The Mysterious World of Chintamani And Bird Carpets

ISTANBUL, December 5, 2009 -- Some of the most striking carpets of the Ottoman era are as white as a painter’s canvas and covered with finely drawn, mysterious icons.

The never-changing symbols repeat in array after array, like waves building strength, creating a powerful, mesmerizing effect

The mysterious icons are the “chintamani,” three balls hovering over a pair of cloud-like wavy lines. And for much of the 16th and 17th centuries, they held a special fascination for Ottoman court artists.

The chintamani appear on silks, ceramic plates, tiles, book-bindings, and embroideries. Sometimes, they even appear on the kaftans worn by the Ottoman sultans.

This kaftan, from the mid-17th century and now kept in the Topkapi Palace museum, is an example.

The huge scale of the design, which was typical of Ottoman royal costumes, made the Sultan visible even in large crowds as he appeared in public.

The chintamani design was so popular in all the decorative arts of the time that it was probably inevitable it would spill over to carpets as well. And that is exactly what many rug experts believe happened.

Rug expert Louise W. Mackie writes in “A Turkish Carpets with Spots and Stripes” (Textile Journal, 1976) that it is “highly probable” that the origin of the chintamni carpet design can be traced to the symbol’s popularity in the art of the Ottoman court in Istanbul.

But what is much harder to explain is where the symbol of the chintamani itself originated and what it means.

In carpet literature, the design is often said to derive from a Buddhist emblem. The word chintamani itself comes from Sanskrit and in Buddhist philosophy signifies a treasure ball or wish-granting jewel.

A Buddhist background for the design is an appealing argument because it also recalls the distant past of the Turkic tribes who migrated to Anatolia from Central Asia and created the succession of dynasties that culminated in the Ottoman Empire.

The original cultures of the Turkic tribes were based on religions like Buddhism and Shamanism for millennia before they converted to Islam.

But if the three-ball pattern appears in early Central Asian painting and even is associated with the badge of the great Turkic-Mongol conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) in the 14th century, there are still parts of the symbol that a Buddhist origin cannot easily explain.

Particularly puzzling are the paired stripes that appear in combination with the floating balls.

Some scholars think that the eye-catching combination may have evolved from mixing a Buddhist motif with much more worldly patterns inspired by animal skins to create an instantly recognizable symbol of power.

The argument here is that the stripes and dots are similar to tiger stripes and leopard spots on the kinds of furs powerful rulers may have worn as symbols of their office.

But perhaps the only certainty about the chintamani design is that comes from Eastern Asia, is very old and, despite every effort at interpretation, remains as mysterious as ever.

“The true significance and sources of this ancient pattern still await satisfactory explanations,” Mackie notes.

The chintamani pattern was used both for carpets woven in the Ottoman court workshops of Istanbul or Cairo, and in commercial workshops in towns like Selendi around the city of Ushak (Usak, Oushak) in western Anatolia.

The two kinds of weaving centers – royal and commercial – produced their own distinctive chintamani patterns.

The Ottoman court carpets (right) have the spots placed above the raised center of the stripes.

But the Anatolian carpets (left) have the spots placed above the lowered center of the stripes.

Why this happened is just another mystery associated with this most mysterious of designs.

The chintamani pattern proved so popular that it was woven for hundreds of years, both on white and colored backgrounds, long after the passion for the design faded in the Ottoman court itself.

Today, the motif has finally passed from rugs, too, but it remains popular in Turkey on plates and other household items.

All this makes the chintamani design one of the great success stories in Ottoman carpets. But it is not the only mysterious pattern to be set against a white background in the 16th century that achieved lasting fame.

Another is the so-called “Bird” pattern, which also was produced in or near Ushak and was much prized in Renaissance Europe.

Europeans used the term “Bird” because the design could easily be seen to represent a bird, with its head, wings, and tail.

But in fact the design is a floral pattern of leaves attached to rosettes.

The sharp, birdlike angles are simply the result of Anatolian weavers doing what they did to all Ottoman-era floral designs: converting them to more geometric to fit their own weaving traditions and techniques.

Some researchers believe that the Bird pattern is actually a variation of the chintamani design.

The late Ferenc Batari of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts suggested the Bird pattern may have evolved from weavers experimenting with framing the floating balls of the chintamani within different arrangements of paired lines.

Batari presented this carpet as a possible step along the way in his article “White Ground Carpets in Budapest" (Oriental Carpet & Textile Studies II, 1986).

