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

The Circassians: Myths, Truths, And Oriental Carpets

LONDON, October 2, 2009 – When Europeans discovered Caucasian rugs in the 19th century, they often assumed they were woven by a once-famous people who today are barely remembered.

Those people are the Circassians. At the time, their domain was the Northwest Caucasus along the Black Sea (in modern Russia) and for a number of reasons they captivated the West’s imagination.

And so, even though the Circassians were not great rug weavers themselves, many rugs woven by other peoples in the Caucasus were attributed to them.

Rug experts Murray L. Eiland, Jr and Murray Eiland III write in their book ‘Oriental Carpets’ (2005) that “much has been written in old rug books” about the Tcherkess, the Turkish term for the Circassians.

“During the early 20th C, it was common to label many Kazak or Karabagh rugs as Tcherkess work, and even now one will occasionally run across a “sunburst” Karabagh with that label. However, the Tcherkess are not from the area that produced Kazak and Karabagh carpets, although they have been associated with the production of several types of kilim.”

What was it about the Circassians that once made them so much a part of Europe’s image of the Caucasus? And why are they almost totally forgotten today?

The story begins far back in history, probably with the Circassian’s own reputation as fierce warriors. In times gone by, there was much money to be made marketing able fighters to imperial armies and the Circassians developed an internationally famous brand-name.

Circassian and other youths from the Black Sea region and Central Asia were both purchased and recruited by Arab rulers as “Mamlukes,” or slave-troops. When the Mamlukes later usurped Egypt and Syria for themselves, several of their sultans were Circassians. The Circassian sultans, who reigned from 1422 to 1517, presided over the Mamluke empire during one of its highest points of power and artistic achievement.

Hundreds of years later, the Circassians continued to find ready employment as fighters in the Ottoman and Persian empires and their brand-name remained as strong as ever. It was powerful enough to attract the attention of Orientalist painters, who fanned out from Europe in the 19th century to rediscover the East both as it was and as the West imagined it to be.

One of those painters was William Allan, born in 1782, who apprenticed as a carriage painter but later studied fine arts at the Royal Academy of Edinburgh. Initially unsuccessful in the art world of London, he opted for travel instead. And for nine years, he journeyed deep into the Russian and Turkish empires.

He sketched what he saw and after he returned painted scenes such as these. It is titled “Circassian Chief Preparing his Stallion,” painted much later in the painter’s life, in 1843.

There is no doubt that Allan painted what he saw – his own collections of artifacts that he picked up during his travels attested to that.

And there is no doubt he was particularly passionate about the Circassians and their remote, mountainous homeland.

When, after his return to London in 1814, the London art world continued to reject him, he told friends he would retire to Circassia forever.

At times, Allan donned Circassian armor himself. Here he is in Circassian costume in 1815, shortly after returning from his travels.

Eventually, Allan’s friends persuaded him to give up Orientalism and focus on painting scenes from Scottish and English literature and history instead. He illustrated scenes from the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the creator of Ivanhoe. And, in the end, he was knighted, as Sir William Allan, before he died in 1850.

But if Allen had little success with his paintings of Circassians – he also painted works like “The Sale of Circassian Captives to a Turkish Bashaw (Pasha)” in 1816 -- others had more. And that success came as European artists traveling in the East portrayed Circassians in a quite different role: this time as women in Turkish harems.

The new fascination was with Circassians -- who are fair-skinned – as white sex slaves and concubines kept by Eastern masters.

This painting featuring likely Circassian women is “Choosing the Favorite,” by Giulio Rosati (1858 to 1917).

The fascination was frankly erotic and commercial and it connected with images that dated back in Europe to at least as far as Voltaire, a century earlier.

Here is what Voltaire wrote about Circassian women in 1734, in his “Letters on the English:”

"The Circassians are poor, and their daughters are beautiful, and indeed it is in them they chiefly trade. They furnish with those beauties the seraglios of the Turkish Sultan, of the Persian Sophy, and of all of those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious merchandise. These maidens are very honorably and virtuously instructed how to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed."

The idea of female Circassian beauty got a further boost in the early 19th century as early European physiologists and anthropologists took on the task of classifying humans.

The most influential was the German Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752 to1840), who taught comparative anatomy at the University of Göttingen. He used the school’s collection of skulls from around the world to divide the human species into races.

Blumenbach came up with five races and had to designate names for them. He chose the word “Caucasian” to denominate the white race, apparently with the view that the region’s inhabitants were uncommonly attractive and thus were archetypes for his grouping. The world Caucasian later passed into English as a synonym for white.

All this helped to create a brand-name for Circassian women as beauties that became easily as well-known as the earlier brand-name for Circassian men as warriors.

