Penelope's Loom, The Odyssey and a computer

This small terracotta loom weight is a Late Corinthian object dated to around 575–525 BCE, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fletcher Fund, 1926; object no. 26.60.58). It's a humble, functional thing: weights like this hung from the warp threads of an upright loom to keep them taut, exactly the kind of loom Penelope would have worked at. According to the Met's own catalogue notes, its checkerboard pattern of glazed and reserved terracotta recalls the checkerboard patterns seen on shrouds in Geometric-period funerary scenes; a small reminder that weaving in the ancient Greek world was tied to mourning and memory as much as to daily labour.

• The cloth: the Lefkandi shroud, ca. 950–900 BCE

If the loom weight is the tool, the Lefkandi find is the astonishing survival: an almost-complete linen shroud, sewn up the sides, discovered folded inside a bronze amphora in a burial building on Euboea, excavated in 1980-81 and dated to circa 950–900 BCE, centuries before Homer is thought to have composed the Odyssey. It is one of the earliest surviving textiles from the Greek world, and is now held and studied by the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Its condition is exceptional for its age, and is a rare physical link to the world of cloth, burial ritual and craft that the Odyssey's weaving scenes draw on.

• The myth, painted: the Penelope Painter's skyphos, mid-5th century BCE

By the Classical period, Penelope at the loom had become an iconic image in its own right. An Athenian red-figure skyphos (a two-handled drinking cup), now in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco in Chiusi, Italy, is so closely associated with this scene that the anonymous artist is known to modern scholars simply as "the Penelope Painter." One side shows Penelope seated beneath her towering loom with Telemachus standing before her; the other shows Eurykleia washing the feet of the disguised Odysseus. It's the earliest and most famous ancient depiction of the scene Nolan restages on IMAX film nearly 2,500 years later.

• The revival: two pioneers re-weave the myth, 1886 and 1907

As HALI 184 explored in “A flatweave / A needlewoven tapestry” (Malin Lonnberg, Compass: Thread of Time, pp. 30–31), the image of Penelope at her loom resurfaced again at the turn of the 20th century. In 1886, the American designer Dora Wheeler created Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night, a needlewoven silk tapestry made with the New York collaborative Associated Artists, using a technique using a loosely woven silk canvas built up with coloured silk threads worked in by needle (this labour-intensive technique was patented in 1882 by Wheeler's mother, the interior designer Candace Wheeler). The piece was hidden away in a barn for half a century before its rediscovery ahead of a 2001 Candace Wheeler exhibition; it now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2002.230).

Twenty years later, in 1907, the Swedish weaver Märta Måås-Fjetterström produced Odin's Hunt, a wool-and-linen flatweave depicting the Norse “Wild Hunt” myth, for Kulturens Konstslöjdanstalt in Lund (now Kulturen i Lund, KM 88152). HALI's article pairs the two works not because they share a myth, but because both were made by young, pioneering women artists who turned to mythology at the forefront of early modern textile design; a reminder that Penelope's loom is only the best-known thread in a much longer, wider tapestry of women, weaving and myth.

• The science: Penelope as computer

Penelope's thread even runs into the history of computing. Between 2016 and 2021, Munich's Deutsches Museum ran an ERC-funded research project literally named PENELOPE, led by Dr Ellen Harlizius-Klück, investigating what ancient weaving can tell us about the origins of science and digital technology. The project's premise: weaving is an inherently binary, “digital” technology, and its patterns anticipate later algorithmic thinking. The team built a working PENELOPE Laboratory at Munich's Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke (Museum for Plaster Casts of Classical Sculptures), with replica warp-weighted looms, pattern-matrices, a live-codable loom, and a reconstructed Penelope sculpture standing before the loom itself. Homer's most famous weaver, it turns out, has also become a namesake for research into the deep history of computing.