The Sampul tapestry
A blue-eyed spearman, and above him a centaur blowing a horn: Greek-influenced art, woven thousands of kilometres east of anywhere Greek. It survives because someone in the Tarim Basin cut a fine wall hanging into pieces and sewed it into a pair of trousers, and was buried wearing them.
Based on the original, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Museum, Ürümqi.
Found: the cemetery at Sampul (Shanpula), Lop County, Hotan Prefecture, Xinjiang; excavated 1983–84.
What it is
Pieces of a woollen tapestry woven between about the first century BC and the first century AD. Joined back up, they show a warrior's face, large and blue-eyed, holding a spear, and above him a centaur blowing a long horn. The style is Hellenistic, the kind of art that spread east after Alexander, but where it was actually woven is argued.
Why "probable"
The excavation, the dates and the fact that the hanging was cut up into trousers are documented. Who the warrior is meant to be, and whether this was loot, trade or a gift before someone cut it up, are reconstructions. That is why the card says "Greek-influenced" and not "Greek".
The trousers
What makes it precious to us is what ruined it. A hanging worth weaving at this level of skill was cut up for its cloth, and the trousers went into a grave with the man who wore them. It is here because someone was buried in it.
And the road
Zhang Qian reached the lands west of the Tarim in the 120s BC and brought back the first Chinese description of them. This cloth comes from the kind of place, and roughly the century, that he was trying to describe.
- Wagner et al., 'The ornamental trousers from Sampula (Xinjiang, China): their origins and biography', Antiquity 83 (2009)
- Jones, 'Centaurs on the Silk Road: Recent Discoveries of Hellenistic Textiles in Western China', The Silk Road 6.2 (2009)
- Picture: made with AI for The Ember Atlas, an imagining, not a record of how it looked.