Cotton (other)

Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor percentages of waxes, fats, pectins, and water. Under natural conditions, the cotton bolls will increase the dispersal of the seeds.

The plant is a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, Africa, Egypt and India. The greatest diversity of wild cotton species is found in Mexico, followed by Australia and Africa. Cotton was independently domesticated in the Old and New Worlds.

The fiber is most often spun into yarn or thread and used to make a soft, breathable, and durable textile. The use of cotton for fabric is known to date to prehistoric times; fragments of cotton fabric dated to the fifth millennium BC have been found in the Indus Valley civilization, as well as fabric remnants dated back to 4200 BC in Peru.
Although cultivated since antiquity, it was the invention of the cotton gin that lowered the cost of production that led to its widespread use, and it is the most widely used natural fiber cloth in clothing today.

Current estimates for world production are about 25 million tonnes or 110 million bales annually, accounting for 2.5% of the world's arable land. India is the world's largest producer of cotton. The United States has been the largest exporter for many years.

Types

There are four commercially grown species of cotton, all domesticated in antiquity:
*'' Gossypium hirsutum'' – upland cotton, native to Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean and southern Florida (90% of world production)
*'' Gossypium barbadense'' – known as extra-long staple cotton, native to tropical South America (8% of world production)
*'' Gossypium arboreum'' – tree cotton, native to India and Pakistan (less than 2%)
*'' Gossypium herbaceum'' – Levant cotton, native to southern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula (less than 2%)

Hybrid varieties are also cultivated. The two New World cotton species account for the vast majority of modern cotton production, but the two Old World species were widely used before the 1900s. While cotton fibers occur naturally in colors of white, brown, pink and green, fears of contaminating the genetics of white cotton have led many cotton-growing locations to ban the growing of colored cotton varieties.

Etymology

The word "cotton" has Arabic origins, derived from the Arabic word ( or ). This was the usual word for cotton in medieval Arabic.A number of large dictionaries were written in Arabic during medieval times. Searchable copies of nearly all of the main medieval Arabic dictionaries are online a
Baheth.info
and/o
AlWaraq.net
One of the most esteemed of the dictionaries is Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari's ''"Al-Sihah"'' which is dated around and shortly after year 1000. The biggest is Ibn Manzur's ''"Lisan Al-Arab"'' which is dated 1290 but most of its contents were taken from a variety of earlier sources, including 9th- and 10th-century sources. Often Ibn Manzur names his source then quotes from it. Therefore, if the reader recognizes the name of Ibn Manzur's source, a date considerably earlier than 1290 can often be assigned to what is said. A list giving the year of death of a number of individuals who Ibn Manzur quotes from is i
Lane's ''Arabic-English Lexicon'', volume 1, page xxx
(year 1863). Lane's '' Arabic-English Lexicon'' contains much of the main contents of the medieval Arabic dictionaries in English translation. At AlWaraq.net, in addition to searchable copies of medieval Arabic dictionaries, there are searchable copies of a large number of medieval Arabic texts on various subjects. Marco Polo in chapter 2 in his book, describes a province he calls Khotan in Turkestan, today's Xinjiang, where cotton was grown in abundance. The word entered the Romance languages in the mid-12th century,More details a
''CNRTL.fr Etymologie''
in French language. Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales (CNRTL) is a division of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. and English a century later. Cotton fabric was known to the ancient Romans as an import, but cotton was rare in the Romance-speaking lands until imports from the Arabic-speaking lands in the later medieval era at transformatively lowered prices.

History

Early history

South Asia

The earliest evidence of the use of cotton in the Old World, dated to 5500 BC and preserved in copper beads, has been found at the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Pass in ancient India, today in Balochistan Pakistan. Quote: "One of the funerary chambers, dating to around 5500 BC, had contained an adult male lying on his side with legs flexed backward and a young child, approximately one or two years old, at his feet. Next to the adult's left wrist were eight copper beads which had once formed a bracelet. As such metal beads were only found in one other Neolithic burial at Mehrgarh, he must have been an extraordinarily wealthy and important person. Microscopic analysis showed that each bead had been made by beating and heating copper ore into a thin sheet which had then been rolled around a narrow rod. Substantial corrosion prevented a detailed technological study of the beads; yet this turned out to be a blessing as the corrosion had led to the preservation of something quite remarkable inside one of the beads – a piece of cotton. ... After further microscopic study, the fibres were unquestionably identified as cotton; it was, in fact, a bundle of both unripe and ripe fibres that had been wound together to make a thread, these being differentiated by the thickness of their cell walls. As such, this copper bead contained the earliest known use of cotton in the world by at least a thousand years. The next earliest was also found at Mehrgarh: a collection of cotton seeds discovered amidst charred wheat and barley grains outside one of its mud-brick rooms." Fragments of cotton textiles have been found at Mohenjo-daro and other sites of the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization, and cotton may have been an important export from it.

Americas

Cotton bolls discovered in a cave near Tehuacán, Mexico, have been
dated to as early as 5500 BC, but this date has been challenged. More securely dated is the domestication of '' Gossypium hirsutum'' in Mexico between around 3400 and 2300 BC. During this time, people between the Río Santiago and the Río Balsas grew, spun, wove, dyed, and sewed cotton. What they did not use themselves, they sent to their Aztec rulers as tribute, on the scale of ~116 million pounds annually.

In Peru, cultivation of the indigenous cotton species '' Gossypium barbadense'' has been dated, from a find in Ancon, to , and was the backbone of the development of coastal cultures such as the Norte Chico, Moche, and Nazca. Cotton was grown upriver, made into nets, and traded with fishing villages along the coast for large supplies of fish. The Spanish who came to Mexico and Peru in the early 16th century found the people growing cotton and wearing clothing made of it.

Arabia

The Greeks and the Arabs were not familiar with cotton until the Wars of Alexander the Great, as his contemporary Megasthenes told Seleucus I Nicator of "there being trees on which wool grows" in "Indica." This may be a reference to "tree cotton", '' Gossypium arboreum,'' which is native to the Indian subcontinent.

According to the '' Columbia Encyclopedia'':"cotton"
in ''The Columbia Encyclopedia'', Sixth Edition. 2001–07.

Iran

In Iran ( Persia), the history of cotton dates back to the Achaemenid era (5th century BC); however, there are few sources about the planting of cotton in pre-Islamic Iran. Cotton cultivation was common in Merv, Ray and Pars