Russia And The History Of Caucasian Carpets

MOSCOW, September 5, 2009 -- The only western nation ever to incorporate a major rug producing region of the east within its borders is Russia.

In fact, Russia incorporated two: the Caucasus and Central Asia. And the experience had not only a dramatic effect on the international rug market and Russian culture but a nearly fatal effect on the carpet producing cultures themselves.

The first region to be incorporated was the Caucasus.

The photo at the top of the page is a detail from an antique Shirvan carpet from the Caucasus. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

In the 1700s, the Russian Empire began moving into the Caucasus and by 1830, after wars with Turkey and Iran, it was in control of ‘Transcaucasia’ -- the area on the other side of the Caucasus mountain chain from Russia (today's Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia).

The conquest of the North Caucasus -- directly bordering Russia proper and including Chechnya and Daghestan -- took considerably longer. It involved continual battles and suppressions known in Russia as the Caucasian Wars, which lasted from 1817 to 1864. Unlike in Transcaucasia, it also involved the mass expulsion of peoples – hundreds of thousands of Circassians – to Turkey to clear the way for Russian settlement.

By a strange coincidence of history, Russia’s move into this ancient and mountainous region, with its myriad cultures, happened at a time when Romanticism was at its height in Europe. So, despite the grim realities of subjugating fiercely independent peoples, the experience set off a wave of “Orientalist” Romanticism in Russia not unlike that epitomized by Byron in Britain.

What did Russian “Orientalism” look like?

A good summary is provided by Russian researcher Oleg Semenov in an article entitled “Oriental Carpets and Russian Interiors in the 19th Century” ('Oriental Carpet & Textile Studies,' Part 1, 1987).

He notes that “to Russians, the Caucasus was a mysterious country, the symbol of a free and natural life, dear to the young and romantic. One recalls the heroes of Pushkin, Lermontov, or even of Tolstoy’s 'Cossacks.'”

The new fascination with the east could be seen in everything from literature to interior decorating. The Caucasus offered a new, larger-than-life stage for young Russians and they seized the opportunity to break with the restrained fashion of their parents – Classicism – and idealize spontaneity, instead.

At home, the French Classicist style of spacious interiors with highly polished floors, symmetrically arranged furniture, and European Savonnerie carpets, was out. The new look, making heavy use of the Caucasian carpets and other art objects flowing back as war booty, was restive, tousled, and exuberant.

“Now the oriental carpet draped the wall or served to display weapons,” writes Semonov.

“Often there was a special divan, smoking room or a bathroom in the men’s part of the house, in which all furnishings were oriental in style. Here it was possible to hang a large carpet on the walls, and to use one to cover a wide ‘Turkish’ divan. Caucasian weapons, hookahs, chibouks (wooden pipes), brass jugs, and low tables with engraved trays embellished the furnishings. The international character of Classicism gave way to a choice of items which created a stylistically solid ‘Oriental’ image for a specific room.”

The displays of carpets and weapons from the Caucasus went along with a cult of gallantry that idealized the individual bravery of Eastern warriors in battle compared to the already ruthlessly efficient organization of Western armies. The cult itself was a holdover from the Napoleonic wars, when officers still sought to distinguish themselves as a warrior class from the growing use of masses of conscripts that marks the beginning of modern warfare.

The model of romantic gallantry, along with the knowledge that it was doomed in the modern age, was exemplified by the book 'A Hero of Our Time' in 1839 by Mikhail Lermontov (shown here).

The hero of the story, a duelist and an immoralist was, in fact, an anti-hero in the full sense of the word who outraged the literary critics of the day. But he was Byronic in his fierce individualism, and he saved his contempt not for the mountain warriors, whom he fought but admired, but for modern society around him. (Lermontov himself, dubbed the “poet of the Caucasus,’ was killed in a duel shortly after his only novel was published. He was 27.)

All this may help explain how the carpets and other material culture of the Caucasus could come into Russian homes on equal terms with Western furnishings even as the people who made them were being subjugated.

This 1894 picture of “Horsemen of the Caucasus” is by Russian artist Franz Alekseyevich Roubaud (1856 - 1928), who was famous for panoramic paintings.

Carpets from the Caucasus remained largely unknown in Western European homes until much later: almost the end of the 19th century.

The reason was the Russian Empire’s protectionist policy of favoring domestic trade over foreign trade.

At one point, merchants trying to export carpets and other goods through Russia’s main Black Sea port of Odessa were required to deposit with authorities a sum double that of the product’s estimated value. The sum would only be reimbursed once the contents of the bales were verified at the port. That imposed impossible capital requirements on the would-be exporters.

At another point, Moscow required that all products for export from the Caucasus be routed first to Tbilisi for customs clearance and tax assessment, whether or not it was the shortest route to market. That too, discouraged foreign trade. (These measures were noted by the French traveler Xavier Hommaire De Hell, who visited the region in 1847.)

