The Benaki Museum's collection of Coptic art includes a uniquely rich group of textiles. These fabrics recently received international exposure through the European programme Tissus, when specialists and researchers from all over the world were able to gain access to them following their publication on the Internet.

The blending of elements derived from the local Egyptian tradition and Greco-Roman civilisation with vigorous newer elements of the Christian religion is very clearly reflected in the textiles which comprise this particular collection. The stress on ornament, the stylisation of the human figure, the emphasis on depicting local subjects such as Nile landscapes, and above all the expressive immediacy of the scenes themselves, are all distignuishing features of Coptic art.

Some of the textiles in the collection reproduce the subject matter and aesthetic tendencies of the great artistic centres of the day. These fragmentary objects are the only evidence we have of the appearance of luxurious silk cloths which have for the most part been lost.

Articles of metalwork and woodcarved objects are representative of Egyptian products once widely traded, chiefly in the 5th and 6th centuries, thus providing valuable historical evidence of the daily life of the period. They also reflect the composite nature of their date and provenance. Egypt, a wheat-growing land that played an important role in the economies of both the Roman and the early Byzantine Empires, was truly a crossroads of peoples and cultures. These circumstances led to the emergence of a local artistic idiom which is most clearly expressed in the collection's numerous bronze vessels, including lamps and jugs decorated with zoomorphic handles and depictions of dancers and apotropaic divinities. These articles are evidence of the advances made in the major artistic centres of the time, while simultaneously representing the foundation upon which Islamic art developed in Egypt following the Arab conquest of 642 A.D.