Oriental Carpets And The Legacy Of The Silk Roads

SAMARKAND, February 14, 2010 -- The Silk Roads, those great trading highways of the ancient world, had a huge influence upon carpets.

So much so, that discovering carpets and carpet culture inevitably leads to discovering the unique world that the Silk Roads created.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the map of the Silk Roads corresponds almost exactly to the map of today’s carpet belt, the countries with a long and still living tradition of producing oriental rugs.

The main trading networks of the Silk Roads stretched across western China (today’s Xinjiang province) to Central Asia, where they either turned south to India or continued straight ahead to Persia, Anatolia, and the Mideast.

At the shores of the Mediterranean they stopped, but boats extended the trade to many ports of southern Europe as well.

What held the Silk Roads together, from time immemorial until they were bypassed by trans-oceanic trade beginning in the 15th century?

The obvious, but incomplete answer, is commerce. And for the markets at the poles of the trade, as in eastern China, southeast Asia, or Europe, that was probably the sole stake.

Eastern China, for example, was throughout most of the history of the Silk Roads the world’s greatest export economy. It produced enormous quantities of ceramics and silk and its export business, organized by independent traders, was a major source of tax revenue for the court.

But where these exports items were headed as they moved in vast camel trains across the empire’s western horizon was of little interest to most Chinese.

Just how much so can be judged from an epic poem written in China in the 3rd century BC. This was about the same time Alexander the Great was firmly linking the West to the Silk Road by expanding his empire to Central Asia.

The poem is “18 Songs of the Nomad’s Flute” and it tells the story of a Han princess who was forcibly abducted by Turkic-Mongol Hsiung-nu (or Xiongnu) nomads and taken north beyond the Great Wall.

Lady Wenji, who was also the daughter of one of the most famous Confucian scholars of the time, was forced to marry one of the nomad chiefs and remained among the barbarians for 12 years.

But she appears to have found nothing of value among them even as she has two sons with her husband and wonders “how could I have become bound to my enemy in love and trust?”

When finally an embassy comes from China to offer ransom for her release, there is no question which choice she will make. She returns to civilization even at the cost of parting from her children and suffering the eternal melancholy the songs describe.

The pictures above are from illustrations for “18 Songs” painted sometime in the 13th century.

But if Lady Wenji’s story became a pillar of Chinese classical literature, the image it gives of the barbarians beyond the Great Wall was only half true. In fact, the nomads and the Chinese were bound together not just as enemies but also as trading partners.

The trade relations between the nomads and China is well explained by Stewart Gordon in his 2008 book “When Asia Was the World,” which describes Asia in the millennium from 500 to 1500 AD.

The nomads, he notes, raised horses that were in constant demand by the Chinese elite and the army and they raised cattle that was essential for sedentary agriculture.

The picture here is of a young Chinese nobleman on horseback, around 1290.

In exchange, the nomads bought the grain and silk produced by China. They also bought iron for horse trappings, elegant cloth for courtly robes, and steel for weapons.

As a result of the trade, the semi-nomadic chiefs not only wore robes of Chinese silk, modeled their own elite life on that of China’s rulers and imported rice as a high-status food, they also adopted many Chinese artistic techniques, including painting, for their court culture.

This porcelain depicting a “Westerner,” or nomad, on a camel is from China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Similar ties between steppe peoples and their sedentary neighbors repeated across Eurasia – from the frontiers of India, and Persia, to the Arabian peninsula. The symbiotic relationships laid the basis for a stable cross-continental trading network that served everybody’s interest.

Over time, the Silk Roads transported goods of almost every conceivable type, from silk to spices to new plant dyes to medicines to industrial products. The industrial products not only included Chinese ceramics but Damascus steel and blown glass from China, India and Persia – the world’s three great glass-making centers in 1,000 AD.

That was at a time when, as Gordon notes, “glass-making had been entirely lost in Europe for centuries and would not be recovered for more than two centuries.”

But if commerce was the raison d’etre of the Silk Roads as far as most people in the manufacturing centers were concerned, it was the cultural exchanges that ultimately became the most important dividend for the people along the Silk Roads themselves.

Over the centuries, these exchanges were so great they created a shared Silk Roads culture that can still be seen in much of the weaving and other art of the region today.

In tracing the history of Asia from 500 to 1500, Gordon describes the cultural exchanges as taking place in two great successive waves: first Buddhist and, then, Islamic.

Both religions were “universalizing,” coming from outside and spreading across huge areas of the Silk Road network by recruiting on a basis of personal commitment rather than ethnicity or region.

At the same time, both religions encouraged people to travel for spiritual development and encouraged rulers to build rest-houses, pilgrimage sites, and colleges (monasteries or madrassas) to facilitate their quest.

Shown here is the complex of three madrassas on Registan Square in the center of Samarkand. The oldest (Ulugbeg Madrassa) dates to the 15th century, the newest to the 17th.

Thanks to these shared religious networks, ideas and artistic styles traveled as easily along the Silk Roads as commercial goods did between bazaars.

Gordon notes that by the Islamic period a man trained in Shari’a law in one state could find employment as an administrator in another.

And court painters “corresponded, viewed each others' work, and moved to find patronage across a network that stretched from Spain to southern India.”

As an example of court painting, here is a book illustration by the most famous court miniaturist, Kamal ud-Din Behzad (or Bihzad), who died in Tabriz in 1535. It clearly shows the influence of Chinese landscape painting in the background.

The evolution of much of the Silk Road region -- think today’s ‘carpet belt’ -- into a shared cultural space was hastened by two other factors: migrations and conquests.

The world being what it is, the increasing riches of cities along the trade routes both gave rise to empires and tempted conquerors from afar.

Just a few of the results were the Seljuk Turk empire extending from Central Asia to Anatolia; Genghis Khan’s empire covering most of Eurasia; and the Timurid empire stretching from Persia to Central Asia to northern India.

These vast empires united very diverse areas which ordinarily were isolated by geography. As Gordon notes, Genghis Khan ruled both steppes and large areas of agricultural China. The Mughals ruled both sides of the Himalayas.

If the shared culture of the Silk Road world could be given a single name, it would be this improbable sounding string of hyphens: Turkic-Mongol-Persian.

But the fusion was real, powerful, and long-lasting. And it helps explain much about what otherwise would be inexplicable in carpet history.

Just one example is the cosmopolitan style of the classical Persian court carpets of the 16th century. In them, Chinese-style cloudbands mix with Islamic calligraphy and Persian legends. All of them together is the legacy of the Silk Roads.

(The term “Silk Road” is a recent, elegant name for a network that needed no name in its own day. The term was coined in 1870 by German geographer Ferdinand van Richthofen, the uncle of the Red Baron.)

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Related Links:

Silk Road and China Trade


Wikipedia: Silk Road

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