In reply to:

still, having the words related leads me to beleive that i was right to speculate that linen might have been the fiber used!

I said the words (bussos (m) and bussos (f)) were similar in form, not that they were related. You might think 'tow' (pull) and 'tow' (coarse flax) were related but they're not.

However, I looked up linen in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, and found that tow is a byproduct of the process of making linen from flax (at the hackling stage)and was used in Greek and Roman times for rope-making. They did have a reference to Pliny's Natural History. I'll see if I can track it down.

Bingley


Bingley