The World's Oldest Carpet Story: The Pazyryk

PAZYRYK, Siberia; Feb. 28, 2010 -- Every carpet tells a story. But few tell one as fascinating as the oldest intact carpet ever found.

It is the Pazyryk carpet, discovered frozen in a tomb beneath the Siberian steppe.

The carpet was woven sometime in the 5th century BC and recovered almost 2,500 years later when, in 1949, Russian scientists opened one of many burial mounds in the Pazyryk valley, in the Altai mountains south of Novosibirsk.

Because the tombs, where Russia borders with China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, were dug deep into the permafrost and covered with piles of timber and stone, the carpet and the mummified bodies of the nobles it accompanied emerged in a remarkably well preserved state.

Here is a picture of one corner of the carpet, which is now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The picture at the top of the page is a detail of one of the carpet’s horsemen.

The century during which the carpet was put in the tomb is best known in the West for what was happening in ancient Greece at the time.

The 5th century was the time of the Greek-Persian wars, of Herodotus completing his “History,” of the construction of the Parthenon, of Sophocles writing ‘”Antigone,” and, finally, of the ruinous Peleponnesian war between Athens and Sparta.

But the story the carpet tells is a very different one from that of the ancient Greeks.

It tells the story of the Scythians, a partly settled, partly nomadic people whose home was the vast expanse of Eurasia north of Greece, Mesopotamia, Persia and China.

This is a picture of a Scythian horseman, made with an appliqué felt technique. It is from a wall hanging found along with the carpet in the Pazyryk tombs.

The domain of the Scythians, who were Persian speakers and a fiercely independent part of the Greater Persian world, extended from modern Bulgaria, through Ukraine and Central Asia, to close to today’s Chinese border.

The basis of their power, and their trading wealth, was the huge herds of horses they raised. They are among the first peoples to be mentioned as mounted warriors and their mobility made them almost impossible to conquer.

At the same time, they were a conduit for trade along the Silk Roads, which carried goods between Persia, India, and China.

But if the horse-herding Scythians were mobile, they also were able to maintain the kind of rich court culture one usually associates only with city dwellers.

They were able to due so thanks to their use of carriages like this one, which was found disassembled in the Pazyryk tombs.

Their carriages enabled them not just to easily move their tents and other necessities, but also carry along stores of luxury goods, some which they imported and others they produced themselves.

One of the things the Scythians are best remembered for today is their intricate gold jewelry, which regularly tours the world in museum exhibits.

The other thing they are best remembered for is the size of their royal burial mounds, known as kurgans, which sometimes could reach over 20 meters high. Inside, as in the Egyptian pyramids, nobles were buried with their treasure for use in the afterlife.

This map roughly shows the extent of the Scythian lands at the time of the Roman Empire.

The other great nomadic people of northern Eurasia at this time, located farther east, were the Turkic-speaking tribes.

Later the Turkic-speaking nomads would sweep west in a centuries-long confrontation with the Persian speakers that would be chronicled in classical Persia’s epic poems.

Still, if much is known today about the Scythians due to their mention in ancient histories and the excavation of their burial mounds, very little is known about their carpets and carpet culture.

The only certainty is that their carpets included both pile rugs (the only example of which is the Pazyryk) and felt rugs.

Here is a close-up of a felt saddle blanket found in the Pazyryk tombs.

Both the pile and felt work show a level of technical sophistication that makes it clear they belong to a very old artistic tradition.

But whether that tradition was the Scythians’ own or was borrowed from neighbors is impossible to know for sure.

Most carpet scholars believe the Pazyryk pile carpet could not have been woven in a nomadic setting in such a remote corner of the Siberian steppe.

Murray Eiland Jr. and Murray Eiland III note in their book 'Oriental Carpets' (1998) that the carpet "raises the question as to how pastoral nomads could have acquired such a technically proficient work of art."

They answer that "it could have been through trade, as some Chinese silk fabrics were found at Pazyryk and other early nomadic burials on the steppes."

Theories of the carpet's origin generally assume it was woven in either a major population center of Achaemenid Persia or perhaps an outpost of the Persian Empire nearer to Pazyryk itself.

If the carpet were made in Persia, that would make it not only the earliest intact carpet ever found but also a striking example of the early carpet trade.

With its motifs of horsemen and deer, it may have been expressly designed for export to the steppes. Or, it might have been specifically commissioned by a Scythian chief.

Here is a saddle found in the Pazyryk tombs, showing the same kinds of tassels that can be seen on the saddles depicted in the carpet.

