current state of the internet is a FUCKING EMBARASSMENT. was chatting with my grandma bout the history of crochet and knitting (and the comparative ages of those respective technologies) and i was like "oh YEAH and also that ancient greek fiber art we partly figured out from chemically testing the scoured bleached pigments of stolen statuary (tumblr knows what im talking about)—gimme 30 seconds to look up the name."
5 minutes and 3 search-engines later i am crying tears of blood screaming spitting blubbering in despair as my grandma attempts to digitally pat me consolingly on the back. the library of alexandria didn't burn it was "restructured" to "increase shareholder profits"
and i STILL CANNOT FIND THE TERM.
i am scouring the internet like the victorians scoured and destroyed all trace of joy and color from stolen relics for the LOST NAME OF THE ANCIENT PROCESS of textile-creation akin to knitting/crocheting/nålebinding that at least one academic/crafter used to recreate the leggings on this Glorious Motherfucker:
the google execs erased it. they bleached my bestie AGAIN from history...
is this of any use
SO IT IS!!!
Archer statue from the Temple of Aphaia (ca. 480 BC) next to a reconstruction of its original paint job:
The leggings and sleeves would have created using a method called SPRANG which predates knitting and is over 3,000 years old. What's even sexier is modern artisans managed to recreate the entire outfit using the original method!
Mmm-HMM, love me a shapely thigh in harlequin hosiery. Put👏men👏in👏clingy-ass👏clothing👏again👏👏👏
Unfortunately english sources are hard to find, partly because Google's a shithole, but also because this textile project comes from a German museum, in Germany, where people tend to speak (and publish) in German. That said, the original link is to a short-but-sweet article I would have had no problem finding in 30 seconds a mere few years ago. fortunately i have clever beautiful insane people following me, but alas not everyone has such luxury. thanks to everyone in the notes who shoved themselves down this rabbithole with me!
in conclusion let us take a moment to sincerely wish Google a very burn in hell🙏
Switch to Startpage or DuckDuckGo. They are either entirely "AI" free (Startpage, last I checked) or have it but allow you to shut it off entirely (DDG, which also lets you exclude slop images from the image search, and doesn't require you to create an account), and the search results are comparable to pre-enshittification Google.

















