ABSTRACT
Roger Moorey’s Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries (1994) and Dan Potts’ Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations (1997) are the basic works on Sumerian craft industries. Moorey provides a comprehensive discussion of crafts throughout the greater Near East from the prehistoric (Aceramic Neolithic) to the historic (Early Dynastic to the Achaemenid Persian), detailing stone, bone, ivory, shell, ceramics, glass working, metallurgy and building crafts but not textiles. Potts has a brief section on textiles among many other crafts. The goal of this chapter is to partially restore a place for the textile industry by offering a view restricted to southern Mesopotamia and the third millennium BC with occasional references to textile production in earlier periods.
