Material culture seems to be a useful concept to investigate the nature of trade and consumption for periods and areas of the world for which we have little documentary or statistical evidence. The object overleaf (Figure 2.1) is not a beautiful palampore or one of the high-quality Indian textiles that illustrate books or adorn major museums and collections. It is a fragment of cloth dating from the fourteenth century. It is rare but not unique: there are at least another 1,225 similar fragments in the storage space at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and more are to be found in other museums around the world. They were acquired in the early twentieth century by P. E. Newberry, the first professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, who donated them to the Ashmolean Museum in 1946. They include printed cottons excavated in Old Fustat, near Cairo, in Egypt. They survive in relatively good condition because of the dry Saharan climate. For decades they remained uncatalogued and unseen. It was only in the 1980s that curator Ruth Barnes went back to them. By then their importance no longer lay within the field of Egyptian medieval archaeology. What is fascinating about these textiles found in Egypt is that their printed designs, use of mordants and colour scheme leave no doubt that they came from several thousand miles away, from Gujarat in northwestern India, and were probably traded all the way to Egypt via the western Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.