A device used for weaving cloth. Normally the variety of loom used can be deduced from surviving fragments of the resulting cloth. The cloth shows, for example, that the horizontal loom was the more usual in ancient Egypt, the vertical loom in Syria and Mesopotamia. In Europe, the vertical loom with weighted warps was standard. The weights - disk-shaped, quoit-shaped, or pyramidal - are frequently found on sites from the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age and reappear with the Anglo-Saxons. In the Americas, the most common form was the belt or backstrap loom, in which a continuous warp thread passed between two horizontal poles. One was attached to a support while the other was attached to the seated weaver, who could adjust the tension of the warps simply by leaning forward or backward. The earliest evidence of the use of the loom, 4400 BC, is a representation of a horizontal two-bar (or two-beamed--i.e., warp beam and cloth beam) loom pictured on a pottery dish found at al-Badari, Egypt. Loom weights have been found at archaeological sites dating from 3000 BC, but this type of loom may have originated even earlier. By about 2500 BC, a more advanced loom was apparently evolving in East Asia.