As Richard E Wright and John T Wertime, note in their 1995 book ‘Caucasian Carpets & Covers,’ even as late as 1852 the number of rugs and related textiles exported from the Russian Empire was negligible.

But that situation changed in the following decades, as new political and social changes swept Russia.

This time a major part of the story was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The freed serfs, who represented slightly less than half of all peasants, were allocated land but in fact often did not get not enough to make ends meet. So, the government launched a program dubbed “Kustar” (Russian for ‘Artisan’) to encourage peasants across the empire to produce handicrafts to supplement their agricultural earnings.

In the Caucasus, the Kustar program sought to dramatically boost home weaving by providing villagers with wool and patterns and taking care of sales. The target was the booming market for Caucasian carpets in Russia and then, as Tsarist officials began encouraging foreign trade, exports to the two great carpet trading centers of the time: Istanbul and London.

The export efforts got a further, huge boost in the 1880s with the completion of the Trans-Caucasus railroad and soon tons of carpets were moving toward Russia’s Black Sea ports.

By the beginning of the 1880s, Europe began to be aware of Caucasian carpets, say Wright and Wertime. The carpets got full exposure at the Paris World Fair (Exposition Universelle) in 1878 and they became a popular addition to Victorian-era homes.

Semenov offers some figures to show how suddenly exports of carpets from Russia exploded.

“Carpet making, which had been a craft, in the second half of the 19th century developed into a marketable branch of manufacture,” he writes.

“Russia became not only one of the most important consumer countries but also a major exporter of Oriental carpets. In 1873 carpet exports from the Russian Empire amounted to 12,914 puds (1 pud = 16 kg) valued at 922,917 rubles; by 1874 they had grown to 17,781 puds at a value of 964,675 rubles.”

He continues: “The volume of exported carpets continued to increase until the outbreak of World War I. The major proportion exported – 90 to 94 percent – was of the more expensive Caucasian carpets, while cheaper Central Asian rugs were mostly brought in for the home market.”

Unfortunately, the story does not end there.

With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Russian civil war, and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, Russian society again changed on an epic scale. And the effects were nearly fatal for the carpet producers at both the village and manufactory level.

White Russians poured out of the country after losing the civil war and many of them brought their valuables, including carpets, with them for sale. Istanbul’s grand bazaar was suddenly overloaded with the same carpets that had furnished Russia's 'Orientalist' interiors of the Tsarist era and many of these now flowed West in a booming business.

But in now communist Russia, the carpet market was finished. Luxury goods were to be despised, even if they were secretly collected, and interior design styles conformed to the new rules.

Semenov, writing during the last decade of the Soviet Union, describes the new mood as a return to more austere and rational style. And perhaps reflecting his times, he approvingly contrasts modernism with the luxurious disorder of the 19th century, when people “scattered carpets over the divans, arms-chairs, walls, and floors."

“Such an abundance of carpets exerted an aggressive influence on the interior’s creator, leaving him no room to think or speak. The carpets, as it were, ‘swaddled’ him, ‘wrapped him up’ from all sides. Their bright colors, unhurried rhythms of design, and originality of texture allowed him only a limited emotional range of somewhat passive, lethargic, stylistically ‘Oriental,’ moods. On one level, harmony between the house owner and his actions gave way to languor and comfort, but beneath the surface subjected him to stress and drama; an intrinsic conflict between the individualistic, subjective man and the habitat he had created. The carpet was no longer a treasure, but a luxury object and this resulted in economic, aesthetic, psychological and even moral and ethical consequences.”

Soviet officials may have had little use for the Tsarist era's love of carpets, but they did not put an immediate end to the Kustar program. The state continued to support carpet weaving as an export commodity.

However, the support shifted from helping weavers who worked at home, and mostly used patterns traditional to their areas, to funding of manufactories receiving and fulfilling orders on a central-planning basis.

The result was that orders for rug with patterns long identified with one region of the Caucasus were routinely given to weaving centers in other regions with very different local traditions. The weavers made mistakes. And over time the sense of unique origin and local lineages that gave Caucasian rugs a special cachet in the Western market eroded away.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western interest in the region’s weaving has revived. But it is still an open question whether carpet making in the Caucasus -- after so many decades of neglect -- can eventually return to its once famous heights. (For more, read: Can Caucasian Carpets Make A Comeback In The Caucasus?)

(Photos top to bottom: Detail of Shirvan carpet, late 19th C; Lithograph of Mt. Elberus, the highest peak in the Caucasus range; Russian interior, men’s study, 1880s; Mikhail Lermontov, portrait; "Horsemen of the Caucasus" by F.A. Roubaud; Kustar pattern for Derbent rug, 19th C; Russian Pavilion, Paris World’s Fair 1878; Bolshevik poster “You … Have you signed up as a volunteer?”; Intourist travel poster for Caucasus.)

