Resumen de The tablet-woven hangings of Tigre, Ethiopia: from history to symmetry
The writer compares and contrasts two groups of silk and cotton tablet-woven hangings from Tigre, Ethiopia. Silk hangings now in the possession of the British Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, originally came from the treasury of the defeated King Tewodros in Maqdala. Following the introduction of these hangings to the scholarly community in 1990, another very important group of cotton tablet-woven hangings was found in three separate churches in the Tämbien region of central Tigre. It is evident that these geographically concentrated cotton hangings are closely interrelated with each other and with their silken counterparts; most of the images in the figural registers represent ecclesiastical scenes or subjects, or lay figures with hands raised in prayer. The cotton hangings appear to have been woven without access to the royal silken ones, though using motifs inspired by them. They can be divided into those that maintain a semblance of the silk hangings' content and those in which the images have been taken out of context and are repetitive and/or symmetrical.
