The Pegasus Cloth: Unveiling a Masterpiece from the Abbasid Caliphate.

The Textile Museum Collection at the George Washington University is keeper of one of the most remarkable textiles of the early medieval Muslim world. The Pegasus Cloth is a large fabric woven in a combination of cotton and silk (mulham), decorated with embroidery of mythological winged horses and trees of life in gold-silver alloy and silk threads, and dated to the late ninth or tenth century. The textile possesses a captivating history, including a detective-worthy provenance mystery, academic misattributions, a moment in the spotlight as the centerpiece of an international exhibition, a disappearance, and a subsequent rediscovery. In this article, a comprehensive technical analysis of the textile will be presented, sourced from the authors' recent sampling and characterization analysis. The embroidery is contextualized within the broader corpus of surviving metal-thread embroideries from the late antique and early medieval Islamic world, and its iconography is discussed and elaborated upon. This investigation reveals that the fragment likely served a furnishing purpose and may have functioned as a wall hanging, destined to adorn the palace of a caliph or ruler. This hypothesis is supported by numerous texts originating from Fatimid Egypt, Abbasid Iraq, and Taifa Toledo (Al-Andalus). These texts, dated between the tenth and twelfth centuries, describe the tradition of decorating audience halls with gold-threaded furnishing textiles featuring similar motifs to those found on the Pegasus Cloth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]