Safavid Floral and Polonaise Carpets: When Persian Rugs Came To Europe

AMSTERDAM, August 7, 2010 – Sometime before the end of the 16th century, Persian carpets – with their signature floral designs -- burst into European interiors.

It was a dramatic entrance and European artists recorded it.

For centuries, they had painted portraits of wealthy families with geometric Anatolian carpets. Now, they began to depict families with Persian carpets instead.

Above is a painting of the children of English King Charles I by Anthony Van Dyck in 1637.

The change of taste was no accident.

This was a time when European seafarers had finally established routine connections with Persia, India, and China.

It was a time, too, when the Safavid Empire was actively promoting the production of luxury export goods, including silk textiles and carpets.

The two sides came together in places like the port of Hormuz, held by the Portuguese and also used by Dutch traders.

So, it is in paintings of wealthy Portugese, Dutch, and Spanish homes by artists such as Velásquez, Rubens, and Vermeer that the newly arriving Persian carpets most often appear.

The Persian floral carpets often had medallions. But many were also of a new type developed in Persia at this time. They were carpets whose whole field was covered with floral and vine patterns with no medallions at all.

Perhaps the most appealing of these were the so-called Vase Carpets, whose flowers were arranged in either real or imaginary vases. Here is one example.

The full-field floral carpets were a huge success in Europe and, like floral medallion carpets, continue to be one of the most popular formats for Persian rugs today.

At the same time, the new design was exported to Mughal India, where it inspired a whole range of similar full-field styles – dubbed Indo-Persian – that were shipped in large quantities to Europe.

Just how successful an innovation the Safavid vase carpets were can be judged by the value modern collectors attach to them.

This year, a vase carpet – with imaginary vases – sold for just short of $ 10 million dollars, the most money every paid for a rug sold at an auction.

Here is a picture of the carpet. (See: $ 10 Million Persian Carpet Sets New Auction Record.)

The vase carpets were woven in Kirman, whose weavers were particularly innovative during the Safavid era. They developed a special loom setting that gave a wavy finish to the surface of such carpets, adding to the appeal.

European travelers to Persia at this time often remarked on the system of court workshops in cities like Kirman, Isfahan, and Kashan which produced luxury rugs.

Their production reached a zenith under Shah Abbas I (reigned 1587-1629), who was famous for his interest in the arts. Like the earlier Shah Tahmasp, he is believed to have enjoyed designing some carpet motifs himself.

This picture of Shah Abbas is from a ceiling fresco that decorates one of the pavilions in his palace complex in Isfahan.

The royal workshops produced carpets for the palace and mosques as well as gifts for neighboring monarchs and foreign dignitaries.

Some of those gifts, such as a medallion carpet sent to the Doge of Venice, survive in museums today.

So do other priceless carpets that appear to have been commissioned especially from Persian workshops at this time by some European families.

The most famous of the commissioned rugs are the so-called "Polonaise" carpets, such as this one in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It is a floral carpet with an overlying pattern of compartments formed by overlapping cartouches. The pile is silk, highlighted with gold and silver brocading, all in muted colors.

The carpets were termed Polonaise by 19th century carpet collectors because their origin in Isfahan was forgotten over the centuries.

When, in 1878, a carpet similar to this one was exhibited in Paris, it was widely assumed that the coats of arms woven into the rug were Polish and that the rug was made in Poland.

E. J. Brill's First Encyclopedia of Islam (published 1913 – 1936) notes that the carpets were "erroneously connected with an 18th century workshop in Scucz where brocaded girdles in Persian style were made."

That error may be more understandable than it at first seems.

One reason is that the design of the carpets shows a certain adaption to European tastes – something not everyone would expect of an early 17th century Persian weaving.

But it is interesting to know that as early as 1601 Sigismund of Poland is documented to have ordered such a carpet. And that suggests Persian producers and European customers may have come to know each others' tastes from very early on.

The finely-knotted silk carpets woven in the time of Shah Abbas are rarely represented in European paintings, because – unlike the floral carpets that often made their way into interior scenes - they were doubtless very unusual in European homes.

But at least one painting does exist that shows the kind of ultimate Persian carpet a wealthy merchant family could hope to acquire.

