The Hestia tapestry is a

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...

-era pagan

tapestry Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven by hand on a loom. Tapestry is weft-faced weaving, in which all the warp threads are hidden in the completed work, unlike most woven textiles, where both the warp and the weft threads ma ...

made in the

Diocese of Egypt The Diocese of Egypt ( la, Dioecesis Aegypti; el, Διοίκησις Αἰγύπτου) was a diocese of the later Roman Empire (from 395 the Eastern Roman Empire), incorporating the provinces of Egypt and Cyrenaica. Its capital was at Alexandr ...

in the first half of the 6th century. It is now in the

Dumbarton Oaks Dumbarton Oaks, formally the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, is a historic estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was the residence and garden of wealthy U.S. diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife, ...

Collection in Washington DC, but generally not on display. The Hestia tapestry, which is made of wool, is a late representation of the goddess

Hestia In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Hestia (; grc-gre, Ἑστία, meaning "hearth" or "fireside") is the virgin goddess of the hearth, the right ordering of domesticity, the family, the home, and the state. In myth, she is the firstborn ...

. It measures 114 x 136.5 cm (44.9 x 53.7 inches). It shows the goddess enthroned with two attendants and six ''putti''. The tapestry is identified in

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

as “Hestía Polýolbos" or "Hestia full of Blessings" ( el, Ἑστία Πολύολβος) and is depicted mainly through the use of

pomegranate The pomegranate (''Punica granatum'') is a fruit-bearing deciduous shrub in the family Lythraceae, subfamily Punicoideae, that grows between tall. The pomegranate was originally described throughout the Mediterranean Basin, Mediterranean re ...

fruit. Her headdress and earrings are made from pomegranates while the blessings that Hestia gives out are in the form of the fruit. The tapestry's history and symbolism are discussed in Friedlander (1945). Scholars note that this pagan artifact is often displayed in Christian households in Egypt.

Bibliography

* Kitzinger, Ernst. ''Handbook of the Byzantine Collection.'' Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1967 * Friedlander, Paul. ''Documents of a Dying Paganism: Textiles of Late Antiquity in Washington, New York, and Leningrad.'' Berkeley, University of California Press, 1945 * Sessa, Kristina. ''Daily Life in Late Antiquity.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 *Shrenk, Sabine. "The Background of the Enthroned: Spatial Analysis of the Hanging with Hestia Polyolbos in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection." In ''Catalogue of the Textile in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection,'' eds. Gudrun Bühl and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2019 * Stone, Damien. ''Pomegranate: A Global History.'' London: Reaktion Books, 2017

References

External links

The Hestia Tapestry - Dumbarton Oaks
Hestia Byzantine art Tapestries 6th century in Egypt {{textile-arts-stub