Silk Decorative Tunic Band with a Hunter 700s Egypt or Syria, Islamic period, late Umayyad or Abbasid, 8th century Complementary weft-faced twill with inner warps (samit); silk Overall: 27.3 x 6.7 cm (10 3/4 x 2 5/8 in.); Mounted: 34.9 x 14.3 cm (13 3/4 x 5 5/8 in.) Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 1939.505 DESCRIPTION This prestigious silk band displays a stylized palmette leaf above a hunter who holds a sword and a shield and pursues a lion and a rabbit. Another fragment with Arabic script indicates Islamic manufacture. Green and ivory silk horizontal wefts dominate, interlaced by vertical warps in a diagonal twill weave. A second inner warp does not come to the surface. Such compound structures were woven on large looms with automatic pattern repetition, called drawlooms. PROVENANCE (Adolf Loewi, Los Angeles, California). CITATIONS Los Angeles County Museum. 2000 Years of Silk Weaving: An Exhibition Sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum in Collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. 1944. no. 11 Weibel, Adèle Coulin. Two Thousand Years of Textiles; The Figured Textiles of Europe and the Near East. New York: Published for the Detroit Institute of Arts [by] Pantheon Books, 1952. no. 53, p. 91 EXHIBITION HISTORY Masterpieces of the Weavers' Art. Hackley Art Gallery, Muskegon, MI (October 7-November 3, 1957). Blue Traditions: Indigo Dyed Textiles and Related Glazed Ceramics from the 17th through the 19th Century. Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (December 4-January 20, 1974). 2000 Years of Silk Weaving. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (March 18-April 16, 1944). Byzantine Gallery 210 Rotation. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 2, 2001-October 15, 2002).