NARRATOR: This approximately fifteen-hundred-year-old cloth owes its preservation to Egypt’s extremely dry climate. Andrea Myers Achi, Mary and Michael Jaharis associate curator of Byzantine art at The Met.

ANDREA ACHI: At the very top are roundels with angels with plump faces, and then beneath that scene you have these riders. They might be military people or people on a hunt, holding rocks and arrows. They appear to be quickly going across the scene, and they have the hunting dogs beneath them. And then at the very bottom you see baskets of fruits, but then also more angels looking in lots of different directions, and then at the bottom right is another rider, and he has this pink and beige cloth rendering.

NARRATOR: Egypt contained many cultures and ethnicities. People came to Egyptian cities from across the Mediterranean, down the Nile from Nubia and beyond, and across the Red Sea from East Africa and India.

ACHI: What’s really interesting to me about this textile is you have people with pink cheeks and beige cloth, but then you also have these black riders. Within scholarship there was this idea that the riders didn’t represent people, and the only people that we see are the beige angels and the rider below. But one thing to consider is the possibility that we're looking at different types of people that were part of communities.

NARRATOR: This textile has lived three lives. First, a skilled fifth-century artisan wove it as a curtain, likely as a commission, to hang in an elite household. Imagine how the weaver’s fingers would have worked the tiny threads of linen and wool on the loom, or how the riders would have danced in the breeze in a doorway. Next, someone wrapped it around a body, beginning its second life as a burial shroud. Finally, The Met received it as a donation from a collector in 1890.