“The oldest knitted artifacts are socks from Egypt, dating from the 11th century CE. They are a very fine gauge, done with complex colourwork and some have a short row heel, which necessitates the purl stitch. These complexities suggest that knitting is even older than the archeological record can prove.”
“Linguistically, all evidence implies that knitting is a fairly recent invention. There are no ancient legends of knitting like there are legends of spinning and weaving (remember Arachne? Ixzaluoh? Nephthys? Amaterasu? Never mind... the numbers of weaving and spinning gods and mostly goddesses are legion). There are no ancient gods or goddesses who knit, no legend of how it was invented or given by the gods. That lack implies that it is a recent skill, developed after mythologies were established around the world.
[…]
So what do we know? Knitting kind of appeared, poof, probably in Egypt or an adjoining land, sometime around 1000CE”
⇒ it’s not a given that knitting existed in Roman times.
probably not; we can’t date knitting that early, and by a wide margin. The earliest knit goods are ~1000CE and Egyptian.
The time period for these finds are ~>800 years earlier.
Naalbinding existed then, and works fine for fingers with its regular tools, and is actually very different from knitting in its technique.
I’m not convinced. I’m more concerned with the honest qualification of uncertainty in claims made about artifacts, though. The language of speculation and likelihood is a lot more intellectually honest than either the “ivory tower knows all” crowd OR the “folk wisdom knows all” gang’s respective positions.
fwiw i’m also immediately suspicious whenever druids are invoked with any certainty: we know so shockingly little about them at all that the confidence interval on anything to do with them is super wide.
I'm not convinced by this, because the object is more complicated and finely made than necessary for making glove fingers. Why a dodecahedron when only one face is used? Why are the holes so smooth and round, which would require extra hand filing to clean up the casting? Why multiple sizes of hole when the size of the glove finger is regulated by the yarn tension?
The article goes into the measurements a lot, like the relation to inches. I thought inches were derived from fingers, like the thickness of a thumb. Just like a foot is derived from, you know; feet