One result in England was several beauty and health products purporting to be from Circassia. Here is an advertisement for "Circassian hair dye" in the 1840s which promises “a rich dark lustrous effect.”

What the Circassians themselves thought of their market image in Europe is not recorded. And that may be because, throughout this period, they were busy fighting for their lives in the northwest Caucasus.

The threat was the Russian Empire’s moving south in the 18th and 19th centuries. In much of the Caucasus, Moscow’s aim was limited to sovereignty over the region. But in the northwest Caucasus, along the Black Sea, the drive for land came from Russian settlers, creating a situation not unlike that of the American West.

The Circassians fought against Russian conquest for over a century, from 1763 to 1864 – longer than any other people of the Caucasus. But the end was inevitable. Their final defeat in the 1860s led to massacre and forced deportation, mainly across the Black Sea to Turkey, during which a large proportion of them perished.

Here is a photo of a Circassian fighter in the Russian-Circassian wars by an unknown artist.

One Circassian leader described his people’s defeat this way in a conversation with the English writer, Frederick Burnaby (1842 - 1885), who traveled through Turkey around the time:

"We once thought that England was going to help us to drive the Russians out of our country. However, you did not come; they outnumbered us, and they had artillery opposed to our flint guns. What could we do? We resisted as long as possible, and then, sooner than be slaves, came here."

Burnaby describes the speaker, Osman Bey, as “the chief of a large band which had emigrated from the Caucasus a few years previous. He was dressed in the Circassian style, with a sheepskin coat, tightly buckled round his waist, embroidered leather trousers and high boots; a black Astrakhan cap surmounted his bronzed features.”

This final view of the Circassians, which appears in Burnaby’s book “On Horseback through Asia Minor,” was not as fascinating as the previous images of them had been. With time, the Circassians slipped out of the West’s memory.

Today, only a few hundred thousand Circassians remain in the Caucasus while the majority are scattered over the globe, particularly through Anatolia and the Levant.

For decades, carpet books were one of the last refuges where memories of the Circassians remained alive. The mention of them is still there, but now only to correct the record on Caucasian weavers.

(Photos from top to bottom: “Veiled Circassian Beauty,” by Jean-Leon Jerome, 1876; “Conference of Circassian Princes, G. Gagarin, 1839-40; “Circassian Chief Preparing his Stallion,” William Allan, 1843; William Allan in Circassian costume, 1815; Choosing the Favorite,” Giulio Rosati, 19th C; Portrait of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach; Advertisement “Circassian Hair Dye,” 19th C; “Circassian Fighter” 19th C.)

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A Room With No View: How Wall-To-Wall Carpeting Took The Place Of Oriental Rugs

WASHINGTON, October 10, 2008 -- One of the many things that makes rugs such a fascinating hobby is comparing the ways our ancestors regarded them with how we do.

It is well known, for example, that the late 19th century marked the peak of Western interest in oriental carpets. No other period comes close to it in viewing Eastern rugs as an integral part of Western interiors.

Just how much they were prized by our great-grandparents can be seen in a picture such as this. Titled 'Divan,' it is by the Croat artist Vlaho Bukovac in 1905 but could have been painted anywhere in America or Europe at the time.

By contrast, just about no-one would think of making such a picture today.

But why were people a century and-a-half ago such huge lovers of carpets? There are many answers to consider, including one that is as often overlooked as it is simple: the dreadful condition of their floors.

The story is told by Randall L. Patton of Kennesaw State University (U.S. state of Georgia) in a study entitled 'A History of the U.S. Carpet Industry.' He explains how American companies became hugely successful by developing inexpensive wall-to-wall carpeting to solve the country's flooring problems. And, along the way, the tale explains much about how oriental carpets were driven from Western homes.

To follow the argument, one has to remember that many of our ideas today about 19th century homes come from visiting manors that have been turned into museums. In these great houses, the floors are of hardwood that is as carefully laid down as a mosaic and as highly polished as the furniture.

But, in fact, most 19th century homes had floors that were hastily cobbled together by the builders from softwood boards of random sizes. The builders neither stained nor varnished these arrays of panels and they left the homeowners the task of figuring out what to do with them.

So how did people cope with such floors? One way was to leave them bare but "whiten them" by scrubbing them with a stiff brush and sand. Or they could be bleached with lye.

Still another possibility was to paint the flooring to resemble a carpet. That option took many forms that are detailed in wonderful detail on a blogsite named 'Victorian Interiors and More.' The subtitle of the blog is "Victorian life wasn't quite what you may have thought it was."