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Medallions, Flowers, And The Origins Of The Classic Persian Carpet Design

TEHRAN, June 22, 2009 -- About the time Ottoman carpets were first becoming popular in the West, a huge revolution in carpet design was beginning in Persia.

The revolution was a shift from carpets with geometric patterns towards carpets with floral motifs instead. And it created what has proven to be the most successful carpet format of all times: the Persian floral medallion carpet.

To envision a floral Persian medallion carpet, all one has to do is close one’s eyes and say the words “Persian carpet.” It is the design that most immediately springs to mind: a central medallion framed by four partial corner medallions on a garden-like field of flower petals, vines, or other tracery.

The reason the design is so familiar is that for hundreds of years now medallion carpets have been the unchallenged best-sellers of the global rug industry. They are woven in Iran, imitated by commercial weavers in half a dozen other countries, and are still the most frequently produced rug style in the world today.

But how did these carpets evolve?

The answer is one of the most fascinating stories in carpet history and takes one back to a period in Iran’s history that most people know little about.

That is the time of huge changes that came with the Turkic and Mongol invasions that began in the 11th century. The empires the nomadic invaders set up after the shock of their conquests were cultural melanges that mixed local art traditions with their own artistic values.

Because the eastern nomads had long lived on the edges of the Chinese world, they brought with them both Chinese influences and more direct access to Chinese textiles, painting, ceramics and other products. And these would have an immense influence on Persian art.

The effects first became clearly visible in Persia with the flourishing of the Timurid Empire, starting in the late 1300s.

The Timurids were the successors to Tamerlane, the Turkic prince who seized power in Samarkand in 1366 and then took over part of the empire carved out some 150 years earlier by Genghis Khan. Their holdings included Persia, western Afghanistan, and much of Central Asia.

This was shortly after the Ottomans’ rise in Anatolia, making the two empires both contemporaries and rivals.

The Timurids’ capital ultimately became Herat, in present-day Afghanistan, and there its court culture flourished.

The rulers attached special importance to miniature painting and it would be new styles developed in that art which would directly set the stage for Persia’s revolution in carpet design.

Timurid life is well recorded in the many miniature paintings that survive to this day. The paintings show a world where rich textiles hang on palace walls and carpets cover the floors.

So, it is possible to know what kind of carpets were made at the time, and what kind of artistic influences eventually changed them, even though no Timurid carpets remain today.

Unfortunately, the Timurid carpets exist only on paper.

Here is a detail of a painting Herat and dated 1429/30 that shows how much Timurid carpets resembled the geometric rugs being woven in the Ottoman Empire at the same time.

Some of patterns shown in Timurid paintings particularly show parallels to the small-pattern Holbein designs from Anatolia that are depicted in Italian Renaissance paintings.

All that probably should not be surprising. There was a shared Turko-Mongol culture behind rugs being woven across the region at the time and certainly rugs were traded back and forth and fashions spilled across borders.

But what is surprising is that the Timurid carpets should be followed by a radical change in carpet design when their Ottoman cousins were not. And the reason seems to be what is going on around the carpets in Timurid miniature art, as in this painting from Herat in 1429. It is a detail from an illustration for a manuscript of Kalileh-o-Dimneh by Abul Ma’ali Nasrollah.:



The carpet's design is abstract, theoretical, and geometrical. But around it are equally graceful, but very lifelike, depictions of people and plants.

This naturalist style became much more pronounced in Timurid painting than in earlier Persian and Mongol miniature art, and its “floral’” style seems to have eventually spilled over into Persian carpets as well.

Art historian Susan Day writes that in the Timurid era “Persian painters, subject to a new wave of Chinese influence, began to depict more naturalistically rendered spring landscapes peopled with animals, birds and mythical beasts enhanced by small individual flowering plants and trees.” (Susan Day, ‘Paradise Gained, Timurid Painting as the Mainspring of Safavid Carpet Design’ in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies Volume V, Part 1, ICOC, 1999)

Just when and how a spillover to carpets happened is not known.

But some Timurid painters are believed to have also designed carpets, including the greatest of all, Kamal ad-din Bihzad in the second half of the 15th century. And certainly Timurid court culture was such that artists in different disciplines were keenly aware of what each other was doing and were often multi-talents, so cross-over would seem natural.

Timur’s grandson, Baysunghur Mirza who reigned as governor of Herat from 1413 to 1433 employed 40 craftsmen in his academy. Half of them specialized in tasks involved in producing manuscripts: calligraphy, painting, illumination, bookbinding and gilding. Other artisans designed tiles, marquetry and tents.

