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All About Carpets & Rugs
Origin of
Carpet
To most people the idea of the rug,
especially the pile rug, is synonymous with the
Orient, particularly Persia and Turkey. Flat-woven floor
covering in plain weave or tapestry technique is to all
intents ubiquitous. They were developed all over the world,
in various materials, from the earliest times by all
peoples who possessed the skill of weaving. In the case of
knotted or pile carpets and rugs, the source is not so
generalized. There is no doubt that the Middle east from
Persia to Turkey became the main region for knotted carpet
production from the Middle Ages onward, but it is very
unlikely they were invented and first produced there.
Pile carpets are most immediately a decorative textile
substitute for furry hides or sheepskins. Like the latter,
their function relates to insulation and comfort as well as
décor. Such woven versions of hides or hide rugs evolved for
various reasons. First, by shearing the animals and weaving
the rugs out of the wool, it was no longer necessary to kill
the animals to have a rug. And by weaving the rug, it became
possible to make it into a piece of decoration as well. One
could dye hides in one color, or in several swaths of color,
but it was not easy to make anything approaching a design in
this way, at least not with any intricacy or permanence. But
a woven pile rug, could be given some sort of design, just
like flat woven textiles, while also imitating the texture,
density, and protective quality of fur hides. This is
the most popular theory of how
the pile rug came to be born, but the question remains where?
From the outset, it seems improbable that such an adaptation
of fur hides took place in the warm climate of the Middle
East, except for the mountainous regions of Turkey, the
Caucasus, and Persia. But mainstream Oriental rug weaving
has always been a primarily urban industry, not a
production of remote highlands. Moreover, the many
archaeological discoveries made in the last century seem to
indicate that the earliest carpets were produced and
invented beyond Central Asia, in the High Altai Mountains of
Siberia to the north and west of Mongolia. The inhabitants
there were tent-dwelling nomads whose material culture was
dominated by textile production. Such people required rugs
to protect them from the elements, in addition to
embellishing their domestic environment. It seems that these
peoples created the knotted pile carpet by about 600 B.C.,
if not earlier.
The specific evidence for this comes from the discoveries
made by Russian archaeologists at the frozen tombs of
Bashadar and Pazyryk, in the High Altai region. The site of
Bashadar produced a fragment of a pile carpet carbon dated
to the sixth century B.C.. Unfortunately, no pattern is
discernible on this fragment. However, at Pazyryrk another pile
carpet was discovered datable
to the fifth or fourth century B.C.. After conservation, its
color and design turned out to be nothing less than
astounding. The center of the rug had a king of chessboard
design with small floral motifs in each square. The borders
also had floral designs, as well as a frieze of horsemen,
one of griffins, and another of fallow deer. The palette had
rich reds, soft greens, blue, and gold, with a velvety pile.
Because of its design and technical sophistication, some
scholars have doubted that the Pazyryk carpet was a product
nomadic weaving. The frieze of horseman and the floral
designs are clearly related to ancient Persian art,
especially the reliefs at the great site of Persepolis. The
weaving technique is also very fine, which to some scholars, suggests urban workmanship or origin.
Consequently, the Pazyryk piece has often been touted as the
world's oldest Persian rug. But this is most unlikely. Other
frozen tombs at Pazyryk produced fragments of ancient
Persian flat woven tapestry textiles with figural decoration.
Since such textiles were imported by the Altai nomads, it is
easy to see how designs from Persian court art could have
reached them. The desire to imitate such intricate tapestry
designs also explains why the weavers utilized a finely
knotted technique, in order to reproduce such delicacy and
detail. In addition, the frieze of deer is not Persian.
They come from the local repertory of Nomadic “Scythian”
art.
The evidence of the wool and dyes in the carpet is also
decisive. The wool is identical in type to the wool of
sheepskin hides found in other tombs at Pazyryk, which was
clearly local. The red dye in the carpet is made from lac or
kermesic acid, derived from insects, and the particular type
of lac is specifically Polish or Baltic in origin. This dye
would have been more readily available to the wide-ranging
Eurasian nomads who lived from eastern Europe to the High
Altai, than to the ancient Persians far to the south. It is
therefore most likely that the Pazyryk carpet was woven
locally by nomadic peoples, even though its design reflected
the cosmopolitan influences of far-off regions. Scholarship
has come to recognize that nomadic Asiatic
weavings – rugs, tapestries, and embroideries – produced at
various times and places generally tend to reflect the
impact of urban textile production from the Middle East. The Pazyryk carpet is simply an early example of this
phenomenon.
But even if knotted pile carpets were developed by central
Asian or Altaic nomads, the idea, if not the actual carpets
themselves would have reached the Middle East by ancient
times where the technique would have been adopted in local
production. It is very likely that the ancient Persians also
made knotted carpets like their nomadic neighbors to the
north, but these have not been preserved. Nor do we have
actual pile carpets preserved from Greek and Roman cultures.
Classical textual references to carpets exist, but they are
ambiguous; they could simply refer to flat woven, floor
coverings or blankets. Not until late antiquity in the
burials of fifth-century A.D. Roman Egypt do we again
encounter actual pile carpets, made now in a looped
technique. Around the same time there is also continued
evidence of carpet production from Central Asia and the
Caucasus, where pile carpet fragments have been discovered
in caves. Fragments of first century A.D. pile rugs
discovered in western China and Tibet
suggest that the nomadic tradition of the knotted carpet
spread east and southward from the Altai region as well.
It is not until the early Islamic period (seventh to ninth
centuries) that the evidence for carpet production again
picks up in the archaeological record, and once again it is
the dry climate of Egypt that has facilitated the survival
of the actual carpets or fragments, especially at Fostat
outside old Cairo. This site was actually the rubbish dump
for the city, and it has produced an extensive series of
carpet fragments, a number of which are early Islamic in
date. The fragments are small, but one can discern designs
of simple floral and geometric patterns which would have been
allover repeat patterns. Given the limited evidence
available, it is hard to generalize about the scale and
extent of carpet production in the early Islamic Middle
East. It is not until the thirteenth century in Anatolia or
Turkey that we finally encounter an actual mass of
surviving large fragments or nearly complete pile rugs.
These are preserved in the mosques founded by the new Seljuk
Turkish dynasty that has recently come to power there.
The Seljuk Turks were originally nomads from Central Asia
who entered Persia and then Anatolia in the tenth and
eleventh centuries after their conversion to Islam. Over a
century ago, even before the discoveries at Bashadar and
Pazyryk, the great pioneer rug scholar, Alois Riegl, was of
the opinion that it was such nomadic Turkic peoples from
Central Asia who first introduced the knotted pile carpet to
the Islamic Middle East around this time. The discoveries at
Fostat, however, show that the knotted carpet was already
known in the early Islamic period. Still, Riegl was probably
correct in emphasizing the role of Turks from Central Asia,
who would have brought with them the ancient tradition of
pile carpet weaving from their ancestral Altaic homeland.
Turks were already a political and military force in ninth
century Egypt, and they were probably responsible for the
earliest pile rug production evidenced at Fostat. It is
therefore highly probably that when the Turks became a
dominant elite across the Islamic Middle East in the tenth
and eleventh centuries, the knotted carpet finally achieved
its position as a major medium of artistic production under
their patronage. From this point on, from Turkey into
Persia, the tradition of Oriental knotted pile carpet as we
know it began to evolve continuously down to the present
time.
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