Today I want to talk to you about the ancients spinning, why only talk about spinning, not about clothing? Because spinning is the source of human clothing, it is the initial link in the formation of clothing, and it is also the most difficult link. Therefore, if you understand spinning, you understand textile, and you understand clothing.
Textile is composed of two concepts: spinning and weaving.
Why? Because archaeological evidence found that "spinning" was much earlier than "weaving".
The human use of plant fibers began around 100,000 years ago, initially processing them into threads or ropes for everyday hunting activities and sewing animal skins and wearing ornaments. Among them, the highly lethal stone ball is a relatively advanced long-distance hunting weapon at that time, and its use methods are diverse, in addition to the original method of throwing by hand, there are two basic uses: one is a tripwire rope, the other is a flying stone rope, both of which are twisted with plant fibers into ropes with strong toughness, or used in conjunction with leather strips processed with animal skins. As shown in the following figure:
Tripping
Tripwire hunting
The most interesting thing is that there are thousands of stone balls excavated from the Xujiayao site in China (100,000-70,000 years ago), the largest weighing more than 1500 grams and the diameter exceeding 100 mm. At the same time as the stone ball, a large number of wild horses, woolly rhinoceros and antelope fossils were unearthed, of which there were more than 300 wild horse fossils alone, which is rare in archaeological history, and some people praised Xu Jiayao as "horse hunters". It seems that the Xujiayao people should have been professional horse hunters at that time.
Stone balls excavated from the Xujiayao site
In addition, there is a bone needle at the Beijing Summit Cave Cultural Site (11,000 years ago), which is 8.2 cm long and has a maximum diameter of 0.33 cm, and there is a small needle eye on the bone needle, which is obviously used for threading.
Bone needles excavated from the cave site at the top of the mountain
In addition, there are rope patterns on pottery excavated from the ruins of The Bottom Ditch of the Sanmenxia Temple in Henan (4,000 years ago), as shown below
Jomon patterns on pottery at the ruins of the temple bottom ditch
The above examples show that as early as before human beings used fibers as clothes, there have been extensive and sufficient practice, these threads, ropes used as weapons, decorations, animal skin sewing, knot rope counting, etc., not only show the high technology of human fiber utilization and production at that time, but also helped ancient humans solve many major problems in life and production, which was actually a high-tech industry at that time. Moreover, these industries have formed an important socio-economic and political force of the social tribes at that time.
For example: we all know the ten "heavenly stems" A ethyl propylene butyl heptyl heptyl xin nondecane, the twelve "earth branches" zi ugly yin 卯辰巳巳 noon unshen unitary 戌海. The Tiangandi branch together formed the ancient Chinese traditional calendar calendar.
Is this day dry for calendars, years?
At the beginning of the last century, Wang Guowei, the founder of the new historiography, discovered for the first time that the "Tiangan Cross" in the oracle bone corresponded to the title used by the Shang Dynasty's Shang King's family table.
What do you mean? That is to say, the entire Shang Dynasty's Shang Dynasty royal family was all marked with ten characters of Tiangan.
For example: Da B, Shang Tang, the founding monarch of the Shang Dynasty;
Tai Ding and Shang Tang's son died before he could succeed to the throne, so Tai Ding's brother Wai Bing succeeded to the throne.
The third son of Zhongren and Shang Tang was the third monarch of the Shang Dynasty, who reigned for 4 years.
A ethylene propylene butyl heptyl heptyl heptyl heptyl sin nonyl decay is representative of the ten major tribes of the Shang Dynasty.
Why do these ten tribes use these ten words to represent them?
Because in the early days of primitive humanities, these ten tribes could each make their own unique tools, so the pride made of this tool was used as the totem emblem of their own tribes, thus forming the symbol of each tribe.
That is to say, according to the current point of view, it is the top ten tribes formed by the top ten industrial clusters that were the most powerful at that time.
What do these ten tribes do?
Let's take a look!
For example, the word "A" is drawn in the early days of the oracle bone. What does it mean? One hand supports a stick, the other hand uses two sticks to tie a cross as a shield, this is the early configuration of the word "armor", and later covered with a piece of animal skin, which is the source of the word "A", which indicates that the A tribe will especially make shield skin, yes, that is, the shield used for war.
The "C" family is engaged in drilling wood for fire.
The "Ding" family engaged in mining and smelting, and made copperware, so they formed the Ding tribe on this pride.
The word "E" is actually a painting of an ancient weapon, and where "Go" is holding a sign, this word is the source of the word "E", which means that this tribe is particularly capable of making weapons.
The word "己" means that this tribe in particular uses ropes to tie things. It was supposed to be professionally stored and packaged, so the tribe used it as its emblem.
The "Geng" tribe made jade.
The "Xin" tribe is a professional household that makes wooden tools and is a professional household in the manufacture of furniture and houses.