The picture is A Lady playing the Theorbo by Gerard Terborch, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The silk carpet is spread over the table on which the lady's cavalier is sitting.

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The World's Most Famous Museum Carpet: The Ardabil

LONDON; July 17, 2010 – The world's museums are full of splendid carpets but the most famous of all is the Ardabil.

One big reason is simply its size: 38 feet long (11.5 meters) by 18 feet wide (5.5 meters).

That is so large that the curators of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London had to make a choice.

They could either keep it on permanent display or not display it at all, because it would be far too much work to just bring it out occasionally.

So, the V&A built a special gallery for it where it is spread in its full glory across the floor and is protected by a glass box.

The Arbabil draws huge numbers of visitors every year and that brings us to the second reason for its fame.

It has a stunning floral medallion design whose center seems to radiate like a sun, transforming the world around it into a sacred-feeling space.

There are very few people who do not feel its power.

On the carpet is an inscription which reads:

I have no refuge in the world other than thy threshold.

There is no protection for my head other than this door.

The strength of the carpet is no accident.

It is one of a pair of matching rugs woven around 1539-50 for a shrine to the spiritual father of Persia's Safavid Empire. It was intended to be, and is, a symbol of power, respect, and holiness on an imperial scale.

How the Ardabil survived almost 500 years and finally came to a London museum is a fascinating story in itself.

But telling it means first describing the origins of the Safavid Empire and the man whose shrine it was made for.

The shrine, in the northwestern city of Ardabil, not far from Tabriz, honors Shaykh Safi al-Din, who died in 1334.

The Shaykh was a plain-living Sufi mystic who inspired a large following at a time when Tabriz was the center of a powerful Turkic state.

His followers remained loyal to his family after his death and the movement grew until, 150 years later, one of its leaders was strong enough to launch a revolution.

That leader was Shah Isma'il, who seized Tabriz in 1501 and, within a decade, all of Persia.

He and his followers, known as Qizilbash (Redheads) for their distinctive turbans with a tall and slender red cone, were messianic warriors who made their brand of Islam, which by now had become mainstream Shi'ism, their empire's state religion.

Ismail and his warriors were Turkmen and spoke a Turkic dialect close to today's Azerbaijani.

But they also were fluent in Persian, the empire's administrative language, making them acceptable to much of the landed gentry.

They dubbed their empire the Safavid – after Shaykh Safi – and it lasted until 1722.

The Safavids inherited the court workshops of Tabriz, Herat, and other leading cities from Persia's previous dynasties and soon began creating their own royal masterpieces.

The design of the Ardabil carpet, woven under Ismail's son, Shah Tahmasp, shows many of the artistic trends already evident in the earlier Timurid era.

Most striking are the resemblance of its medallion design to the format of contemporaneous book covers and the resemblance of its floral pattern to floral designs in miniature paintings.

Here is a miniature painting by one of the most famous artists of Shah Tahmasp's time, Mirza Ali.

It depicts the musician Barbad who hid in the branches of a tree to audition for one of Persia's legendary early shahs after he had been barred from the court by the ruler's jealous leading singer.

The artist has given the figures from ancient times the distinctive Qizilbash turbans of the Safavid court.

Many art historians believe that some miniature paintings not only inspired carpet designs but that some illuminators may also have directly designed carpet patterns.

That is because leading court artists freely crossed between artistic disciplines to help create or influence a unified "court style" identified with a particular monarch.

According to E. J. Brill's comprehensive First Encyclopedia of Islam (published 1913 – 1936), "under Shah Tahmasp excellent painters were employed to sketch carpet cartoons and they introduced human figures and genies into the designs, especially of the large hunting carpets." (see Portable Paradises: The World Of Safavid Garden Carpets)

Interestingly, Shah Tahmasp himself was an accomplished amateur artist who is often said to have designed carpets. He was trained, like many Persian nobles in "the arts of the book," including calligraphy and illustration, and kept a retinue of artists around him.

The twin Ardabil carpets were woven, most likely in Tabriz, when Shah Tahmasp undertook the expansion of the shrine in the late 1530s.

The goal was to expand it as a place of pilgrimage but also, some historians believe, to provide a burial chamber for Tahmasp himself.

Here is a diagram of the floor plan of the Ardabil shrine showing the two carpets' placement.

