The Bronze Age in Shahr-e Sūkhte with Egypt, Anatolia and Mesopotamia

The art and technology of Bronze Age and third Millennium BC in which urban communities grew and intercultural communications increased in West Asia is of special importance in the history of mankind. Cloth-weaving is one of the arts which emerged in such time especially in a number of lands like Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Iran, and provided the ground for transactions and cultural relations. In such era, textile is of both ordinary and ritual usages. Accordingly, this paper aims to study comparatively the warp-weft looms of such regions in this period, and especially Shahr-e Sūkhte (The Burnt City) as the case study. For this purpose, by collecting documentary data from libraries and museums, the paper studies descriptively-analytically the origin, types and methods of cloth weaving (textile) in Shahr-e Sūkhte. This paper is of fundamental researches type in terms of goal and of historical ones with respect to methodology. The present paper seeks to find answers to these questions: what warp-weft looms were commonly used in such regions in third Millennium BC? which weaving looms were used by the residents of Shahr-e Sūkhte?The results of this study show that the use of three kinds of loom including horizontal ground looms, vertical looms and warp-weighted looms were common in the ancient sites of the third Millennium BC. The design of different complicated textiles found in Shahr-e Sūkhte along with round discs used as textile weights as well as the discovery of the samples showing the application of tablet weaving in decorated end warps of fabrics all are the evidence of using warp-weighted looms in Shahr-e Sūkhte.