1300–1350
Fragments of cotton fabric dating c. 1250–1400 and possibly originating in South Asia will be discovered in historic finds at Al Fustat, a town in Egypt, in the 1920s. The red and blue block-printed patterns on these pieces of cloth are similar to Ajrakh, a textile printing tradition practised in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Sindh, and will corroborate other written accounts of finished Indian textile goods being regularly traded across the Indian Ocean.
Bilgrami, Noorjehan. “Ajrakh: Cloth from the Soil of Sindh.” In Approaching Textiles, Varying Viewpoints: Proceedings of the Seventh Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America. 2000, 253-61.
Rosenfield, Yael. “Indian Block-Printed Textiles: Past and Present.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 15, 2016. Accessed October 6, 2023. https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/ruminations/2016/indian-block-printed-textiles.
Roy, Tirthankar, and Giorgio Riello. How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 . Leiden: Brill, 2009.
First Published: March 11, 2024
Last Updated: May 23, 2024