In fact, Tahmasp was not buried at the shrine, but the idea of creating a mausoleum might help account for the inscription which appears on both carpets.

The inscription (quoted above) is a couplet by the fourteenth-century lyric poet Hafiz. Under it appears the name of the master artist who apparently oversaw the massive weaving project, Maqsud of Kashan.

But how did one of the splendid Ardabil carpets come to rest in a London museum?

In fact, both of them arrived in England around 1893 virtually in tatters. For centuries they had withstood heavy wear in the shrine but as Persia's fortunes rose and fell both they and the shrine were badly neglected.

Carpet historians believe – though no documents prove it -- that both pieces were sold around 1890 to the English carpet producer Ziegler & Co., which had workshops in the northwestern Iranian city of Sultanabad.

The shrine's curators are presumed to have sold the carpets to pay for repairs to the building after it suffered heavy earthquake damage

A British carpet broker then acquired both pieces and used parts of one to repair the other. The result was one 'complete' carpet and one incomplete.

The complete carpet came to the attention of the V&A. There, William Morris, the pioneer of the British Arts and Crafts Movement and one of the V&A's Art Referees, pressed hard for the museum to buy it.

The V&A did so partly by using a public subscription to raise the then vast sum of £2,000.

The existence of its incomplete twin was kept secret by a succession of private owners for many years. It was only revealed publicly in 1931 at an exposition in London.

The "secret" carpet – smaller than the V&A's and borderless – eventually passed into the hands of American industrialist J. Paul Getty and from there to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

It too, is a marvel but due to the ironies of fate, must live forever in the shadow of its better-known twin.

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Portable Paradises: The World Of Safavid Garden Carpets

TABRIZ, July 3, 2010 – There are few things more appealing than a portable paradise.

So appealing, in fact, that in the early decades of the Safavid dynasty in Persia, portable paradises were not only created, they were taken to the highest level of royal art.

The paradises were lush gardens full of trees and animals and they were portable because they were carpets.

They could be rolled out at will in a noble's tent as he campaigned in dry and parched landscapes and instantly the setting would be transformed into a dreamscape of the highest refinement.

The Safavid paradise carpets contained forests of cypress trees and flowering trees teeming with leopards, lions, deer, peacocks, and flying birds. There were fantastic creatures as well, including Chinese phoenixes and sometimes houris.

Some of the carpets were with medallions and some without. When there was a medallion, it might be transformed into a pool with ducks floating on its surface.

How appealing the gardens were can be easily seen in the picture of one of them above. It is a part of a carpet that today exists in two halves, one in a Paris museum and one in Cracow.

Exactly why so much attention and expense was lavished upon garden carpets at this moment in Persia's long history is unknown. But the answer may be in the fact that the times were tumultuous and the first Safavid Shahs, who were still consolidating their empire, had to spend much of their lives in the field.

Here is a photo of a now lost fragment of another Persian carpet which once belonged to Hungarian tycoon Baron Hatvany. It was lost in the turmoil of the 1930s.

The central medallion of the carpet fragment depicts the encampment of a shah on a military campaign or hunting party. The garden around it is fanciful but the details of the royal pavilion are true to life.

Venetian traveler Michele Membré described the encampment of the second Safavid Shah – Shah Tahmasp - in his account 'Mission to the Lord Sophy of Persia (1539–1542).' He describes a ruler who spent so much of his time campaigning that it was his camp, not the capital city, that was the focus of royal life:

“The tents which Shah Tahmasp had in his company were many, according to what I was able to count with my own eyes he seemed to have 5,000. Of horsemen, as it seemed to me, he had 14,000 in number, without counting servants. Of horses and mules he had so many that they could not be counted. All the plains were full of animals.”

He goes on to say that the royal tents or pavilions were “made of sticks of gilded wood in the form of a dome and covered with scarlet. Upon the cloth is foliae, cut out and sewn with silk. Within, on the ground there was a red felt, lined with a kind of wool canvas, and over the said felt there were very fine carpets of silk, on which appeared figures of many animals and foliage.”

The complex of royal pavilions included an audience chamber -- or divan -- a bath, sleeping quarters and not far away a tent for the miniature painters who were part of the Shah's retinue. The presence of the painters allowed the Shah, who was an amateur painter himself, both to enjoy painting as a pastime and to receive reports on the progress of the royal illuminated manuscripts he commissioned.

