Tapestry weaving,or the weft faced weaving of discrete areas of colour to form patterns and picturs has an extremely long history and appears to have been developed in many different cultures and places. The orange and yellow one shows a band of tapestry weaving on the sleeve of the clothing of a mummy from north west China and is dated to the 1st millenium BC.As well as being old, it is interesting in that the weave is not the normal 'over one, under one' weave but a more complex 'over three, under two'.

The roundel containing the face of a woman is from Egypt and the early Christian Coptic culture. By tradition, the Coptic church was founded by St Mark in Alexandria somewhere between AD 43 and 48. and by the 3nd of the third century had spread into the Egyptian population along the Nile

The third picture is of a Peruvian tapestry of the Chimu culture dating to about the 6th century AD