The mystery of the Pazyryk carpet's exact origin may never be solved. And perhaps it does not need to be, because the Pazyryk itself makes a still more important point.

That is, that carpets, whether woven at home or imported from afar, seem to be a universal human interest as old as time.

How did the Scythians use their rugs which – judging by their inclusion in a royal burial tomb – were clearly prized possessions?

The answer must be left to the imagination.

One possibility is that the carpets were at the center stage of decorating schemes that also included elaborate furniture like this table, also found in the Pazyryk tombs.

Perhaps the lion motifs of the table combined with the motifs of both natural and fantastic creatures on the carpets to fill Scythian tents with the echoes of the things their culture most prized.

The Pazyryk carpet alone includes horses, griffins, and deer. Its size is 180 x 198 cm (5'11" x 6' 6").

Today, the Pazyryk carpet is regularly reproduced by modern carpet weavers who find its design still has a magical appeal.

This high-quality replica is produced by weavers working in northern Afghanistan using natural dyes and handspun wool. It is available from Nomad Rugs in San Francisco.

It is interesting to think of the Pazyryk carpet, placed in a royal tent, as the world’s earliest known example of a room with a rug.

And it is even more fascinating to think that this earliest known example is so stunning in its beauty that it can equally express all the pleasure and excitement people have taken in furnishing their rooms with rugs ever since.

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

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.)

#

RETURN TO HOME

#

Related Links:

Silk Road and China Trade


Wikipedia: Silk Road

Mejid Rugs And The End Of The Ottoman Era

ISTANBUL, January 29, 2010 -- Can a single carpet style symbolize the sudden decline of a country’s carpet making tradition?

Many European carpet collectors once regarded this carpet – a so-called Mejid rug – just that way.

The rug is typical of a whole class of small-size, town-woven carpets that appeared in the mid-1800’s. It was a time when the Ottoman Empire was moving rapidly toward its final eclipse in 1923.

The rugs are striking for several reasons. One is their distinctly non-Anatolian look. The other is that, even though they were clearly influenced by the West’s own artistic values, Europeans at the time found them distasteful and fled from them.

How did these rugs come about and why were they popular in Turkey at the time?

The place to begin the story of the rugs is with their namesake, Sultan Abdul-Mejid.

He reigned from 1839 to 1861, during a time of massive threats to the empire’s traditional way of life. His efforts to fend off those threats by Westernizing many Ottoman institutions reached to every level of society, including the Arts. But the results were often mixed.

Abdul-Mejid came to the throne just as one of the empire’s prize possessions, Egypt, had permanently broken away. That followed the earlier loss of Greece and dramatically underlined the need to modernize both the army and to build loyalty among the empire's far-flung, multi-national subjects.

Abdul-Mejid, like his father Mahmud II before him, looked to France and the ideals of the French Revolution for inspiration.

At the time, monarchies everywhere were awed by the way ordinary Frenchmen had enlisted en-masse in the Revolution’s armies to defend the values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and how Napoleon had later harnessed that power to all but conquer Europe. Many kings realized that their future depended upon at least partially making their societies more equitable.

Abdul-Mejid sought to transform Ottoman life by introducing the first of what would be many attempts at “Tanzimat,” or “Reordering” over the next decades.

The reforms attempted to stem the tide of nationalist movements within the Ottoman Empire by enhancing the civil liberties of non-Turks and non-Muslims and granting them equality throughout the Empire.

They also established a new system of state schools to produce a new generation of government officials more open to European technologies and administrative practices.

But the reforms were not only changes in substance but of style. Abdul-Mejid built Dolmabahce Palace in the French baroque manner, decorated it the same way, and moved there from Topkapi Palace. He also dressed in the European fashion and government functionaries began to do the same.

Over time, the new European dress-code would fully replace the complicated Ottoman hierarchy of different clothing styles and even shoe colors which had distinguished officials by rank and office. It consisted of a monotonous, long-tailed frock coat that was called the “stambouline” in the West and, more facetiously, the “bonjour tuxedo” in Turkey. Like new uniforms for the army, the coat was intended to change the mindset of those who wore it.

The message was not lost upon Turkish artists, including weavers, who closely watched court styles.

Entrepreneurs responded with new European-flavored designs of their own. One answer was the “Mejid” carpet, which gained wide domestic popularity.

The “Mejids” clearly reflect the Francophile taste of the sultan, though it is not known whether the sultan liked them himself. They were woven in bright pastel shades and decorated with sparse, natural-looking flowers or even rococo swirls. It was a huge departure from Turkey’s own design tradition of non-naturalistic ornamentation and richly concentrated colors.