In other words, this was a time not only of portable paradise carpets, but of portable court life in toto. The miniature painters whose company the Shah enjoyed produced what was the most valued art of all: illustrated books of poetry or tales of past kings. The books, too, were a moveable feast for the eyes.

Here is a miniature painting showing precisely the sort of royal encampment seen in the medallion of the garden carpet and described by the Venetian traveler. The painting is part of Shah Tahmasp's Shahnameh, the book he commissioned to illustrate the poet Firdawsi's epic saga of Persia's kings. It was painted circa 1525.

It is interesting to note that the first two Safavid shahs – Shah Ismail and his son Shah Tahmasp – were so busy campaigning that they, in fact, largely neglected their official capitals.

Art historian Sussan Babaie describes how much so in the book "Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Safavid Iran 1501-1576" that accompanied a major exhibition of early Safavid art in New York in 2003/2004.

She writes that “in the historiography of late medieval and early modern Persianate architecture, the 16th century appears to be an anomaly. No single building from the period, for example, could remotely compete with the monumental achievements in the arts of the book (the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp) or of weaving (the Ardebil carpet).”

One reason why both Shahs may have neglected their capital Tabriz was that it was on the frontline of their continual struggles with the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottomans captured and looted the city several times, so making investments in the usual fixed forms of royal art – large monumental buildings – was decidedly risky. Tahmasp finally moved the capital to the safer city of Qazvin but remained more interested in the portable arts than in architecture.

At the same time, both of the earliest Safavid shahs may have preferred the relative privacy of portable art for both religious and political reasons.

Babaie notes "the war-ravaged state of affairs in the newly minted empire and the messianic zeal of the young Ismail whose dream of establishing a divinely inspired utopian empire on earth precluded public displays of wealth and consumption."

Later Safavid Shahs settled down to a more traditional royal life and built great monuments. Most notable of all was Shah Abbas I, who moved the capital to Isfahan in 1598 and created a model of urban beauty.

But throughout the Safavid period, which lasted until 1736, garden carpets remained highly popular. So much so, that their changes in design to some extent reflect the changes in Safavid royal life itself.

Here is a carpet from the 1600s which contrasts dramatically with those of the century before. The free-ranging forest dreamscape has given way to an orderly orchard with irrigation canals and a central pool.

The carpet, named the “Wagner” Garden Carpet after a German collector, is said to be reminiscent of the royal gardens in Isfahan. It is filled with fruit trees, leopards, gazelles, and even pigeons and butterflies, but it is definitely not portable. Its size is immense: 5.5 meters by 4.3 meters.

It would be wrong to leave the subject of garden carpets without noting that – while they reached a peak of refinement in the Safavid era – both gardens and their depictions have always been part of Persian culture and remain so today.

The first recorded garden carpet can be traced back to the 6th century AD and the Ctesiphon Palace of the Sassanian King Khosrow I.

His carpet – in fact a huge embroidery – used multi-colored jewels to depict flowers and stones bright as crystal to depict running streams. The branches of the trees were of gold and silver thread and leaves were of silk. Unfortunately, the carpet was destroyed in the Arab conquest of Iran, when it was torn up and shared out as war booty.

Here is a photo of another garden carpet, from the second half of the 16th century. It is the Mantes carpet, named after the Church of Mantes outside of Paris where it was discovered before being moved to the Louvre Museum.

Interestingly, the use of the word "paradise" in connection with a garden can be traced back very far indeed – to the time of Cyrus the Great.

Around 540 BC, Cyrus built the largest and most beautiful garden ever recorded at his capital Pasargade, northeast of Shiraz. It was enclosed to keep certain animals in and others out and had rows of fruit trees, shrubs and flower beds. Some of its stone watercourses survive to this day.

Cyrus called his garden a “Paradaiza,” or literally an "enclosed park." The word passed into ancient Greek and from there into most European languages.

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$ 10 Million Persian Carpet Sets New Auction Record

LONDON, May 15, 2010 -- How much are private collectors ready to pay for Persian rugs?

The answer came at an auction in London last month: just short of $ 10 million.