The "壬" tribe is engaged in sewing;
The word "癸" is a pictographic description of the ancient human spinning house, that is, the spinning that weaved linen cloth in the early years
Hammer (spinning), its rotational state, drawn out is a "decyl" word, is engaged in textile equipment.
And the "B" tribe? What does it actually draw? The painting is a rope.
Yes, that's the rope we're talking about today. Early ropes were woven from plant fibers, which could only be extracted from such things as flax, grass, rattan, bamboo, etc. To make rope, you first have to put flax in water, rot its fleshy part, and then extract its short cellulose, and then weave, bundle, and blend it into a long rope, which cannot be knotted in the middle, which was definitely a high-tech industry at that time, so the tribe that could make rope used this as a totem emblem, which is the source of the "B" word of the B tribe. From this point of view, the Shang Tang family, the ancestor of Yin Shang, is likely to start by playing with ropes.
It can be seen from this that these ten tribes represent the most advanced technologies and tools of the Shang Dynasty era
Producing tribes, tribes that made great contributions to the survival and development of human beings in the dynasties of that time. At the same time, they are also the ten most powerful tribes.
We come back to continue the textile story of the ancients.
After having experience in the application of plant fibers for ropes and threads, humans began to slowly move to other types
Try fabrics, such as weaving fishing nets, weaving baskets, etc. With the continuous improvement of production technology, the stability of living standards, the reproductive level of human beings has gradually improved, and then brought with the traditional animal fur production of leather clothing can not meet the survival pressure brought about by the population surge, must look for heating materials that can replace animal furs, and gradually primitive humans have turned their attention to the fabrics that can be used for ropes, fishing nets, baskets, can plant fibers be woven into fabrics for heating...? Try it.
Here we want to put forward the most important basic concept of yarn formation, that is, yarn twisting.
What is twisting? Twisting is actually to strengthen the holding force between the fibers that form the yarn, which can make the overall yarn stronger and improve the quality of the yarn. The twisted yarn has good strength, elongation and elasticity, and can withstand various mechanical forces in the later textile dyeing and finishing processing and use. It has a good length, friction and holding force, which is conducive to the weaving of the fabric. It has hygroscopicity and heat invariance, which is conducive to dyeing and finishing processing and comfort when taking. After twisting, the surface of the yarn is glossy, the feel is good, it is not easy to pick up after weaving into the fabric, and so on.
When our ancestors described unity as strength, they often used the term "twisted into a rope, strong to make a place" to describe, which is from the practice of twisting and molding of ancient traditional yarns.
The formation of the original fabric yarn is carried out by hand twisting, which can be completely obtained from the processing experience of the rope, but the efficiency is very low, if the yarn made in this way is used to make fabrics, it is conceivable that the formation of a fabric is very slow. There is a constant deterministic pursuit factor throughout the history of human invention - efficiency. With a new invention, the follow-up work is to continuously improve and continuously improve the efficiency of this technology and products, all throughout the ages.
As a result, ancient humans began to try to use tools to improve the efficiency of spinning.
Because textiles are easy to decay and difficult to preserve, modern people want to understand the living conditions of human ancestors, they can only guess from the tools they left behind with non-perishable materials such as stones, animal bones, animal horns, mussel shells, etc. Because the remnants are mostly stones, so it is called the Stone Age. When textiles began, it is difficult to accurately break the generation in modern times, so it can only be found with stone spinning wheels as a symbol of the emergence of textiles. In fact, the emergence of textiles should have preceded the stone spinning wheel, and the surviving Amazon primitive tribes used wild cotton to make cloth pockets for babies, and they did not use spinning wheels, but directly twisted the cotton into threads on their thighs with their hands. With the spinning wheel, the efficiency of the twisted thread was greatly improved, and the emergence of the stone spinning wheel marked a major advance in the textile technology of primitive people.
Traditional spinning:
The tools for twisting thread are generally called spindles and spinning pendants, and folk also call twisted wires (as shown below).
spindle
The earliest spinning technology is the traditional hand spinning, it is carried out with the help of spindle, is powered by finger twisting hammer, the intermittentness of twisting determines the speed of rotation of the spindle is uneven and the movement is intermittent, resulting in uneven yarn and low spinning efficiency. To overcome the above shortcomings and further improve the quality and efficiency of spinning, it is necessary to provide a uniform, continuous and stable power to the spindle.
The ancient spinning technique of the spindle-off method
The ancient spinning technique of the rotary ingot method
Traditional hand spinning is powered by twisting the spindle with your fingers, which creates an intermittent twist, which leads to uneven yarn and inefficient spinning. To overcome the above shortcomings and further improve the quality and efficiency of spinning, it is necessary to provide a uniform, continuous and stable power to the spindle.
All inventions arise from problems, problems generate needs, and needs lead to inventions.