Here is a carpet woven in Ghiordes at the time. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

How much any empire can stave off collapse by adopting new models at times of crisis is debatable. Abdul-Mejid’s efforts ran into huge obstacles, not the least of which were the Western European powers themselves.

They loaned him massive amounts of money to buy weapons to confront the expanding Russian empire, but attached fatal conditions to the loans.

The conditions were demands for trade concessions to open the empire’s raw materials -- wool, cotton, silk and coal -- to European businesses and its markets to European products, including textiles. The results of this, too, were soon visible in the carpet industry and its commercial hub, the Istanbul bazaar.

Until 1830, the Ottoman Empire was still largely a self-contained and self-sufficient space. But with the opening to the West, its manufacturers suddenly came into direct competition with the industrial revolution. European textiles flooded the market and domestic producers found it impossible to compete.

Worse still for the domestic producers, the introduction of European fashions in the court harem caused a wave of emulation among Otttoman women. Dresses were made of European rather than local fabrics and the market for fine Ottoman silks collapsed.

Celik Gulersoy in his 1980 book ‘Story of the Grand Bazaar’ sums up the process this way:

“When ten thousand hand looms disappeared, villages could no longer be closed production units and the villagers turned into laborers and imported European goods rapidly took the place of domestic textiles in the Empire’s markets.”

The new shopping focus was the Bonmarches, the borrowed-from-French generic name for the shops erected in European style on the main avenue of Istanbul's chic Beyoglu district.

In 1881, a visiting English writer, Lady Brassey, described in her book ‘Sunshine and Storm in the East’ how rich Turkish ladies with their servants visiting the Grand Bazaar were surrounded by the treasures of the East but demanded the merchants show them Western goods instead, though these were mostly second quality. She regarded it as very strange.

By the turn-of-the-last century, the Grand Bazaar itself lost its most distinctive feature: the merchants sitting passively on wooden divans with their cupboards full of goods behind them. That, too, gave way to the new European style.

The arches lining the walls of the old Bazaar were connected to form shop facades and the merchants took to standing in their doorways.

In many cases, the merchants had no better choice because their new premises were no bigger than telephone booths. To complete the image of shops on a European street, they added signs and advertising above their doors.

During these decades, the Ottoman carpet production industry changed equally dramatically. Western capital entered the business and the Western market became the driving force of almost all the large-scale carpet manufactories.

Miroslav Jungr observes in his 2005 book ‘Oriental Carpets:’

“The European powers brought every aspect of mass production to bear on the weaving process, including using synthetic dyes and demolishing traditional design schemes. Floral patterns, beloved by foreign customers, became standard even though – with a few exceptions such as medallion ushaks – they had never been part of the Turkish tradition.”

Curiously, the Mejids, the Turkish weavers’ own early experiment with incorporating European styles, were completely overlooked in Europe. Jungr notes their stylized flowers and mostly shiny colors did not correspond to the cosmopolitan taste of the time. But in Turkey they remained popular even after the death of Sultan Abdul-Mejid himself in 1861.

Only today, as their story is becoming better known, are the Mejids beginning to win respect from collectors. And that is partly because of the bittersweet story they tell of the end of one era and the start of another.

#

RETURN TO HOME

#

Salting Carpets And Topkapi Prayer Rugs: A Detective Story

ISTANBUL, January 16, 2010 -- The Topkapi Palace treasury is the repository of many interesting things.

But for carpet lovers, some of the most fascinating – and mysterious – are the niched prayer rugs which are carefully stored away in its darkened rooms, safe from the aging effects of sunlight, air, and wear.

The carpets are so intricately made, and so fragile, that they were obviously never intended for daily use. But just who made them, and what they were intended for, is one of the great mysteries of carpet history.

Here is an example of one of the niche rugs in the Topkapi collection.

The rug is fragile because it is woven in some places with metal-wrapped silk threads. The metal -- silver that is gilded with gold -- gives parts of the carpet a metallic sheen that glitters in the light. But the metal itself can be worn away by the slightest abrasion and, at the same time, it makes the rugs so inflexible that even folding them could tear them.

Thus any of the normal things one does with carpets, from rolling them to stepping on them -- and certainly praying on them -- would destroy them.

Yet that is just one of the many peculiarities of these prayer rugs.

Still more surprising are the inscriptions on the borders.

Prayer rugs are usually associated with the Sunni branch of Islam, which was also the state religion of the Ottoman Empire. But the inscriptions here are Shi’ite, the state religion of one of the Ottoman Empire's greatest rivals: the Safavid Empire of Iran.