The carpet – which set a record price of $ 9,599,535 – is a "vase" carpet from Kirman, a city whose weavers are widely considered to have been among the most inventive of the classical carpet age.

The vase carpets, woven in the 16th and 17th centuries, are some of the Kirman weavers' greatest works of art, with spectacular, colorful and intricately designed patterns of swirling branches, foliage and flowers.

The floral patterns may be arranged in vases or, as in the case of the auctioned carpet, there may be no vase apparent.

Such carpets are always highly sought after and rare, with the best examples kept in museums.

But to fetch close to $ 10 million, this carpet measuring 11 feet by 5 feet had to have some unusually distinguishing features. And, in fact, it has several.

One is the unusual energy and charm of its pattern.

Christie's, the auction house which made the sale on April 15, describes its magic this way:

"The designers have worked out an arrangement that makes the blossoms completely secondary to the leaves. It is no longer the powerful scrolling of individual leaves that creates the energy of the design; here it is the rhythm set up by the interlocking leaves.

"Their stems and the drawing of the individual plants growing from each end of the carpet create one rhythm, but the coloring, which makes facing leaves from two different plants still have the same colors, creates the counterpoint. It is an apparently simple but wonderfully satisfying design."

The energy of the arrangement can be seen even more clearly from a distance than from close up.



But the carpet is also noteworthy for another reason that particularly interests carpet historians.

And that is (again to quote Christie's) it "can claim to be the earliest design which can clearly be demonstrated to be a prototype for the most popular Persian carpet design of all - the so-called herati pattern."

Here is a diagram of a herati pattern.

Kirman dominated the rug-making industry of south-eastern Iran for centuries and its weavings were remarked upon by the earliest western travelers to the region.

Marco Polo, traveling through Persia in 1270, praised the carpets of Kirman as a particular marvel.

By the 17th century, at the height of the Safavid era, Kirman’s designers were at their most inventive and their weaving techniques of a sophistication not seen in other parts of the Persian Empire.

One innovation was to set their looms so that the cotton warps were on two different levels. They then threaded the wool wefts, leaving some tight and others sinuous, to give an immediately recognizable wavy finish to the surface of the carpet.

Interestingly, it was this characteristic weaving pattern that helped an art dealer recognize this particular carpet as a Kirman vase carpet (without a vase) and bring it to auction.

The story of who the art dealer is, and where he discovered the carpet, is still being pieced together by an art world hungry for more details. But the early indications are it is the stuff of which legends are made.

The Financial Times reports that the carpet originally was bought for only €18,000 (some $ 23,000) at an obscure German auction house late last year.

"Cataloged simply as “Persian carpet” and estimated at €18,000, the finely knotted wool rug appeared at Georg Rehm, a provincial saleroom in Augsburg, in October last year," the paper says.

It continues: "Asked to confirm the sale, the auction house refused 'to divulge results ... after extensive negotiations with our suppliers and buyers'."

How the carpet fell out of the sky to arrive at "an obscure German auction house" is unknown.

But by the time it went on sale at Christie's enough of its history had become clear to interest some very competitive art collectors.

The carpet was traced to the former holdings of Martine Marie Pol, the Comtesse de Béhague, who prior to her death in 1927 maintained a renowned collection of antiquities, including both European and Oriental Carpets.

One of her many properties, the Chateau de Fleury in the Ile de France region, is shown here.

Much of the countess’s collection was dispersed in two sales in 1927 and 1928, but the Kirman vase carpet was not included in those. Christie's believes the carpet instead passed on to her heirs before being sold at some stage between the 1930s and 1950s.

Yet even as Christie's evaluators widely publicized the carpet's pedigree before the auction, they badly underestimated what price the carpet might command.

The auction house estimated the carpet to be worth from $307,600 - $461,400. But when bidding began, the price immediately began soaring toward the stratosphere.

There were seven bidders, one in the auction room and six on the phone from Britain, continental Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. Among the parties, just one was a museum, all the rest were private collectors.

Britain's Economist magazine described the bidding this way:

"At £2.4m the countess’s rug beat the record price for a carpet at auction; at £3.5m it beat the record for an auctioned Islamic work of art. By £5m, bids began jumping ahead in increments of £500,000, which proved too much for one of the two remaining bidders, who put the phone down at £5.5m, too upset to continue. The rug finally sold for £6.2m (including commission and taxes), proof for the dealer who consigned it that he had been right to trust his instincts."

