W. W. Rockhill in _Diary of a
Journey through Mongolia and Thibet_, Washington, 1894, p. 41.

"DIAGONAL WEAVING."

I am unable to agree with a recently made statement published in _The
Labyrinth, Gerzeh and Marghuneh_, by Prof. Flinders Petrie, E. A.
Wainwright and E. Mackey, p. 6, which runs: "The fact of the weft not
being at right angles to the warp, if one may conclude by the fabrics,
does not, I think, imply that such weaving is of inferior quality.
When I noticed the peculiarity first, I thought it might have arisen
through distortion by stretching over the body, but repeated examples
of the same fact have led me to consider other causes. We know how
closely analogous to 'darning' was the early weaving; and in our days
it is not unusual to find stockings not darned at right angles, and it
may be the women weavers of old sometimes put in the weft more or less
out of true right angle. In the childhood of weaving we should expect
different methods, and it may be, seeing that we have no selvedged
cloth until very long after this time, that they experimented with a
diagonal weft to see if it would not reduce the tendency to fray out
at the sides." The amount the warp and weft are out of the right angle
is stated to be about 20 deg. The specimen shown me under the microscope
indicated clearly that the warp and weft were not at right angles and
that the interstices were not square but diamond shaped.

It is possible to arrange the warp threads diagonally from beam to
beam, but with continuous weft (that is in weaving so as to get
selvedges) the weft has the tendency to slip up on one side and down
on the other, hence the weaving is made laborious. With a separate
weft for each pick, _i.e._, for every once the shed is opened, there
is naturally not this tendency, but this alleged diagonally woven
cloth frays just as easily as any other piece of cloth without
selvedge, so in either case there is not only no advantage but
distinct disadvantage taking the diagonal "beaming" into
consideration. We must give the Egyptians credit for using the least
laborious of two methods, that is _if_ the second one were known to
them.

Apparent diagonal weaving can be produced by anyone taking an ordinary
piece of linen or cotton cloth, cutting off the selvedge and
stretching the cloth in a direction diagonally to the direction of the
warp and weft, and a piece of diagonally woven cloth is the result!

The probability is that the s