The site offers this description of using a stencil to paint a floor, as quoted from an 1859 short story that appeared in 'Godey's' magazine:

“Tomorrow, you must drive down to Dayton, Albert, purchase some pearl-colored paint, enough to put two coats on the floor, and some green, enough for a border. Take a sheet of tin, mark three large leaves in a group upon it, and take it to the tinman. Tell him to cut out the leaves like a stencil letter; you can, by putting it down and painting over it, make a handsome border of green leaves for your carpet.”

Beyond painting the floors directly, one could put down painted coverings. A cheap way to do that was to glue newspapers to the floor and paint and shellac them.

Another, more expensive, option was to put down a painted floor cloth. As the Victorian-expert website notes, "generally they were placed in hallways and parlors." In kitchens or any room where water was likely to be spilled, oilcloth was the better choice.

And then, of course, there was matting - the most often used floor covering of all. Inexpensive mats were woven from coconut fiber, straw, and corn husks, while expensive ones were made from wool.

As time went by, and the industrial age brought more wealth to the middle class, all these homemade solutions began to give way to what people really wanted: large and attractive woven carpets.

It was not an indulgence. As one observer at the time noted: "the general use of carpets was a necessity some few years ago from the fact that the floors of our houses were generally built of such poor material, and in such a shiftless manner, that the floor was too unsightly to be left exposed." That is Horace Greeley, writing in his 1872 book 'Great Industries of the United States.'

Carpet manufacturers -- domestic and foreign, hand loom and power loom -- fought hard to satisfy the demand for large rugs. The battle continued on a grand scale until the progressive introduction of hardwood floors through the century finally reduced the demand for wall-to-wall sized carpets and increased interest in smaller accent rugs.

Through these decades from the second half of the 19th century to the early 20th century, the most desired carpets of all were handwoven oriental ones. Their widespread appeal was heightened by their historical association with the rich and by the fad of "Orientalism" that accompanied the expanding colonial age.

Plus, they got a boost from the World Expositions like those in Paris and Chicago, which helped to familiarize millions of people with the artistic traditions of the Islamic world, China, and Japan and popularized them.

But it was also during this period that power loomed carpets began their steady progress into American homes, a progress that would eventually push out every competitor.

In his history of the U.S. carpet industry, Patton notes that by 1870 power loom technology had been refined sufficiently to produce "reasonable substitutes for higher quality hand loom woven goods." The American machine carpet makers published lavish catalogs, advertised directly to consumers, and sales ballooned to roughly 80 million square meters by 1923.

Then came the Great Depression and a fall-off in business of all kinds. But out the ashes emerged a far more formidable power loom industry. First, based in the northeastern United States and using wool, it struggled just to regain the heights of the turn-of-the-century. But in the 1950s, the industry relocated to the area around Dalton, Georgia, switched to cotton, and discovered a magic formula.

That formula was "tufting" a technique traditionally used by local women to produce bedspreads. The technique is to insert tufts of cotton yarn into a pre-woven grid of backing material and then boil the backing to shrink it and lock in the tufts.

Once mechanized, the tufting process reduced the cost of making carpets by half compared to weaving and opened the way for wall-to-wall carpeting to sweep the market. The tufting industry later overcame some final objections that its cotton carpets were less durable than woven wool ones by switching to synthetic fibers and then no more obstacles remained.

Patton says that by 1990 Americans were consuming over 12 square meters of carpet per family per year, compared to about 2 square meters in the early 1950s. "Tufted carpets achieved total dominance of not just the residential carpet market," he notes, "but the residential flooring market in general."

The omnipresence of tufted carpeting in American homes and businesses today has not entirely forced woven carpets -- power loomed or hand loomed -- from the scene. As the author notes, high-end consumers do still appreciate the special qualities of wool and woven carpets continue to dominate specialty commercial markets such as hotel lobbies.

But the triumph of cheap wall-to-wall carpeting does mean that many American housing contractors now simply lay down carpeting rather than hardwood floors as the first and least expensive choice. And that, ironically, creates a situation not so different from the one faced by our great-grandparents.

That is, when your flooring is highly affordable but monotonous, how do you liven it up?

For the past many years, that question has been waived as homeowners have continued to welcome wall-to-wall carpets in white and other single tones. The carpeting, just like white walls, complements today's minimalist interior designs and poses no color problems when choosing the rest of the furnishings.

Still, nothing remains the same and history has a way of repeating itself. Today, people argue over whether it is good taste to add an oriental accent rug to an already machine-carpeted room. Tomorrow, it may become the first thing they rush to do.

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Related Links:

Randall L. Patton, A History of the U.S. Carpet Industry

Victorian Interiors and More

History of Carpet Tufting

Victoriana Magazine

World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893