An Amazon in Antinoë: Contextualizing a Late Antique Textile from Egypt.

The collection of late antique Egyptian objects housed in The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum's Cotsen Textile Traces Study Center number in the hundreds, but not many have been the subject of in-depth art historical research. One such textile is a small square fragment, identified with its accession number, T-0690. Previous documentation within the museum's collection database on T-06go only includes past social media posts highlighting the artifact, one of which refers to its central figure as a male warrior while the other focuses on the weaver's use of red-purple dye to color the figure's Phrygian cap. A closer look at the fragment, woven sometime in the fifth or sixth century CE, reveals the central figure to be an Amazon, one of a race of female warriors thought by the ancient Greeks and Romans to inhabit the Scythian lands, roughly modern Russia and Central Asia, This emerging research note will attempt to place this late antique textile within its archaeological and art historical context through a brief discussion of the culture in which it was made, a reconstruction of its object biography, and a comparative study with other Greco-Roman artistic depictions of Amazons, When all of these aspects of its history are considered, it becomes clear that the weaver of this textile was broadly aware of the many ways in which the Amazons were portrayed in the art of previous ancient Mediterranean civilizations. He or she likely employed multiple visual characteristics, which normally do not coexist on a single piece, in order to give the figure unmistakably "Amazonian" traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]