Socks

Good socks allow one to walk farther, faster, and to be less foot sore afterward.

For an army, this means that the army with the better socks gets there firstest, with the mostest.

Not being foot sore as an army goes into battle is a very big deal.

For a marching army, better socks are an enabling technology.  The army with the better socks has an advantage. That was as true 2,000 years ago as it was in General Kitchener's time.

Hesiod talks of lining shoes with "felt".  However, looking at the translator's footnotes, all I can be sure of is that the lining was something made from wool, and that it may not have meant the same thing, all the time.

I never said that Alexander the Great or Hesiod or Darios per se, were spinners or knitters.  I said  that the military men of the time would have arranged the best foot wear possible for their armies on the march.

Read "The Art of War".  Barefoot armies lose and die. Socks and boots are enabling technologies for an army on the march.  Both the Greek and Persian armies marched. Then, the Roman army marched.

Then there is that Coptic sock. Who here thinks it was a proof of concept prototype to replace the felt in Hesiod's leather foot wear?  No, that sock shows sophisticated details that were likely worked out over generations.    That sock shows long evolution.

Knitting and Nalbinding

All knit fabrics can be replicated by nalbinding. This is controlled by natural laws as deep and wide as the more commonly known Newton's laws of motion. Therefore nalbinding a replica of an object says nothing about whether the original was made by knitting or nalbinding.

On the other hand, knitting is faster. It may be that an object may be practical to use and wear out when it is quickly knit, but when made by nalbinding the object is too valuable and precious to be subjected to the wear of routine use.

Thus, I "knit" my boot socks.  It takes me 20 hours to knit a pair, or 15 hours to swave a
pair.  I could produce the same pair of socks by nalbinding, but it would take twice as long, and be less uniform and consistent.  As practical objects, subject to wear and abuse, I want to invest an minimum amount of time in each pair of socks, and  I knit or swave my socks.  Therefore there is a purpose, and a value to knitting.

I like the Eastern Crossed Stitch (ECS) for sock fabric.  However, while ECS can in theory be swaved, as a practical matter, this fabric must be knit.  Just because a fabric can be knit in theory does not mean that it can be knit with the wrong tools or without specific tools and techniques.  One certainly cannot walk into to modern LYS and purchase the tools required to rapidly produce ECS.  That does not mean that such tools do not exist and were not not known to professional knitters in the past. It only means that such tools are not common today.

DK Burham replicated objects using nalbinding.  Every person familiar with nalbinding knew that could be done, so Burham's work is interesting, but it provides no useful information. Certainly nalbinding is suitable for luxury objects, or objects of ritual or ceremonial use.  Economic constraints constraints of whether nalbinding was economically practical for objects subject to wear were not considered, but we know that the socks were subject to practical use and were in need of repair.  Thus, we can guess that the socks were not luxury, ritual, or ceremonial; and, economics did play a role in the choice of fabrication method.

Moreover, if the socks were substantially knit from short pieces of loom warm waste, then the Coptic Socks may contain individual stitches that are neither typical knitting or typical nalbinding, but which are simply the result of  repair of dropped stitches or darning/weaving in ends at a break in the yarn. Before I started swatching these ECS fabrics, I did think that 3 of these stitches  indicated that the fabric was nalbinding.  However, as I look back over my knit ECS swatchs, I do see similar stitches in my knit ECS work. This was something that I could only discover by knitting ECS. I did not settle any question, except that ECS makes great socks.

Over all, I am highly amused that so many people are so passionate in favor of a flawed analysis that provides so little information.