The animal’s image of textiles from the Nile Valley in Late Antique

Abstract

The so-called Coptic textiles, produced during Late Antiquity, displayed an ornamental repertoire of great variety in origin and typology where animals were protagonists of decoration in many clothing and ornamentation pieces. They can appear alone, fighting, forming part of hunting scenes and circus games, allegorical scenes, etc. The animals completed and enriched their meaning. In this paper, the presence of animals in textiles will be analyzed considering their function in the composition, their symbolic value and the role they played in the culture of their time. The animals could have magical and apotropaic qualities that increased semantic value of the objects.