In the year 1130 Roger I., the Norman King of Sicily, brought a colony of silk weavers from Athens and induced them to settle in Palermo, where an extensive silk industry was already developed under the former Saracenic rulers, who were vassals of the independent Fātimy Khalifs of Egypt, during the ninth and tenth centuries. After the introduction of the Greek weavers into the Palermo workshops we find the Siculo-Arabian designs altering from the older circular panels of Saracenic ornament, which consisted of the designs of birds and animals placed back to back, or _vis-à-vis_, of Mesopotamian origin, to bands of birds, animals, and fishes, grotesque and otherwise, mixed with foliage and scrolls containing mock Arabic inscriptions. To trace the analysis of patterns in silk fabrics is to trace the historical development of the fabrics themselves, for pattern and manufacture, historically considered, have developed side by side. When we consider the varieties indicated by the names of Byzantine, Saracenic, or Arabian in its various forms, Italian and French, we shall find that in the order mentioned the chronological development of material and pattern run concurrently. Silk, in its raw state, during the first few centuries of our era arrived in the principal towns of Asia Minor, in Alexandria in Egypt, and in Byzantium (Constantinople), from China, by the way of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, and overland by caravans. The Persians and the Byzantine Greeks, from the first to the eighth centuries, monopolised the Western silk manufacture, as they already possessed the looms on which they had made linen, woollen cloth, and carpet tapestry. It required very little adaptation to convert them into silk looms, and towards the early part of the seventh century the new material had firmly established itself in Persia, Syria, and Constantinople. The patterns for the most part were symbolic and large in character, and nearly all of them had their origin in the “Homa,” or sacred “Tree of Life” (Figs. 259, 260), with the worshippers on either side consisting of kings or other personages in the act of adoration, such as we find as a common theme engraved on the Assyrian cylinders, wall decorations, and bronze platters, which had its origin in the older Egyptian forms. Where the Sacred Tree, with animals instead of human forms, was made a feature of in the silk fabrics, the stuff had a Persian development derived from Babylonian sources, but the Greeks or Byzantines used this pattern for the sake of expediency, and not in a symbolic sense.