historic times. It
may be discouraging to those who like to feel that tapestry properly
belongs to Europe only,--Europe of the last six centuries--to find
that the art has been sifted down through the ages; but in reality it
is but one more link between us and the centuries past, the human
touch that revivifies history, that unites humanity. People of the
past wear a haze about them, are immovable and rigid as their pictured
representations. The Assyrian is to us a huge man of impossible beard,
the Egyptian is a lean angle fixed in posture, the Greek is eternally
posed for the sculptor.

But once we can find that these people were not forever transfixed to
frieze, but were as simple, as industrious, as human as we, the
kinship is established, and through their veins begins to flow the
stream that is common to all humanity. These people felt the same need
for elegantly covering the walls of their homes that we in this
country of new homes feel, and the craftsmen led much the same lives
as do craftsmen of to-day. Even in the matter of expense, of money
which purchasers were willing to spend for woven decorative fabrics,
we see no novelty in the high prices of to-day, the Twentieth
Century. _The Mantle of Alcisthenes_ is celebrated for having been
bought by the Carthaginians for the equal of a hundred thousand
dollars.

[Illustration: TAPESTRY FOUND IN GRAVES IN PERU

Date prior to Sixteenth Century]

Thus we connect ourselves with the remote past in making a continuous
history. But as the purpose of this book is to assist the owner of
tapestries to understand the story of his hangings and to enable the
purchaser or collector to identify tapestries on his own knowledge
instead of through the prejudiced statements of the salesman, it is
useless to dwell long upon the fabrics that we can only see through
exercise of the imagination or in disintegrated fragments in museums.

Then away with Circe and her leisure hours of weaving, with Helen and
her heroic canvas, and the army of grandiose Biblical folk, and let us
come westward into Europe in short review of the textiles called
tapestry which were produced from the early Christian centuries to the
time of the Crusades, and thus will we approach more modern times.

So far as known, high-warp weaving was not universally used in Europe
in the first part of the Middle Ages. Whether plain or figured, most
of the fabrics of that time that have come down to us for hangin