If Bird carpets did indeed evolve this way, it would be an interesting example of how one successful carpet design gives rise to another as weavers constantly explore new ideas.

White carpets decorated with chintamani, birds, or other mysterious symbols viewed as crabs or scorpions fascinated the European market, where they all were referred to popularly as “White Ushaks.”

Here is a Bird carpet circa 1625 in the painting ‘Mother, Child and Gentleman’ by Alessandro Varotari.

Three hundred years later, in the early 1900s, the fascination with White Ushaks remained strong enough to inspire one the few short stories specifically about carpets in European literature.

The story is ‘Birds and Chintamani,’ written by Czech novelist Karel Capek in 1929. It describes the discovery of a carpet that, by all known rules, cannot exist. That is, a white carpet on which the two famous designs of birds and chintamani are combined together.

The discovery of the carpet, tucked away in stack of unsold items in a Prague rug shop, changes the collector’s life forever.

You can read the story by clicking here: Birds and Chintamani.

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Konya, The Seljuks, And The First Great Anatolian Carpets

KONYA, Turkey; June 10, 2009 -- Imagine you had a time machine and could visit one of the great carpet production centers of the Silk Road.

Where would you go?

You might follow Marco Polo’s advice and head for Konya, in central Anatolia.

The great Venetian traveler of the Silk Road describes the area around Konya this way on his journey from Anatolia to Persia between 1271 and 1272:

“The best and handsomest carpets in the world are wrought here.”

At the time, Konya was a major city of the Seljuk Empire. It was at the heart of the first great Turkic empires created by nomadic peoples sweeping into Iran and Anatolia from Central Asia and beyond at the start of the last millennium.

Turkic, as well as Mongol, empires dominated a huge swath of Eurasia from the 11th century through the 16th century and created a cultural melting pot that extended from Turkey to China.

And it was out of that melting pot, fueled by a constant exchange of commodities and ideas along the Silk Roads, that most of what we know today as oriental carpets emerged.

The nomads who followed their armies and settled down in the conquered areas brought their own rich tribal weaving styles into them. Over time, these fused with local artistic traditions to create a huge variety of new patterns in the continual process of design innovation and change that has always characterized the woven arts.

It is in Konya where travelers first record this fusion producing a major commercial, and international, carpet export industry. One is Ibn Battuta, Moroccan lawyer who spent 29 years traveling most of the Islamic world in the 14th century.

Visiting Konya in the 1330s, about 60 years after Marco Polo and just after the end of the Seljuk era, Ibn Battuta mentions that the carpets made there were exported to all the Turkic-ruled regions of the day. That included Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Persia, and parts of India and China.

The extent of the carpet industry’s reach should be no surprise. Ibn Battuta’s lengthy “Rihla” or “Book of Travels” describes a pre-modern but already globalized world.

As author Ross E. Dunn observes in his book ‘The Adventures of Ibn Battuta,’ the Moroccan traveler’s “tale reveals that by the 14th century the formation of dense networks of communication and exchange had linked in one way or another nearly everyone in the (Eastern) hemisphere with nearly everyone else.”

As just one example of the importance the rulers of the different parts of the vast Islamic world gave to trade, the Seljuks were famous builders of caravanserais, or “Hans.”

The ruins of many still stand in Anatolia today, marking the Silk Road trading routes that crisscrossed the empire and made it rich. This one is the Sultan Han at Aksaray, not far from Konya.

In the state-funded Hans, the vast caravans – some with enough camels to carry the equivalent of a cargo ship of their time – found water, food, and a secure place to stop for the night at regular intervals along the way.

Unfortunately, Ibn Battuta does not say whether Konya carpets were exported to Europe, leaving that a mystery. But it seems likely they were because Europe was in close trading contact with both the Seljuk Empire and the rest of the Islamic world.

After all, the Seljuk Empire was hardly terra incognita. Much of it was carved out of the Byzantine Empire as the Seljuks expanded westward from their first great conquest, Persia.

Once the Seljuk cavalrymen defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071, the commanders settled down in Konya and other ancient Greek and Armenian towns.

But, as Dunn points out, nomadic Turkoman clans continued to drift over the Anatolian plateau, whose majority and heavily Hellenized and Christian population was still neither Muslim nor Turkish or Turkish-speaking.