Timurid tile work also shows a fascination with more fluid, lifelike forms. Faience mosaic, or ‘tile mosaic,’ became the signature mark of Timurid architecture along with patterned brickwork. Huge surfaces were decorated with glazed tile work like this which survives on the Friday Mosque in Yazd, Iran.

Beyond the Timurid lands, rival courts in many other places were equally huge patrons of the arts, and they too may have contributed to the floral revolution in carpet design.

One great center was Tabriz. In the late 1400s, it was the capital of the “White Sheep Turkomans,” the Ak-Koyunlu, whose court astonished a Venetian ambassador with its brilliance. Giosofat Barbaro noted in his official report the beauty of the carpets he saw when he visited in the 1470s but, unfortunately, he gave no details about them.

Here is what Barbaro says about the carpets he saw at one court ceremony. The quote is from a translation of his travelogue that appeared in English in the 16th century:

“The day following I prepaired to him [the king] into a great feelde within the towne, wheare wheate had been sowen, the grass whereof was mowed to make place for the tryomphe and the owners of the grounde satisfied for it. In this place were many pavilions pight [erected], and as sone as he pceauned [perceived] me he comaunded certin of his to go with me, and to shew me those pavilions, being in nombre about [one hundred], of the which I pused [perused] [forty] of the fairest. They all had their chambres whinfoothe [interior rooms], and the roofes all cutt of divers colors, the grounde being covered with the most beautiful carpetts, betwene which carpetts and those of Cairo and Burse [Bursa] there is as much difference as betweene the clothes made of [fine] Englishe woolles and those of Saint Matthewes [cheap and low quality woolens sold at the San Matteo market in Florence].”

The Tabriz region had earlier been part of the Mongols’ powerful Il-Khanate – the most westerly division of Genghis Khan’s vast empire – and had a cultural heritage very much like that of the Timurids.

Here is a miniature painting believed to show the Ak Koyunlu ruler Ya'qub Bey (1478 to 1490) with his court sitting on a carpet that is again similar to a small-pattern Holbein but again also is set against a heavily Chinese-influenced floral landscape.

Overall, it was a time of great artistic competition across the Turkic-Mongol world as rulers maintained academies of artists, competed with each other to attract the best talents and even captured artisans in their military campaigns and took them to their capitals.

The pre-eminent miniaturist Bihzad, for example, eventually joined the court of the Safavids, the next great empire to arise in Persia after the collapse of the Timurids around 1500. And it is from the Safavid period that we have the first surviving Persian floral carpets.

As this picture shows, Safavid textiles in general could look almost as naturalist as miniature paintings themselves. This is a detail from a silk fabric showing horsemen and animals among flowers and trees.

But the move to floral carpets was not the only way carpets and carpet making changed during the Timurid times.

As Day notes, “the second half of the 15th century also corresponded to a revolution in carpet manufacture. The first large format carpets made on wide looms date from this time.”

So does the use of silk and the weaving of more intricate carpets executed from cartoons created by court artists, she says.

At some point in the middle of this ferment the elements came together that would define Persian carpets once and for all: the fusion of floral design with a central medallion.

Just where the central medallion design originated is impossible to know.

Many rug scholars point out that the format of a central medallion framed by quarter medallion corner pieces is simply a detailed excerpt or blowup of a staggered allover medallion pattern. Thus it is something that weavers may have played with in some form or another from time immemorial.

Day discovers an example of its use as a central motif (but without the corner medallions) on this carpet in a miniature from 1445 or 1446. It is an illustration for Nizami’s Khamseh and painted by Khwaja Ali al-Tabrizi.

But she says central medallions can be traced back as a decorative device to long before that.

Throughout the Islamic world, centralized circular medallions set off by corner quadrants are one of the oldest motifs used to embellish bookcovers.

In textile design, medallions can be found in Persia as far back as the Sassanid period, where they appear as decorative roundels. The Sassanid Empire preceded the conquest of Iran by Arab Muslims in 651.

And, looking still farther back, rug book author Jon Thompson suggests that “the theme of the central medallion is an old one with ancient religious and metaphysical roots in the art of central Asia. Its ultimate origin is probably in the Far East.” (Jon Thompson, ‘Oriental Carpets: From the Tents, Cottages, and Workshops of Asia,’ 1983.)

Placed on a floral field, the central medallion format would not just revolutionize Persian carpet design. Its attractive power would prove so great that the floral revolution behind it would soon also spread to the Ottoman Empire, changing the look of Turkish carpets, too. But how that happened is another story.

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Related Links:

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The Timurid Empire – University of Calgary

Art Arena: The Timurids

Weaving Art Museum: Masterpiece Persian Carpets

Nazmiyal Collection: Timurid Dynasty Carpets and Rugs

Bihzad and Persian Miniatures

A Brief History of Persian Miniature Painting

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