The identity of the two remaining bidders is secret. But several art dealers have told The Financial Times they believe both were from Qatar.

The Gulf state has a recently opened (2008) Museum of Islamic Art with a major collection of carpets and textiles and it is not impossible the Kirman vase carpet could one day be loaned to it.

In becoming the world's most expensive carpet, the Kirman vase beat the previous record of $ 5.5 million set by the famed Pearl Carpet of Baroda in March 2009 at a Sotheby's auction in Qatar.

The Pearl Carpet of Baroda is not of hand-knotted wool but is "woven" from strings of Basra pearls: one-and-a-half million of them, harvested off the coast of Qatar and Bahrain. It is believed to have been created as a gift for the tomb of Prophet Muhammad in Medina and commissioned by the Maharaja of Baroda, who died before he could make the donation.

After the pearl rug, the previous record-holder for the most expensive auctioned carpet was a silk Isfahan rug dating to the 1600s. It previously belonged to tobacco heiress Doris Duke sold for $ 4.45 million at Christie's in New York in June 2008.

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Christie's: A Kirman Vase Carpet

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The Economist: Rug Rave – Prices Fly For A Persian Carpet

Rug Rag: Pearl Carpet Of Baroda

The Qashqai And Other Tribal Carpets Of Western Persia

SHIRAZ, April 17, 2010 -- When Persian tribal carpets first began to reach 19th century Europe, they often got a mixed reception.

One problem was where to put them.

They were typically of small size at a time when putting a large carpet across a big living room floor was the preferred choice.

And their tribal designs were not considered particularly refined, at a time when "civilized" elegance was the style.

So, Persian tribal rugs -- like Turkmen tribal rugs and many others with bold geometric designs – often found themselves relegated to the "man's" room in the house.

The unspoken rule was: tribal rugs in the study; floral workshop rugs in the boudoir and parlor.

But if there were misunderstandings about where to put the rugs, perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of all was about what to call them.

The name "Persian tribal," of course, meant nothing because it neither distinguished between the rugs' styles nor told anything about the people who wove them.

In fact, the great majority of the rugs were not made by Persians – in the sense of Persia's majority people, the Fars – at all.

They were made by peoples as diverse as Turks, Arabs, Kurds and Baluchs. For millennia, they too have inhabited Persia but they have kept their own languages, cultures, and artistic traditions. Currently, these minorities make up some 49 percent of Iran's inhabitants.

It was only with time that European rug owners began to realize that the new patterns on their floor were a window into a fascinating world of tribal and nomadic folklore that remains very much alive in Iran today.

Here is perhaps the most famous tribal rug of the turn-of-the-last century.

It is the rug used by Sigmund Freud to cover his famous "couch" in Vienna, where much of his pioneering research in psychotherapy was done.

The rug is characteristic of the Turkic-speaking Qashqai (or Gashgai, Kashgai), who are one of Iran's largest tribal confederacies. Their rugs are filled with symbols, both abstract and semi-naturalistic, that derive from the nomadic weavers' ancient traditions.

Freud believed these symbols, with their unconscious suggestions, could help create a mood in which his own patients could relax and more easily explore their subconscious memories. The rug still covers his couch, which he moved to London after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

Here is another Qashqai rug with rows of trees interspersed with vines. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The Qashqai, who live in southwestern Iran, were one of the best organized and most powerful nomadic peoples in Persia during the 19th century, when they often forcefully fought off government efforts to control or settle them.

Their annual migration was, and is still, the largest of any in the country.

In their migration, the Qashqai move from their summer pastures in the mountains north of Shiraz to winter pastures south of the city.

The trip, which covers some 500 km (300 miles), takes them up and down steep mountain slopes as they descend from their winter camps at altitudes as high as 2,500 meters (10,000 feet) and move southward toward sea level.

Their life of nomadic pastoralism is told in the symbols they weave into their rugs.

The symbols range from human figures to four-legged animals, birds, trees, and flowers, as well as a wide range of geometric shapes.

Some of their carpets are so filled with such motifs that they almost look like a catalog of the objects in their daily life.

Below is a carpet is typical of the Shekarlu, one of the tribes in the Qashqai confederacy.