As Marco Polo described it:

“The inhabitants of Turkomani may be distinguished into three classes. The Turkomans who … dwell amongst the mountains and in places difficult of access, where their object it to find good pasture for their cattle, as they live entirely upon animal food .. The other classes are the Armenians and Greeks, who reside in cities and in fortified places and gain their living by commerce and manufacture.”

Here is a map of the Seljuk Empire circa 1000. Indeed, the Seljuks called the lands of their Anatolian sultanate 'Rum' because it had been established on territory long considered "Roman", i.e. Byzantine, by Muslim armies. Rum was the Arabic word for Rome.

The Seljuk rulers had formal trading agreements with Genoa and Venice (see: Venice: Discovering Europe’s Silk Road City And The Early Carpet Trade), two of the European shipping powers that dominated the Eastern Mediterranean at the time.

The Italian ships regularly called at ports in southern Anatolia as well as in the Black Sea, presumably to pick up goods flowing Iran and Central Asia along the Anatolian trunk road linking Konya, Erzurum, and Tabriz.

But if Seljuk carpets reached Europe, there is no record of them in European painting of the time. By the time early Renaissance artists begin depicting carpets, the Seljuk Empire – which ended around 1300 – had fatally weakened by the next great wave of nomads to sweep over Eurasia, the Mongols.

Indeed, until very recently, there was no evidence at all – apart from the carpets’ very limited appearance in Seljuk miniature paintings (as in The Makamat Manuscript) – of what Marco Polo’s “best and handsomest carpets in the world” might have looked like.

The story of how some enterprising carpet lovers finally found a few surviving Seljuk pieces is one of the great surprises of the rug world.

In 1905, the German Consul General and others in Konya, was intrigued by Turkish custom of contributing rugs to mosques and noticed that in the oldest mosque in Konya – the Aleddin (Ala al-Din) mosque – the overlays of carpets had built up over time almost like geological strata.

In an amateur archaeologist’s dream, the consul persuaded the city government to allow an “excavation” to see if the oldest carpets might be from the Seljuk era, when the ancient mosque was greatly expanded in 1220.

To everyone’s amazement, carpets with designs never seen before were indeed discovered in one dark corner beneath all the others: three complete ones and five fragments. The vizier of Konya commissioned watercolors of the rugs, these were published in Europe by rug researcher F.R. Martin 1907-8, causing great excitement.

The rugs are now in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul and the Ethnographic Museum of Konya and are generally considered to have been woven late in the1200s or early in the 1300s.

But these are not the only Seljuk style rugs to be found.

In 1930, American Professor, R.M. Riefstahl “excavated” three more rugs in the Eşrefoğlu Mosque, a Seljuk-era mosque from 1296, in the city of Beyşehir, about 100 km east of Konya.

Those rugs are now in the Mevlana Museum of Konya, which celebrates the life of the Seljuk Empire’s best known citizen, Mevlana Jalaleddin Rumi (1207 -1273), the Sufi mystic whose followers founded of the Whirling Dervish order. His inspirational humanist and religious poems, which he wrote in Persian, are among the most popular works of poetry worldwide today.

And then finally in 1935 and 1936, the Swedish art historian Carl J. Lamm discovered seven more Seljuk carpets among a score of Anatolian fragments unearthed during excavations of Fustat, the first capital of Egypt under Arab rule.

Fustat was burned down in 1168 by its own vizier to keep it out of the hands of the invading Crusaders. After that, the area was incorporated into nearby Cairo but eventually fell into disrepair and for hundreds of years served as a garbage dump.

The fragments from Fustat, which are now kept in several European museums, suggest that the Seljuk carpets were indeed exported widely.

And thanks to all these miracle recoveries of Seljuk rugs early last century, we know that they were produced in two main styles. They could have overall repeating geometric patterns or repeating animal patterns.

The geometric patterns are complex and some of them have a surprisingly close resemblance to the patterns in Seljuk stonework, suggesting the rugs were part of an overall design movement not unlike design trends in many other periods, including our own.

Here is a geometric, recessed-brick pattern on the tower of a Seljuk-era mosque in Damghan, Iran.

But all the Seljuk carpets are unique in another way, and that is their use of color. They have a distinctive way of using two shades of the same color one upon the other to give their design a subtle, soft appearance.

This “ton sur ton” palette -- in various tones of red, brown, ochre, green and blue -- does not appear in later Turkish rugs. And it still makes Seljuk carpets sparkle today.

The peculiar designs of the Seljuks would later morph into very the different styles of the Ottomans, the next great empire to rise in Anatolia.

