When a new Anthropological Department was set up in Ashanti in the 1920s, R. S. Rattray, an Africanist from Oxford, was charged with the task of re-searching the law and constitution of Ashanti, to assist the colonial administrators in ruling the region. Rattray set out to do detailed and voluminous research on Ashanti religion, customs law, art, beliefs, folktales, and proverbs. His personal contact with the people of Ashanti afforded him an intimate knowledge of their culture, which is reflected in his thoughtful and nuanced writing on them. In his seminal work of 1927 ‘Religion and Art in Ashanti’ these blue and white cotton Warp samples and succeeding coloured silks were included.
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