And, because Shi’ia themselves use prayer stones but not prayer rugs in their religious observances, the existence of Shi'ite prayer rugs should be an impossibility.

For decades, carpet experts have wrestled with the problem and come up with two explanations.

One is that many of the pieces are modern forgeries of classical carpets.

Another is that the pieces are, in fact, classical carpets but created for a very special political purpose.

Let’s take the forgery charges first.

The trail, like many a good mystery story, begins in London, specifically in the dark corridors of another museum, the Victoria and Albert.

In 1909, the Australian millionaire and art collector George Salting bequeathed to the museum upon his death a rug he believed was made in the 16th century and which in many ways seemed similar to the prayer rugs in the Topkapi.

Like the prayer rugs, it was extraordinarily fragile and woven in places with metal-wrapped silk threads, It also bore inscriptions in cartouches on its borders.

And though it was not a prayer rug itself – it was a medallion rug – it too was clearly never intended for use on the floor.

The “Salting carpet," as it became known, soon caught the European rug world’s eye but not in the way Mr. Salting likely intended.

One reason was its colors. They were very bright and amazingly well preserved. And that, on a rug which otherwise looked like it was from the classical era, struck many as a blatant sign the weaving was a recent forgery.

The challenge became to discover which carpet workshop in the modern era could possibly have forged such a complex piece. And the leading detective was Germany’s Kurt Erdmann, one of the most influential carpet experts of his generation.

Dubbing the “Salting” and similar rugs in other collections “disturbingly colorful,” he blazed a trail to Hereke, about 50 miles east of Istanbul. That is the home of one of the most famous workshops of the turn-of-the-last century Ottoman court, where weavers were routinely commissioned to make copies of Persian and other classical rugs for Istanbul’s palaces.

The “Saltings,” he concluded in 1941, were frauds, but almost perfect ones, and he paid tribute to their weavers, whose identity was betrayed only by their "Anatolian" sensibilities:

“What was achieved deserves full recognition. In the best pieces, the Persian 16th century style is remarkably successful. A wrong note is often struck in the coloring, whereby a difference of artistic sensibility leads, on the one hand, to an exaggeration of the richness of the coloring and, on the other, to adoption of the Anatolian coloring scheme which is restricted to a few shades.”

Here is a detail from George Salting's carpet showing its bright colors.

Few dared argue with Erdmann. So, for decades the Salting carpets lived in limbo.

Because they were incredible pieces of art by any measure, museums and collectors continued to treasure them. But they were identified as 19th century rugs, making them a historical anomoly.

Things might have stayed that way forever except for the march of time.

More recently, a new generation of rug experts has become intrigued again by the Salting carpets and, more particularly, their similarities to their prayer rug cousins in the Topkapi museum.

And those prayer rugs have cast doubt on Erdman’s theory because they, unlike the Saltings in Europe, have a documented biography. The curators of the Topkapi have listed the prayer rugs as part of the royal collection for centuries, long before the Hereke workshop produced its earliest confirmed rug in 1892.

Now, as scholars increasingly regard Salting Carpets and Topkapi Prayer Rugs as a single category, the hunt has turned to piecing together a history that explains how such clearly “Persian 16th century style” weavings came to Istanbul, why they include such a self-contradictory thing as Shi’ite prayer rugs, and how some of these carpets – the “Saltings” – eventually made it to Europe in such a fresh state that they could be regarded as modern weavings.

It is not an easy task, but the history that is taking shape is fascinating. The supporting evidence comes from two relatively new fields of rug study, rug structure and rug documentation, and have helped trace the carpets to the court workshops of the Safavid Empire during the 1500s.

Michael Franses summed up the historical explanation in his article “Some Wool-Pile Persian-Design Niche Rugs,” published in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies Volume 5 (ICOC 1999).

He notes that in the 1500’s, the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Empire were locked in a struggle for supremacy. The balance of power went back and forth and the stakes were who would control eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan and Mesopotamia.

Eventually, the tide turned consistently against the Safavids due to the energies of Sultan Suleyman, the same Ottoman leader who was known as Suleyman the Magnificent in the West.

His armies took took Tabriz twice from the Safavids for various periods and captured Baghdad for good. As a result, the Safavid Shah Tahmasp, who reigned for 52 years during this regional warfare, turned to a policy of appeasement instead.

The gifts the Safavid court sent to Suleyman and his immediate successors are well illustrated in Ottoman miniatures of the time. The paintings show lines of courtiers streaming before the throne bearing boxes, bags, and lengths of fabrics.