In order to solve the intermittent problem of hand twisting, people first began to try better tools. So the hand-cranked spinning wheel came into being, which consisted of a spindle, a rope wheel and a handle, gently shaking the rope wheel, and the rope drove the spindle at a high speed and evenly and stably with a transmission ratio of dozens of times. This is probably the earliest application example of belt drive. The use of spinning wheels greatly improves the efficiency and quality of spinning, and according to the requirements of the fabric, spins yarns of different thicknesses. After continuous improvement, single ingots are changed to multiple ingots, hand cranks are changed to pedals, and pedal spinning wheels are important inventions in the history of ancient textile machinery in China. In the Yuan Dynasty, there were five-spindle spinning wheels with five ingots, which could spin two pounds of yarn every day and night. There was also a large spinning wheel led by human, animal or hydraulic power, with thirty-two spindles, which could spin a hundred pounds of yarn in a day and night, which was the most advanced spinning machinery in the world at that time. In the West, it was not until 1769 that the British Arkey produced the "water wheel spinning machine", which was centuries later than the Chinese water-to-large spinning wheel.
Hand-cranked spinning wheel
The pedal spinning wheel is still in use today
Hydraulic spinning wheels
Okay, let's summarize it now:
According to archaeological evidence, the practice of human textiles should have originally started with thread. In addition to the use of thread, there are fishing, bird sets, netting, lashing arrows, sewing animal skin coats and bark coats, etc., and the history of twisted thread is much older than the 5,000-year history of spinning wheels. This alone has a history of tens of thousands of years.
It has been found that oscillation with bowstrings can loosen feathers, water hemp can precipitate very fine fibers, and soaking in hot water can extract silk fibers from the cocoon. This is the preparation process for fiber acquisition and yarn making. How to think of it, there is no evidence to check, it is all up to guess.
The role of the twisted thread is to make the thread stronger, more durable and more versatile. This is important and should be a key part of the sustainable use and development of yarn. The truth also has a profound impact on the survival philosophy of Chinese.
The experience of twisting thread comes from the practice of people rubbing rope.
First loosen the fibers, and then twist multiple yarns into yarn, which is the twisting line. The original hand-spun yarn, which was initially kneaded by hand, was similar to the rope rubbing, and the efficiency could be imagined.
The emergence of spindles was a revolution for pure palm twisting, and the large number of spindles showed that there was already a large demand for yarn at that time, and this demand should be weaving. The pottery excavated from the banpo village site in Shaanxi Province has a cloth mark on it, which has fully proved this.
Hand spinning wheels, pedal spinning wheels, and hydraulic spinning wheels are the ultimate inventions of spinning technology by human ancestors before the arrival of industrial society. It represents the highest level of productive forces in agricultural society. The initial idea of the invention of the spinning wheel is to improve the quality and efficiency of the twisted thread, that is, to improve the efficiency of the traditional spindle. The basic principles of traditional spinning and twisting have not changed.
Even in the modern textile industry after the industrial age, the basic principle of modern large machines and spinning production under high efficiency conditions is still the original traditional spinning principle.
This is the most certain and unchanging thing in the entire history of the development of the human textile industry.
From a modern point of view, traditional spinning is a basic invention and basic science, and the follow-up hand spinning wheel, pedal spinning wheel, hydraulic spinning wheel, modern machine spinning, etc. are all applied sciences.
From the processing sequence of modern people's textile industry chain, it can be divided into upstream textile technology - spinning technology, midstream textile technology - weaving technology, downstream textile technology - textile and clothing design. Spinning technology is the basis of weaving technology and textile clothing design, without spinning technology there is no weaving technology and textile clothing design, which shows how important the position of spinning technology in the entire modern textile technology system is. According to the previous research, it was found that the original textile technology also followed the development law of the textile technology system.
The development path of the original textile technology is: leather clothing → spinning→ weaving → textile clothing. The difference is
Primitive clothing (leather clothing) predates the original textile technology, and the original clothing promotes the development of the original textile technology.
The spinning technique was not initially for weaving, but for the sewing of leather garments. The principles of weaving technology were not initially for weaving, but for weaving baskets and fishing nets. Clothing weaving can only occur when there is a large surplus in the main agricultural industry of primitive agriculture and planting, resulting in a surge in population and surplus labor, and leather clothing can no longer meet the needs of the surging population.
The emergence of primitive textile technology is an inevitable product of human development. Primitive textile technology accompanied the development of humans from ape-man to man. Anthropology tells us that every technological advance human being has come at the expense of the degradation of human animal instincts. Conversely, the gradual degradation of animal instincts has exacerbated human dependence on technology. From this point of view, our entire history of human development is actually a history of technological development.
From this point of view, the emergence of the original spinning technology is an important event for the survival, development and establishment of civilization of our human beings!
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