Ryt Ivory Pillow

Details

The Ryt Ivory Pillow brings the ancient past and the present day together beautifully, adding new layers to the aesthetic of your home. Sustainably woven and printed, featuring a luxe duck feather insert, it’s body-hugging comfort is exactly what you need at the end of a long day or the start of a lazy one. Finished with sophisticated touches like its colorful piping and a custom gold zipper, it’s a magazine-worthy addition to any room. Its eye-catching abstract pattern, recalling drops of ink from the brushes of the ancient scribes of Egypt, is absolutely mesmerizing. Paired with a luxurious, ivory tone in cotton-linen or sumptuous velvet, the Ryt Ivory Pillow is the perfect finishing touch for your favorite room. Available in cotton-linen, soft velvet, or in our outdoor eco weave fabric.

Editors' Note

The Ryt Collection features abstract, inkblot patterns in honor of the ancient Egyptian priests, scholars and scribes whose early writings set the stage for written communications around the world up to the present day. Egypt was among the first human civilizations to develop ink for writing and art, an innovation discovered contemporaneously with China around 2500 BC. Ancient Egyptians referred to ink or paint as Ryt, and created it from a variety of organic and inorganic materials. Though inks have been found in several colors, including blue and green, most writing was done in black ink with red used to emphasize important words, instructions or section headings. Egyptians made black ink from burnt materials like charcoal or soot, while reds were made from ocher. Acacia gum, a naturally occurring edible resin found in acacia trees, with a wide range of historical and modern uses, was added as a binding agent, along with vegetable and animal oils to create a solution that was dried and rolled into pellets. Scribes carried these pellets in different colors in anticipation of a writing assignment. When needed, a pellet would be immersed in water, creating ink in the desired hue. Though their writings have held the attention of scholars for literal centuries, studies into the chemistry and  ink making process of ancient Egyptians continue to reveal new insights. As recent as 2020, scholars have found that from an early date, Egyptian inks included lead as a drying agent to ensure that what the scribes wrote would quickly become permanent on the page. Further, they have surmised that the high level of copper found in Egyptian inks, particularly black, suggests that the soot from which it was made was a byproduct of copper extraction from sulfurous ores, similar to the process that produced the famous Egyptian Blue. Unfortunately, copper is also known to have been a source of degradation for the papyri and acacia gum that were both the medium on which the Egyptians wrote and a major component of the ink itself. Despite this, many thousands of fragments and whole texts have been recovered — from prayers and letters to scientific texts and tax documents — offering an invaluable window on what continues to be one of humanity’s oldest and most intriguing cultures.