The gifts came in special caravans headed by Safavid ambassadors and the caravans were sizable enough to stagger European diplomats to the Ottoman court who witnessed their arrival.

A Hungarian ambassador who was present to see a Safavid delegation arriving to congratulate Suleyman’s son, Selim II, on his accession to the throne in 1567 wrote:

“The train consisted of 700 men and 19,000 pack animals, bearing all sorts of luxuries, including woolen carpets so heavy that seven could scarcely carry them.”

He also wrote that he saw “silk carpets from Hamadan and Dargazan … 20 large silk carpets and many small in which birds, animals, and flowers were worked in gold.”
Some of the miniature paintings of the time show what could be courtiers carrying rolled-up carpets among other gifts including precious silver trays and decanters.

If the carpets did indeed come to Istanbul as gifts, there are still other things to explain, including the giving and accepting of “Shi’ite” prayer rugs.

That they had to be considered “Shi’ite,” there is no question. The calligraphic inscriptions on many of them are in praise of Ali, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law, who is particularly venerated by the Shit’ite faithful.

Similarly, there is no question that the Ottomans, who controlled Mecca and styled themselves the protectors of Sunni Islam, knew what the inscriptions said. The language used in the Ottoman court during much of the 16th and 17th centuries was Persian and Persian culture, like Italian Renaissance culture in Europe, was familiar to everyone in the region.

Were the messages on the carpet a diplomatic slap to the Ottomans even as the gifts were sent as tribute to keep the Ottoman powers at bay?

Or were they a Trojan Horse, slipping the Safavids’ state religion into the very inner sanctum of the Ottoman Sultan, the “Guardian of all the Holy Places”?

The answers may never be known, but the carpets were clearly so valuable that they were not only accepted but preserved in immaculate condition in the vaults of the Topkapi Palace treasury. Whether they were ever publicly displayed is not recorded.

That leaves one last mystery: how some of the Salting type carpets - like this one in Copenhagen's David Collection museum -- arrived in such pristine condition to Europe.

One intriguing possibility is offered by John Mills, whose article “The Salting Group: History and a Clarification” also appears in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies Volume 5 (ICOC 1999).

Mills suggests some of the rugs may have been smuggled out of the Topkapi and sold in the streets of Istanbul when the city plunged into chaos during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. That was when Russian troops, pushing the Ottoman Empire out of Bulgaria, advanced to the gates of the city and were thought to be on the verge of taking it.

As refugees from the Balkans streamed into the city, there was near anarchy, the price of food shot up, and panicked people began liquidating valuables for cash. Incredible carpets began appearing in the bazaar.

Were carpets from the Topkapi Palace among them?

An anonymous correspondent writing a report five years later in Burlington Magazine has left this intriguing clue:

“I well remember much hawking of harem treasures during the terrible winter of the Russo Turkish war,” he wrote in 1903.

At least one European buyer is known to have bought a Salting type rug at that chaotic time. It is Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky, who was the Russian ambassador in Istanbul in 1878.

If some of the Salting carpets did come out of the Topkapi treasury, that could account for why their colors were so perfectly preserved that they could be mistaken for recent work.

It is an intriguing thought and one which carpets scholars are likely to keep pursuing in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, some Western museums continue to identify their Salting-type carpets as 19th century Turkish work. But the Topkapi palace curators have no doubt their own collection of prayer rugs comes from the Safavids.

#

RETURN TO HOME

#

The Origins Of Classical Geometric Carpet Motifs: Girih, Rumi, And Kufesque

ISTANBUL, January 1, 2010 - The geometric patterns of the Anatolian carpets that so fascinated European painters have diverse origins.

Some of them come from nomadic weaving traditions, such as the Memling gul. It is easy to weave and, unlike more sophisticated designs, has a flat, two dimensional appearance. It can be found in nomadic traditions ranging from Central Asia to the Transcaucasus to Iran and Anatolia.

But other motifs, especially those which appear to be three-dimensional (such as the medallion above), are so complicated they likely were borrowed from other fields of art.

The search for their origins takes one into the sophisticated world of Islamic decorative art and specifically, into the drafting rooms of court and commercial artists who created the complex designs and patterns that can be seen in the tile work of mosques and other buildings or in book illustrations.

One of the art forms such designers took to particular heights was ‘strapwork,’ the use of interlacing lines to give patterns an illusion of depth. The example at the top of this page is from a rug depicted in an Italian fresco from the early 1500s.

The motif -- an strapwork octagonal medallion -- is typical of both "Large Pattern Holbein" and "Small Pattern Holbein” carpets. The octagonal medallions are outlined by interlacing lines which make them stand out from the background field.

