Egyptian Textiles
Authors: Lauren Wallis with Penny Edmonds
‘Khayamiya’ is a popular style of decorative Egyptian appliqué textile craft that dates back to Ancient Egypt. The brilliantly coloured collection of textiles in the Smoking Room are visually and stylistically consistent with Khayamiya made for tourists travelling to Egypt. Khayamiya were and continue to be crafted by the famous Tentmakers of Cairo, who have historically sold their work in the Cairo tent markets.
The Mortlocks travelled around the globe in the early twentieth century and took passage on luxury cruise ships. It is likely that William Ransom Mortlock and his wife, Rosye Mortlock, passed through the Suez Canal on one such tour around 1903. The Suez Canal was completed in 1869 and provided the shortest maritime route from South Asia to Europe, joining the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. The ships stopped at various ports, including Port Said, a thriving international port city.
The Mortlock postcard collection, made by Rosye Mortlock, shows lively coloured images of Rue de Commerce (the business street) in Port Said. It is possible that the Mortlocks purchased these postcards in Port Said on their 1903 trip to Europe via the Suez Canal and that they also bought tourist Khayamiya on this journey. By this time, the British controlled the Suez Canal. The postcards also suggest that William and Rosye made possible stops in Cairo, Alexandria and ‘Mallah’ or ‘El Mallah’ in Egypt, and at Aden, Yemen, at the entrance to the Red Sea.
French General Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt from 1798 to 1800 sparked keen interest in the culture of Ancient Egypt. A widespread obsession with Ancient Egypt, known as Egyptomania, began during this period and is widely reflected in Western art and culture. Early twentieth-century tourism prompted a surge for collecting everything Egyptian, especially of the Pharaonic period. During the First World War, Australian soldiers, nurses and doctors stationed in Egypt had the opportunity to purchase Egyptian tourist objects for their own private collections for the first time.
It is possible that the Mortlocks purchased these postcards at Port Said on their 1903 trip to Europe via the Suez Canal and that they also bought tourist Khayamiya on this journey.
As a result of the long history of tourism in Egypt, Khayamiya can be found in collections across the world. From the beginning of the twentieth century, Cairo artisans made artistic and functional changes to their historic craft due to the influx of tourists that previously were not afforded the opportunity of travel. The genre of ‘touristic’ Khayamiya is well represented globally because of this tourism in Egypt.
The touristic Khayamiya diverge from the more regal, contemporaneous khedival Khayamiya. These touristic pieces, in contrast to the scale of khedival Khayamiya, were frequently made in 45 cm–wide squares or 45 cm x 100 cm rectangular panels; rectangular panels were meant to be no bigger than a typical household door. They were charming, easily folded and distinctly ‘Egyptian’ and, perhaps most importantly, they were inexpensive.1
The composition of touristic Khayamiya panels deviates little from their original form (khedival). Both forms of Khayamiya usually have two broad bands, with the top band showing a repeating pattern; on touristic panels, this pattern is often Egyptian lotuses. On khedival panels, the lower band usually has calligraphy; on touristic panels, the goddess Nekhbet, represented by stylised vultures with broad wings, is frequently depicted. According to scholar Sam Bowker, such panels also feature two borders resembling columns that enclose the central medallion occupying the upper centre composition.2 A solid form at the bottom gives the panel a base. While the content of a panel may reflect the imagination of an individual tentmaker, the overall layout is consistent across both khedival and tourist Khayamiya.
Khayamiya typically had four motif styles: Islamic, Pharaonic, Folkloric and Calligraphic. Pharaonic motifs, such as canopic jars, sheep, falcons and ambiguous hieroglyphics, are frequently seen in touristic Khayamiya. This is true of the appliqués at Martindale Hall. A mummification scene with a black sheep and a missing canopic jar is shown in Object 158; a multicoloured bird holding a fan above the pharaoh is shown in Object 159; eleven sun-crowned cobra heads are seen above a panel featuring a spread-winged bird holding two feathers, and Horus and Isis are shown in Object 161. Bowker notes of Object 158 that ‘the missing canopic vessel is completely consistent with Khayamiya as an inexpensive souvenir’. Since these textiles are meant to depict the form or idea of ‘Ancient Egypt’ without the need for literacy in those languages, they are renowned for their misspellings in Arabic calligraphy and meaningless hieroglyphics. Today, the touristic genre of Khayamiya is the most accessible and widely distributed; they can be bought in antique shops and also online. These panels were often ignored by curators due to their popularity among tourists in the early twentieth century. The textiles were frequently viewed by curators as fleeting expressions of popular culture as opposed to objects with a long heritage that belonged to a meaningful art tradition.
Dating the appliqués at Martindale Hall is challenging. No evidence has been discovered that places any of the Mortlocks in Cairo specifically. However, Senior Textiles Conservator Kristin Phillips of Artlab Australia argues that they are authentic tourist pieces from the Tentmakers of Cairo. They are common tourist items, and Phillips believes them to be roughly made, as the ‘stitching is long and quick, the fabrics are somewhat coarse, and the dyes are not very fast’.3 The domestic scale and size of the appliqués indicate that they were made to be displayed in a home. The Egyptian imagery on the panels is consistent with other examples Phillips has seen, and she suggests that these textiles could have been created after the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, when all things Egyptian were fashionable. If this speculative date is accurate, then they may have been purchased by Jack (W. T.) Mortlock in later travels.
Khayamiya symbolise an important cultural heritage tradition and memory work for the Tentmakers of Cairo.
The bust of a smoking British Prime Minister Winston Churchill mounted on the top of one of the textiles (above) exemplifies the eclectic nature of the Smoking Room and also Jack Mortlock’s imperial patriotism.
Khayamiya are part of a significant cultural-heritage tradition and perform important memory work for the Tentmakers of Cairo. Equally, Khayamiya reflect community memory, particularly for Anzacs. For the small town of Mintaro in regional South Australia, the Khayamiya represent the wealthy pastoralist Morlock family’s baronial lifestyle and their taste for collecting.
The bust of a smoking British Prime Minister Winston Churchill mounted on the top of one of the textiles exemplifies the eclectic nature of the room and also Jack Mortlock‘s imperial patriotism.
Footnotes
- Sam Bowker, ‘The Urban Fabric of Cairo: Khayamiya and the Suradeq’, International Journal of Islamic Architecture 3 (2015): 475–501; B. O. Gagnon, ‘Egyptian Appliques’, Uncoverings 24 (2003): 131–63. ↩︎
- Sam Bowker, ‘The Urban Fabric of Cairo’. ↩︎
- L. Wallis, personal communication to Kristin Phillips, Artlab, South Australia, 10 August and 12 October 2023. ↩︎