P REVIOUS TO I914, VON KREMER, MEZ, KARABACEK, AND OTHER DISTINGUISHED GERMAN orientalists had discovered notes on the textiles of early Islam in those texts available at the time and had published them in rather a casual and unsystematic manner; but the far wider range, ever increasing, of texts available in good editions today contains raw materials for research virtually inaccessible to these earlier authorities. In particular one might mention the three manuals of police regulations for petty trading, manufacture, and the maintenance ofpublic morality (IHisba), published within the last five years. They display an interest in the social and economic life of the people rare in oriental authors and describe manufacturing processes which literary men ignore. Much of the material collected by me on Persia has already been set forth in Gaston Wiet's excellent essay, "Une Liste alphabetique des localites de la Perse celebres comme centres de tissage" in his L'Exposition persane de 1931.Though most useful and easy to consult, there were several criticisms that one might make of this method of treatment. The list naturally gives no indication of the groups of cities manufacturing similar types of materials; being a list only, though a very good one, it could not show the interdependence of the manufacturing groups of Persia, Iraq, Egypt, North Africa, Yemen, or Spain, for Persia was treated as a single isolated unit. Nor did the scope of the "Liste" extend to the examination of chronology, the correction of faulty and misleading texts or translations, nor theserious comparison and collation of sources. Nearly all M. Wiet's sources are geograph