Shown here is a much rarer and more elaborate version of a strapwork medallion on a Large Pattern Holbein. It is depicted in the painting 'Virgin and Child with the Family of Burgomaster Meyer," by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1528.

Strapwork, also known as “girih” (the Persian word for knot), is a common design trick in both European and Islamic artwork. But eastern artists, who were particularly interested in geometric shapes, took it to levels of enormous complexity.

Just how complex it could be is only hinted at in carpets. But it is worth taking a moment to consider just for its own interest.

Here is an example of girih used to decorate the exterior of the restored Khanqah (lodging complex) of Nadir Divan Beg, dating to the early 17th century, in Bukhara, Uzbekistan.

The secret to understanding girih, which was meant to both delight and confound the eye, is understanding how the artisans created their designs.

They assembled them from jig-saw puzzle-like pieces, which could be combined with one another to generate an almost infinite variety of different patterns.

Here are five “ghiri tiles” representing different categories of puzzle pieces. They consist of a decagon, a pentagon, a hexagon, a bow tie, and a rhombus and all the sides of each are are of the same length, so any can fit together with the others.

The shapes of the girih tiles are not visible in the final design. What one sees are the patterns formed by the line decoration on the tiles.

How to create girih designs was a whole field of study that was codified in manuscripts of the time.

One such manuscript is the ‘Topkapi Scroll,’ a 15th century collection of architectural drawings created by master builders in the late medieval period in Iran.

The scroll, preserved in the Topkapi Palace complex in Istanbul, contains 114 individual geometric drawings detailing the theory and instructions for laying intricate patterns on walls and vaulted ceilings.

Both this picture and the one above are from ‘Medieval Islamic Architecture, Quasicrystals, and Penrose and Girih Tiles: Questions from the Classroom,’ by Raymond Tennant.

With time, every art form begins to experiment with stylizations, some of which try to turn the art form inside out.

In girih, this took the form of sometimes drawing designs by representing only the interstices where certain lines met. The lines themselves were dropped from view.

An example in carpets is this para-mamluke rug. It is not Anatolian but Syrian in origin.

With large-scale tile work on buildings, the effects of showing only certain interstices could be still more dramatic. The results resembles stars in the night sky, but arranged in subtle patterns that the brain perceives almost subconsciously.

There is no room here to discuss a kind of girih that never appears in carpets and is the most complex of all.

That is designs made up of shapes which, when put together, create a pattern that does not repeat itself, no matter where one looks. Moreover, the shapes cannot be re-arranged in any way that makes the pattern repeat.

One example is on the Darb-i-Imam Shrine (1453) in Isfahan.

The existence of shapes which can do this has only recently been identified by modern mathematicians, who still have difficulty modeling the phenomenon.

The fact that such shapes were being applied in art more than 500 years ago – with or without full understanding of the geometric laws involved – is a humbling reminder of the achievement of the ‘golden age’ of science in the Islamic world, which itself built upon the science of the classical world.

Still another, much easier to understand, motif which appears on Renaissance era Anatolian carpets and is borrowed from decorative tile designs is a motif composed of ‘split leaves.’

The split leaves are known as ‘rumi’ in Ottoman Turkey and “Islimi’ in Persia and can be seen in Small Pattern Holbein rugs (left).

The split leaves are arranged to form a quatrefoil that is the secondary motif in the rug pattern. The quatrefoils alternate with the primary motif, which is the octagonal girih medallion.

What did the split-leaf motif, appears as very angular in these carpets, look like in its original version on tile work?

Here is a sample (right). It is a quatrefoil of four rumi forms embracing a lotus flower and is very curving and lifelike in design. The motif was made angular for carpets to conform with the ‘geometric’ style popular for carpets at the time.

The rumi design, like girih, was subject to much experimentation. One result was what may have been the most popular of all the Anatolian export carpets to Renaissance Europe, the so-called Lotto design.

The Lotto (below), which at first glance looks like an abstraction of the Small Pattern Holbein, has both its motif elements derived from the rumi form.

Most frequently it appears in Renaissance paintings as a yellow geometric rumi lattice on a red ground. In fact, it is the most frequently depicted classical Anatolian carpet of all, appearing this way or with variations in some 500 paintings.

This picture of also shows yet another carpet pattern – this time to form the border – derived from still another field of decorative art: calligraphy.

In the ‘kufesque’ border, the calligraphy, which is highly ornate and curvilinear in its original medium of book illustration, is made geometric by the weavers.