And this time Anatolian rugs would be so heavily exported to Europe that “Ottomans” would appear hundreds of times in the paintings of the Renaissance.

But it would be humble animal patterns of the Ottomans, and not their more complicated geometric cousins, that would become the first recorded oriental carpets in the West -- 100 years after the Seljuk Empire's demise. (see: Were Animal Design Carpets Europe’s First Favorite Oriental Rugs?).

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Related Links:

Seljuk Textiles and Carpets

Turkish Culture – Anatolian Carpets

Persian Art – The Seljuks

The Seljuk Han in Anatolia

Wikipedia – Great Seljuk Empire

Wikipedia – Seljuk Sultanate of Rum

From Table To Wall To Floor: Oriental Rugs Keep Moving Around European Homes

PRAGUE, May 9, 2008 -- Oriental carpets are the great nomads of European homes

Over the centuries, few furnishings have moved around as much as they have. Rugs have been put on tables, hung on walls, stretched over sofas, displayed on floors and, finally, tucked under the furniture.

In the process, they have helped express the social values of their owners – from medieval merchants looking for status symbols to modern families looking for creature comforts.

All this makes the history of rugs in Western homes a fascinating study.

Rug experts date the first imports of oriental carpets into Europe to around 1200 – the time of the fourth Crusade – or earlier. The knights leading the crusades were keen observers of Eastern court life and eager to acquire the trappings for themselves.

By 1300, Europe’s court painters began to show some of these acquisitions in their artworks and by 1450 the depictions are so highly detailed they can be cataloged. The carpets – then all from Anatolia with geometric motifs – appeared in many paintings with Christian religious themes and were usually placed at the feet of the Virgin Mary or on the steps of alters. One example is Alessio Baldovinetti’s Madonna and Child with Saints, circa 1454.



Giving the carpets such a place of honor in religious paintings may have been a reflection of the awe the oriental rugs inspired in the European public. And it may show how easily the Eastern textiles found a place within Europe’s own tradition of using luxurious tapestries as symbols of power and prestige.

Through the 1400s, carpets began to become sufficiently available to rich Europeans to also appear in portraits of the nobility and wealthy merchants. By 1450, paintings of festivals in cities like Venice and Florence show wealthy merchant families draping their rugs out their windows for all to see.

The public displays seem intended to emphasize the wealth of the merchant families and their growing social status as Europe moved into the Renaissance. And the rugs from distant lands seem a perfect symbol of the cosmopolitan mood that accompanied Europe’s emergence from centuries of feudalism.

By 1550, Persian carpets began to be imported into Europe along with Anatolians. The Persian court pieces, with their curving floral patterns, equally became part of the portraits of the rich and powerful – only now oriental carpets were displayed most frequently on top of tables.


At times, the tables included conference tables, as in a famous portrait of British and Spanish officials concluding a treaty in 1604 over an Anatolian. This painting is The Somerset House Conference, by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz.

Carpets continued to be draped over furniture in European houses through the 1600s and 1700s, but by 1800s they were on the move again.

During the 1800s, the accelerating industrial age made many Europeans and Americans wealthier and they began acquiring the luxury goods of the rich, including oriental carpets. The new owners experimented with putting rugs of many different sizes in many different places in their homes.

The first half of the century saw carpets move onto the walls and, in small formats, onto the floor. They were status symbols to be displayed and, when they were on the floor, other furniture was pushed back to give them pride of place. Different designs became associated with particular rooms. A lady’s boudoir would have a bright and floral Persian rug. A man’s study or smoking room would more likely have a red-and-black Turkmen.

But by the second half of the 1800s, the trend was toward big format carpets covering more and more of the floor. As a result, carpets began to go under furniture. Compared to the earlier taste for putting carpets on top of tables, this was history stood on its head. Yet the practice, and the sense that a carpet – or carpeting – adds comfort to a room but need not be considered as artwork continues today.

Could carpets one day come off the floor again? If they do, there are two directions in which they might go.

One direction is suggested by Europe’s periodic taste for draping colorful carpets over sofas. The famous Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, raised his couch to iconic status partly by covering it with a beautiful nomadic Qashqai rug. He maintained that the mysterious motifs in the carpet helped his patient relax and wander back into their memories more easily.

