International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

APPLIED ARTS OF THE BYZANTINE WORLD ‒ PART 1
Chairs:
 Ivana Jevtić, Ivan Drpić
Anna Kelley
, 
The Invisible Textile Workers of Egypt
Anne Hedeager Krag
, 
Christian Motifs in Egyptian Textiles
Mariel Peñaloza Moreno
, 
Byzantine Identity through a Material Culture Case: The Cameo as a Narrative
Elvana Metalla
, 
La céramique peinte provenant des contextes funéraires et urbains en Albanie
Georgi Sengalevich
, 
«Dimitrios» or «Prodromos»: The Case of a Popular Sgraffito Ceramics Monogram
Julia Reveret
, 
Orner l’espace liturgique aux IX
e
et X
e
s. : 
synthèse sur l’art de la céramique polychrome architecturale en Bulgarie

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Anna Kelley 
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom; 
[e-mail]
The Invisible Textile Workers of Egypt
Women in the Byzantine economy have largely been considered invisible by scholars of the 
twentieth century. Their presence in the archaeological record can be obscure, and textual evidence 
written by or sent to women is often treated as personal correspondence rather than professional 
documentation. However, this overlooks a large segment of the population who were functioning 
within the framework of commercial production. One of the best windows modern scholars have 
into the important role women played in the economic life of late antiquity is through research of 
the textile industry. In the first millennium CE, the various stages of textile production and trade 
employed a large proportion of Egyptian society, and are therefore integral to our understanding 
of the economy and trade. The textile industry also provides a key case study in discerning how 
the concepts of professional versus domestic and commercial versus craft were understood in late 
antique society.
In discussions of the textile industry of Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt, it is often repeated 
that women were not participants in a professional context and did not contribute to the economy 
in an official capacity. Such views are based on two methodological problems: they both project 
modern ideas onto the past and generalise from a single example. More specifically, they assume 
that the home and workplace were separate entities and use the model of imperial silk factories as 
a blueprint for the whole industry. Such assumptions are not supported by the evidence. Through 
discussion of the archaeological finds and references to female textile workers in the papyri, I 
will show that women were working as professionals within the textile industry and were active