What Were their Day Jobs?

Some have Klotho combing the wool, Atropos spinning the thread, and Lachesis cutting the thread --- thus assuming a lifetime was a single unwoven thread. Alternatively, Barber suggests that Klotho spun, Lachesis measured the length of thread required to warp the cloth about to be woven, and Atropos cut the alloted thread (a view for which there is some etymological support ). Both alternatives seem less likely to me, given that a woman or group of women commonly engaged in all aspects of weaving: thread preparation is critical, but not everything. I tend to find some support for this view by looking at the related roots of the words , though I caution that I am an amateur there too, and one of the synonyms for the Moirai was Klothes, ``the spinners'' ). Weaving was not simply a pragmatic activity of clothing the family, but early developed into a high art form: for example aristocratic women wove narrative tapestries depicting clan history or other themes in ancient times, just as they would in the Middle Ages. Since I tend to think of life more as a fabric than a thread, I find Bell's assignment more evocative.

One might ask about the cultural milieux which led to the tight association of women and weaving. Barber argues persuasively that textile industries, along food gathering and preparation, and horticulture, became predominantly tasks which were engaged in by women because they could easily be conducted while breast-feeding and keeping an eye on young children. (Obviously changing economic patterns means this particular division of labor no longer applies in many instances.) Thus, the work of textile production was a central part of the daily work of women: extremely time-consuming, critically important to the health of the society's members, very important economically, and a medium of great artistic and social significance. According to this theory, men tended to develop the leisure necessary for technological or social innovation more rapidly than women, which in some cultures allowed men to dominate the textile industry during ancient times (in at least one case developing a tightly controlling bureaucracy which specialized the numerous component tasks to individuals; but the bureaucracy may have been partly motivated by the need to dominate a captured population).

In modern weaving either a continuous thread or overlapping of separate threads at color changes can be used. I am guessing that most ancient techniques used knots at such changes, but I have not yet confirmed this guess. Some modern knots may be found in Ashley .

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