The Anatolian geometric carpets were characteristic of carpet tastes across the Islamic world until styles began shifting toward curvilinear and floral patterns in the late 1400s.

Walter B. Denny, writes in “Anatolian Carpets’ (2002) that “it appears that before the phenomenon known as the ‘carpet revolution’ began to dominate carpet production in the last part of the 15th century, the carpet traditions of all these weaving centers may have shared elements of a common design vocabulary of geometric girih motifs, rumi design, and kufesque borders.”

It is interesting to think that while Renaissance Europeans did not import much Eastern art other than carpets, the rugs did offer them a considerable sample of what was going on in the other Islamic arts of the time.

Today, oriental carpets remain the only form of Eastern art that is widespread in Western homes. Often unbeknown to us, it is still a window onto the much larger, and ever changing, world of Eastern design.

#

RETURN TO HOME

#

Related Links:

‘Medieval Islamic Architecture, Quasicrystals, and Penrose and Girih Tiles: Questions from the Classroom,’ Raymond Tennant.

‘The Tiles of Infinity,’ Sebastian R. Prange, Saudi Aramco World magazine, Septmber/October 2009.

Topkapi Palace And The Art Of The Ottoman Court

ISTANBUL, December 17, 2009 -- Ottoman court carpets are intimately connected with a very special artistic culture, that of the Ottoman court itself.

The court both inspired and was the main consumer of the carpets, tiles, illustrated books and other art objects by countless artisans attached to court workshops inside and outside of Istanbul.

The imperial artisans, collectively called the Ehl-i Hiref or Community of the Talented, produced much of the finest work in the Ottoman Empire and their designs were copied or adapted by commercial artists even down to the village level.

But what why did the Ottoman rulers attach such great importance to developing and maintaining an artistic style that would clearly distinguish the court from the rest of the world outside?

The immediate answer might be that all courts in all lands tend to do the same. Just one other example is Versailles, designed as a pinnacle of Baroque style to underline the power of Louis XIV.

But the Ottoman court, with its seat in Topkapi palace, was very different from Versailles. Whereas Versailles was designed as a public stage, Topkapi was designed as a private one, and its culture was far more self-defined and self-contained.

There was a logic behind that choice.

The story is neatly told in the book ‘The Ottomans’ by Andrew Wheatcroft (1993). As he points out, the Ottoman court projected power through an image of inaccessibility, exclusivity, and mystery designed to create a sense of public awe. And everything about Topkapi palace and its court culture was intended to heighten that effect.

The first great Ottoman sultan, Mehmet II, began building the palace almost immediately after he conquered Constantinople in 1453.

A contemporary, the Greek historian Critoboulos of Imbros, wrote at the time:

“He gave orders for the erection of a palace on the point of old Byzantium which stretches out into the sea – a palace that should outshine all and be more marvelous than the preceding palaces in looks, size, cost and gracefulness.”

The site was the ancient Greek acropolis of Byzantium, the highest ground in the city. And originally, the grounds were far vaster than they are today, extending all the way down the shoreline below.

But if the acropolis had been an open area, Mehmet’s Yeni Sarai (New Palace) was deliberately isolated and separated from the city. Its buildings were hidden behind a massive wall some 35 feet tall. And it was organized in three areas, of ever diminishing accessibility to the public, guarded by three successive entry gates.

The first great courtyard, behind the Imperial Gate was the largest, with an area of 500,000 square feet. It included the workplaces of some 600 craftsmen: goldsmiths, weavers, amber-workers, armor-makers, potters, upholsterers, and many others. There were also stables and the barracks of guards and gatekeepers.

Anybody could enter from the street but once inside had to move and speak quietly.

Europeans found the hushed atmosphere eerie and regularly remarked upon it. Artist Nicolas de Nicolay wrote in 1551 that “notwithstanding the number of people coming together from all parts is very great, yet such silence is kept, that yee could scarcely say that the standers-by did either spit or cough.”

The second courtyard, behind the Gate of Saluation, marked the real boundary between outer and inner worlds. The gate had two sets of doors strong enough to resist a siege and guests passed through it only by invitation or for ceremonial occasions of state.

Once inside, the atmosphere was of a park, with lawns and fountains under cypress trees and gazelles wandering freely. The gardens were dotted with pavilions, or kiosks, which gave the impression of tents erected in an open space. It was an echo – conscious or not – of nomadic life and love of nature in the middle of a thriving but shut out metropolis.

At times, sultans also held outdoor audiences in the park, like the one shown here.

