During the later half of the first millennium BC, demand for this exotic fabric eventually created the lucrative trade route now known as the Silk Road, taking silk westward and bringing gold, silver and wools to the East. Named after its most valuable commodity, silk was considered even more precious than gold. The Chinese realized the value of this beautiful material they were producing and kept its secret safe from the rest of the world for more than 30 centuries.
In the 7 th century, the Arabs conquered Persia, capturing their magnificent silks in the process. Sericulture and silk weaving thus spread through Africa, Sicily, and Spain as the Arabs swept through these lands. The principal wife to the Emperor and the heir to the imperial throne are also described as wearing yellow silk when showing themselves outside the palace.
Gradually, the restrictions on who could wear and use silk in China began to vanish, and more and more people — who could afford the precious material — could be seen sporting silk clothing and decorating with silk ornaments.
Eventually, silk production grew to become quite a large industry in China. Silk was used for a variety of things, from fishing-lines and bowstrings to musical instruments. Earlier, documents had been written on silk cloth. Now, Chinese paper makers developed techniques for making more affordable, yet still luxurious, paper where silk rags were mixed with other naturally occuring fibers to make the pulp.
Soon, silk was present in so many aspects of Chinese life that it began altering the language. During the Han Dynasty, silk became somewhat of a currency. There are for instance documents from this era telling us about farmers who paid their taxes in grain and silk. When taxes were paid in silk, it also ment that the state would make its payments in silk, and civil servents could for instance get their salary in the form of silk.
The cost of something could be described using lenghts of silk as the unit of measurment, just like many other societies would use weight units of gold or silver. Since silk was highly valued and appriciated outside China as well, lenghts of silk became a well-established trading commodity between China and foreign countries. Silkworm cultivation for silk production, also known as sericulture, reached Korea around the year BC, but it would take until after AD before the practice was established as far away as India.
Because amino acids have a slight electrical charge, they are pulled through the tube. The tube also contains a substance that chemically attracts the D amino acids. After analyzing a variety of silk samples, Moini and his team determined that 50 percent of the amino acids change from L to D forms after 2, years. The technique is more efficient and more precise than previous methods. It will soon be put to use to date artifacts of unknown age.
She may use the dating method on items such as the Buyid silks, a group of artifacts that may have originated in Iran sometime between the 8th and 12th centuries. According to Chinese legend , after a silkworm cocoon dropped into the teacup of the wife of the Yellow Emperor, she found that the cocoon could unravel to yield about 3, feet 1 kilometer of thread. To learn more about the origins of silk, scientists investigated ruins dating back 9, years at Jiahu in the middle of Henan Province in central China.
Previously at this site, scientists had unearthed bone flutes that are the earliest known playable musical instruments on Earth, as well as what may be the earliest Chinese writing. Old tales suggested that silkworm breeding and silk weaving began around this area, said study co-author Decai Gong, an archaeologist at the University of Science and Technology of China at Hefei. In addition, prior work at Jiahu revealed that the area's warm and humid climate favored the growth of mulberry trees, whose leaves are the sole food of silkworms.
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