Rethinking Silk's Origins

摘要

New findings suggest that silk making was not an exclusively Chinese technological innovation, but instead arose independently on the Indian subcontinent. Ornaments from the Indus valley in east Pakistan, where the Harappan culture flourished more than 4,000 years ago, seem to contain silk spun by silk moths native to the region. What's more, the silk seems to have been processed in a way previously thought to have been a closely guarded secret within China. There is hard and fast evidence for silk production in China back to around 2570 BC; the newly discovered objects are believed to date from between 2450 BC and 2000 BC, making them similarly ancient. There have been no previous finds of manufactured silk at sites outside China before about 1500 BC.rn"This is the first evidence for silk anywhere out of China at such an early date," says Irene Good of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the authors of the study. "It was a complete surprise."