In the park was also the meeting place of the Sultan’s councilors – a kiosk known as the Hall of the Divan. The Hall’s floor was gilded and covered with a carpet of gold and there was a dias with the sultan’s throne. But the sultans themselves often preferred to appear to be absent, listening when they wanted from behind a grilled window.

The window, and the uncertainty of whether the sultan heard what was being said, gave the sultan such a degree of control that many sultans rarely attended the meetings of the divan at all.

The innermost world lay behind a third and final gate: the Gate of Felicity. Here was the sultan’s inner realm with those who lived closest to him, including the harem, with his wives and concubines and their children, and his retainers.

This retreat, known as The Abode of Bliss, was in fact a miniature city where more than 3,000 people spent their entire adult lives.

They spent their lives in splendid, luxurious isolation. But the isolation was not intended to cut them off from the world so much as to produce people who totally identified with the court and would be loyal to it throughout their lives.

These people were the royal pages, for whom court life was a school and who later would be sent out to govern the vast reaches of the empire.

In the early days of the empire, the sultan chose the boys who would become pages from outside the Turkic population, with its strong clan system. That was yet another way of creating an isolated group loyal only to the throne.

Gia Maria Angiolello, a young Venetian who served as a translator in the palace from 1473 to 1481, describes the Sultan’s pages this way:

“Sons of Christians, in part taken in expeditions with foreign countries and in part drawn from his own subjects … after they have been in his service a certain time, when in the opinion of the lord he can trust them, he sends them out of the palace with salaries which are increased as he thinks fitting.”

The “sons” initially were part of the tribute which the Ottomans exacted from conquered peoples, particularly in the Balkans and Caucasus, to create the Janissaries, the Sultan’s most rewarded and loyal troops.

Shown here is an Ottoman miniature of Janissaries battling the Knights of St. John in the siege of Rhodes, 1522.

The Janissaries, too, were an isolated group outside the clan system and the boys who would fill their ranks spent their childhoods on special farms in Anatolia where they became Muslims, gained strength, and learned to fight.

Both the pages, who were raised in the palace, and the Janissaries were the “kul,” or slaves of the sultan.

It was a privileged position, so much so that even after the tribute system was abandoned, the status of kul and the opportunities it offered passed from father to son. And over time many free-born Muslims also bribed or negotiated their way into the Sultan’s household to gain the same status

As Angiolello remarked in his early observations about pages, “there are few that do not accomplish their duties, because they are rewarded for the smallest service to their lord, and also because they are punished for the smallest fault.”

Wheatcroft notes that after the pages finished their training, they were given wives from among the harem women who were also slaves of the Sultan. This became a further bond to the court, because both “shared the common experience of palace life and even the unique dialect spoken in the Abode of Bliss.”

When the couple was dispatched to the provinces, it modeled its own household on the Ottoman court and spread that court culture farther.

Here is a painting of an Ottoman house in Cairo, before the influence of Western styles, by Frank Dillon (1823-1909).

Did the system work well? Yes, and for centuries.

As Wheatcroft puts it, “When the Conqueror built the Abode of Bliss on Seraglio Point, he created more than a building. The palace was the apex of Ottoman society: all power flowed from it, carried forth by the sultan’s servants sent to govern in his name.”

In this system, the arts were not only decorative but also helped create a frame of reference agreed upon by the court’s members. The shared style, like everything else, reinforced loyalty to the group and distinguished them from those outside the walls.

All the procedures within the palace were codified in kanunname, or law codes that even specified the dress for every rank of the ruling class.

Pictured here is the Sultan leaving Topkapi Palace for Friday prayers in one of the capital's mosques circa 1810 by an unknown artist. The once-a-week outing was the only time the Sultan appeared in public.

The advisers to the Sultan, the viziers, wore green. Chamberlains wore scarlet. Religious dignitaries wore purple and mullahs light blue. The master of horse dressed head-to-foot in dark green.

Court officers wore light red shoes. Those who worked in the Grand Vizier’s office, located just outside the palace walls, wore yellow shoes. And among non-Muslims, Greeks wore black shoes, Armenians violet, and Jews blue slippers.

Topkapı Palace gradually lost its importance at the end of the 17th century, as the Sultans preferred to spend more time in their new palaces along the Bosporus.

In 1856, Sultan Abdül Mecid I decided to move the court to the newly built Dolmabahçe Palace (shown here), the first European-style palace in the city.

By then, the Ottoman Empire was changing rapidly and its court life was becoming more European as well.

But how that happened is another story.

#

RETURN TO HOME

#

The Mysterious World of Chintamani And Bird Carpets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#