At times, carpets even have become the upholstery of the furniture itself. Jon Thompson writes in his 1983 textbook 'Oriental Carpets' of a fad in the 1870s and 1880s for cutting up tribal carpets to use them as the covering fabric for armchairs. He credits the destructive practice with saving at least parts of some valuable rugs that might otherwise have been worn out by use on the floor. The fad inspired one German businessman, Carl Wilhelm Koch, to machine-weave furniture fabrics in Turkmen and Qashqai designs.

The other direction is for carpets to go back onto the walls, the usual place for artwork. They have often been there before. The 19th century craze for prayer rugs from across the Islamic world made many homes look like museums. And still today, a small silk rug of almost any design is more likely to be hung than walked upon.

The future is never possible to predict. But it is interesting to think that putting an oriental carpet on the floor – so automatic today – is historically a recent trend in Western interior design. And if history is a guide, it may only be a step on the way to something else.

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Related Links

Oriental carpets in Italian Renaissance paintings: art objects and status symbols

Turkish Rugs In European Paintings

Kilim Sofas

Oriental Carpet Books Sell In Strange Ways

LONDON, March 21, 2008 -- Books about rugs may seem like a no-surprise part of the Oriental Carpet trade. But when it comes to how the books are sold, the business is very much a world of its own.

There may be thousands of carpet retailers spread across the globe. Yet there is only a handful of dealers who specialize in rug books and stock enough of a variety to interest collectors.

One of those retailers is Ed Stott, who operates Oxianna Books from his home base near London. Indeed, his base is his home because, as for most of the specialist booksellers, the business does not generate enough profit to warrant shop space.

Stott says ‘the bread and butter’ of the trade are specialty books for connoisseurs.

“People who have just spent serious money for a carpet, rug, or bagface will want to buy the book if the piece is published, if only to show friends,” he says.

After all, a book full of rare rugs including something similar to one’s own goes a long way toward authenticating a piece to any doubters in the crowd. And perhaps it can even help ease relatives’ shock over a rug’s sticker price.

One of the most highly sought-after books among collectors is the catalogue for an exhibition of Turkmen weavings held at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C in 1980. The catalogue, ‘Turkmen’ by J. Thompson and L. Mackey, has sold an estimated 5,000 copies, something Stott believes is a record for a specialist book.

Some other books -- like rare rugs themselves -- appreciate in value over time. One is ‘Rugs of the Peasants and Nomads of Anatolia’ by W. Bruggemann and H. Bohmer. It was originally published in 1983 with just 500 copies in German and 500 copies in English at the price of 60 British pounds a copy. Today, Stott says, a first-edition copy is fetching 400 pounds.

But if collectors are ready to pay high prices for specialist books, they appear to have mixed emotions about another source of information on rugs: auction catelogues.

Stott says a few auction catelogues are highly sought after because they are the stock of a single collector or dealer and may offer more information than appears in general-audience carpet books.

But most catelogues are considered to have only modest value because the pictures are post-card sized and, Stott says, the digital process can enhance the colors. After all, the intention of the catalogues is to sell carpets in auctions and advertising is advertising.

The world of carpet books is still a new one, with the earliest dating back only to around the 1900s. Stott says there were a few early German authors at that time but that it was really not until after World War II that books started to appear regularly.

At first, authors tended to be academic in their writing. But by the 1970s they also began aiming at more general readers. One of the pioneers was ‘Woven Gardens, Nomad and Village Rugs of the Fars Province of Southern Persia,’ by D. Black and J. Loveless. It caught, and expanded, the wave of interest in nomadic and village carpets at the time.

How does someone get into the business of dealing in specialist rug books?

In Stott's case, it was quite by accident. Ten years ago, his job as computer expert at British Gas was made redundant. But opportunity presented itself in the form of a friend who was going through a divorce and needed to dispose of a whole collection of books about carpets, travel, and related subjects.

Stott combined the collection with the rise of e-commerce and his mail-order Oxianna Books was born.

But it is not an easy business to be in, particularly today.

As a dealer based in Europe, Oxianna is hard-hit by the exchange rate when it does business with American customers. The weak dollar has made merchandise priced in British pounds or euros more expensive than before.

And compared to a few years ago -- when many new carpets books were published – today’s trend is toward fewer and ever pricier tomes. That is because color reproduction of photographs is very costly -- so much so that publishing a top-quality book now often requires having a carpet club or other sponsor subsidize the project.

Perhaps that is why many specialist bookstore owners engage in their business only part-time and without giving up other professions they may have. The business has to be as much for the love of carpets as for the hope of rewards.

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Books on Rugs and Textiles