Stories at the Loom: Patterned Textiles and the Recitation of Myth in Euripides

Recent anthropological analysis of non-industrial textile manufacture in Central Asia reveals a tradition of mnemonic devices, recalled in the form of songs, that are used to reproduce patterns in various forms of textiles. Evidence from a range of texts suggests that a similar practice was used by weavers throughout the Greek archaic and classical periods to render complex designs in cloth. Several passages in Euripides' Ion suggest that, in the Greek sphere, these mnemonic devices sometimes took the form of mythological narratives, perhaps even related to the manufacture of cloth representing the very stories used to encode their forms.