Sericulture

Silk production Raising silkworms and reeling their cocoons began in China in the Neolithic period. Silk cloth traveled west for centuries before the know-how did, which is what makes the transfer so interesting. The technique moved in stages. It reached Khotan in the Tarim Basin by the first half of the 1st century CE and was established in India by 140 CE. Byzantium acquired it in the early 550s, when, according to the historian Procopius, monks who had learned the craft in a land he calls Serinda brought silkworm eggs to Emperor Justinian. The hollow canes of later retellings are not in his account. In 1147, after raiding Corinth and Thebes, Roger II of Sicily set up silkworks in Palermo and Calabria, taking the industry into the West.