In it, the highly recognizable objects include wooden combs used by tribal women for their hair. The combs, as symbols of a bridal trousseau, also stand for marriage and happiness.

The Qashqai consider themselves Turks and call all the other inhabitants of Iran "Tajiks."

But their confederacy itself is a conglomeration of clans of different ethnic origins, including Luri (or Lori), Kurdish, Arab and Turkic.

Their common language is a form of Turkish closely related to that spoken in Azerbaijan.

Just when Turkic-speaking nomads first moved into Persia is unknown.

But most historians trace the first large-scale movement to the time of the Seljuk conquests, around 1,000 AD. That was when Turkic tribes in western Central Asia were migrating in mass further west and south, into modern Iran, Iraq, and Turkey.

The tribes -- from the Oghuz branch of the Turks -- shared similar cultures and languages and many of those ties survive to this day. They can readily be seen in the many shared motifs on rugs across the Turkic world.

Here is a carpet woven by the Amaleh tribe of the Qashqai confederation.

Over the centuries, the Qashqai and other tribal confederacies often played significant roles in ruling the country. Persian shahs routinely took power with the military backing of the Turkic tribes then ruled through the bureaucratic power of the Persian – Fars – elite.

The power of the tribes was not finally curbed until the 1930s, when Reza Shah (who re-named Persia as Iran in 1935) deployed a newly modernized army, with armored cars and planes, against them.

The Qashqai were starved into submission when the army blocked the narrow passes on their migration route across the mountains and the nomads' riflemen were unable to dislodge them.

Since then, many of the Qashqai have settled, joining other members of their confederation who over the centuries have taken up village life.

It is partly because tribal confederacies like the Qashqai have always had both nomadic and settled components that some of their rugs are town or city weavings.

Here is one example. It is a Kashguli carpet from the second half of the 19th century. (Kashguli is the name of another of the major Qashqai tribes. It was also frequently used in the 19th century rug market as a label for a Qashqai rug of superior quality.)

Much of the Qashqai's workshop weaving is associated with Shiraz which, because of the nomads' twice yearly migration around it, is the political and economic center of their life.

So many Qashqais' rugs are sold in the Shiraz bazaar that their weavings, particularly the simpler ones, are often simply termed "Shiraz" carpets.

The Qashqai are hardly the only nomadic and tribal people who have became well-known in Europe through their weavings.

Another is the Khamseh tribal confederacy, which neighbors the Qashqai to the east and is considered to be Arab. It trace its roots to Arab nomads who moved into Persia from the Arabian peninsula well before the Islamic conquest.

But their confederacy speaks no single language and its members, who have banded together for strength, have diverse ethnic origins.

To north and west of the Qashqai are two more major tribes, the Luri and Bakhtiyari. Both speak northwest Iranian languages close to Kurdish and their members have diverse ancestries.

Here is a picture of a Lur taken around 1921. The photo at the top of this article is of the field of a Luri rug. It shows the love of highly detailed symbols that is common to all the confederacies.

It is impossible here – or perhaps anywhere – to list all of Iran's tribes. Even today, despite heavy government pressure to settle everyone, nomads can be found in all but two of Iran's provinces -- Kurdestan and Yazd.

But how much any of the tribes today weave for themselves rather than for the world market they first began to conquer in the 19th century is another question.

Since then, nomadic weavings from Iran and elsewhere have steadily adapted to non-nomadic homeowners' tastes.

An early response was to weave multiple and more elaborate borders, to create more varied looks. So much so, that multiple borders became a tell-tale sign of later nomadic weavings throughout the carpet belt.

In more recent decades, the Qashqai and neighboring confederacies have had great market success by simplifying one of their traditional rug types -- the thick-piled Gabbeh -- to an ever more minimalist look.

The new Gabbeh is composed of just a few tone-on-tone colors and a scattering of tribal motifs or accent points.

The evolution of the Gabbeh tells the story of how the global market looks to nomadic weavings for innovation and change, despite the fact that change is foreign to the timeless world of the nomads themselves.

But exactly how that happens is the subject of another story. (See: How Traditional Are Iran's Modern Gabbehs?)

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Animal Figures In South Persian Rugs

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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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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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

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

Turkish Rugs In European Paintings

Kilim Sofas