Intimately connected with the raw materials, and how they were wrought in the loom, is the question about the time when wire drawing was found out. At what period and among what people the art of working up pure gold, or gilded silver, into a long, round, hair-like thread--into what may be correctly called “wire”--began, is quite unknown. That with their mechanical ingenuity the ancient Egyptians bethought themselves of some method for the purpose is not unlikely. From Sir Gardiner Wilkinson we learn that at Thebes were found objects which appeared to be made of gold wire. We may fairly presume that the work upon the corslets of king Amasis, already spoken of as done by the needle in gold, required by its minuteness that the metal should be not flat but in the shape of wire. By delicate management perhaps of the fingers, the narrow flat strips might have been pinched or doubled up so that the two edges should meet, and then rubbed between two pieces of hard material a golden wire of the required fineness would be produced. In Etruscan and Greek jewellery wire is often to be found; but in all instances it is so well shaped and so even that it must have been fashioned by some rolling process. The filigree work of the middle ages is often very fine and delicate. Probably the embroidery which we read of in the descriptions of the vestments belonging to our old churches (for instance “An amice embroidered with pure gold”) was worked with gold wire. To go back to Anglo-saxon times in this country, such gold wire would seem to have been then well known and employed, since in Peterborough minster there were two golden altar-cloths: “ii. gegylde þeofad sceatas;” and there were at Ely cathedral “two girdles of gold wire” in the reign of William Rufus. The first use of a wire-drawing machine seems to have been about the year 1360, at Nuremberg; and it was not until two hundred years after, in 1560, that the method was brought to England. Two examples of a stuff with pure wire in it may be seen in the South Kensington collection, nos. 8581 and 8228. The process of twining long narrow strips of gold, or gilt silver, round a line of silk or flax and thus producing gold thread is much earlier than has been supposed; and when Attalus’s name was bestowed upon a new method of interweaving gold with wool or linen, thence called “Attalic,” it was probably because he suggested to the weaver the introduction of the long-known golden thread as a woof into the textiles from his loom. It would seem, from a passage in Claudian, that ladies at an early Christian period used to spin their own gold thread. Writing at the end of the fourth century, the poet thus compliments Proba: The joyful mother plies her learned hands, And works all o’er the trabea golden bands, Draws the thin strips to all their length of gold, To make the metal meaner threads enfold.