$ 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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Related Links:

Christie's: A Kirman Vase Carpet

Financial Times: How An 18,000 euro Rug Sold For 6 Million Pounds

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

Rug Rag: Pearl Carpet Of Baroda

Mark Your Calendars Now For The 12th ICOC In Stockholm

By Dennis Dodds, Secretary General of the ICOC

In June of 2011, ICOC will offer a veritable smorgasbord of unexpected discoveries, exciting sights and festive events that are sure to appeal to rug enthusiasts, expert collectors, scholars and dealers from around the world.

Mark your calendars now!

The 12th ICOC will be held in beautiful Stockholm from June 16-19, 2011.

An art-filled pre-conference tour takes you to Copenhagen.

And a post-Conference tour to St. Petersburg, Russia will cap off your unforgettable ICOC experience.

June is the perfect time to visit these wonderful cities with their rivers, lakes, canals and architecture.

The Conference in Stockholm, June 16-19, is the perfect season and the perfect destination to enjoy educational lectures from international experts, a robust International Dealers’ Fair and several exhibitions of rugs and textiles from private collections.

A special exhibition of rare Turkmen carpets and trappings is being organized. The hotels that we recommend are situated very close to the Central train station and are within easy reach of the Conference Center for these events.

Your evenings will be filled with receptions and visits to exhibitions at several museums and the Royal Palace.

Feast your eyes on the world famous Anatolian ‘Marby’ rug, as well as 17th century Transylvanian rugs, glorious ‘Polonaise’ carpets, colorful 18th century Swedish folk art textiles, and the widely published Safavid silk velvet coat that belonged to Queen Christina. And this is just a sampling!

The pre-Conference tour to Copenhagen, June 14-15, features the stunning new installation of the David Collection, which has one of the finest collections of Islamic Art in Europe, including a small Mamluk rug, a large Seljuk carpet, a ‘Salting’ rug, a millefleurs Mughal rug, an early Persian Safavid carpet and some fabulous early Islamic textiles -- as well as many outstanding European works of art.

See the wonderful Rosenborg Royal castle built by King Christian IV in 1606. In the "The Knights' Hall”, twelve tapestries from 1675-1679 show the King's victories in the Scanian War. This Hall also holds all the 17th century Coronation ‘Polonaise’ carpets and they will be on view together exclusively for our group.

Copenhagen’s Museum of Applied Arts will display some interesting Islamic textiles and we will visit a Royal apartment at Amalienborg Palace where the Royal family lives today.

A leisurely boat tour under the bridges of Copenhagen will give you a sea-view of this remarkable Danish city and its harbor.

The post-Conference tour to St. Petersburg, Russia, June 21-24, promises to be one of the most remarkable highlights of all previous ICOC events.

You will have rare private access to many famous carpets and textiles in the storage rooms of the world famous Hermitage Museum. You will marvel at the venerable Pazyryk Carpet and the splendid Scythian material right before your eyes.

The Russian Museum of Ethnography will give us rare entry to its storage areas and a special rug exhibition, organized exclusively for the ICOC tour group by its renowned former curator, Dr. Elena Tsareva, now of the Kunstkamera Museum.

A boat tour of the River Neva and St. Petersburg’s canals will give you a wonderful perspective of Peter the Great’s ideal city and its historic architecture.

We will also visit one of the splendid Summer Palaces.

(Follow updates regarding the 12th ICOC in Stockholm at: www.ICOC-orientalrugs.org)

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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

American Sarouks And Zieglers: The First Western-Designed Persian Carpets

ARAK, Iran; April 3, 2010 -- If you could travel back in time to an American home at the turn-of-the-last-century, it is very possible that the rug on the floor would be an American Sarouk.

The "Sarouk" in the carpet's name refers to the village of Sarouk, in northwestern Iran, where it was made.

But the "American" refers to how much it was modified to suit American tastes, and how hugely popular it became in America as a result.

The double-barreled name makes the American Sarouk one of the most striking examples of the way much of the Persian carpet industry changed between 1800 and 1900. It was a time when the Persian Empire changed greatly too, as it had to adapt to a new world order dominated by industrial powers.

The carpet is believed to have been designed by a dealer in New York, S. Tyriakian, who did what would have been unthinkable in earlier times.

He knew that for many Americans, Persian carpets were too "oriental." The floral patterns seemed too elaborate and overcrowded, while the colors called too much attention to the floor at the expense of the other furnishings.

So, he played with the design and colors to create rugs that owed as much, or more, to European artistic traditions than to Persian ones.

Here is a another Sarouk. This carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Often the background color was chosen to go well with dark-wood Western furniture, something totally foreign to Persian homes.

But the way the colors were obtained was itself still more unorthodox.

To soften the "garish" colors of imported carpets, dealers in New York, London and other European centers had developed "chemical washes." But not all dyes could stand up to them.

In the case of the American sarouks, the original bright pink of the field tended to disappear almost entirely in the bath. So, to restore the color, dealers hired touch-up artists to hand paint the field in the shades they wanted.

Such labor-intensive alterations were possible in the labor market of New York at the time, and as a result the American Sarouks are also commonly known as Painted Sarouks today.

The American Sarouk, which enjoyed a peak popularity in the 20s and 30s, is one of the best-known Westernized designs that came out of northwestern Persia.

But it was neither the only nor the first.

Decades earlier, western capital and finally even Western carpet manufacturers began moving into the Persian carpet industry much as they also were doing in the Ottoman Empire.

As they did, they not only helped to create the boom in 19th century interest in oriental rugs. Ironically, they also helped satisfy it with rugs that often were far more at home in Western houses than they ever would be in Eastern ones.

One of the reasons creating Western-designed rugs was possible in Persia is that, as the 19th century opened, the Persian carpet industry itself was in a state of disarray.

After producing stunning carpets during the long and stable Safavid era that started in 1501, Persia plunged into a prolonged period of power struggles and strife beginning with a Pashtun invasion from Afghanistan in 1722.

The court patronage system, which had stimulated the art of carpet making, ceased and the great urban workshops that supplied the aristocracy of Persia and Europe closed down.

It was not until the establishment of the Qajar dynasty in 1794 that things stabilized again. But by then, the world had changed.

The new challenge for the Persian Empire was to compete with expanding military and commercial strength of Europe which was based upon the industrial revolution.

One reaction was to adapt. The first signs of that can be seen in this royal portrait of the second Qajar shah, Fath Ali.

Such realistic portraiture was a huge departure from traditional Persian court painting based on the miniaturist style. According to Julian Raby, a Lecturer in Islamic Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, the look is directly borrowed from contemporaneous portraits of Napoleon, which were widely admired for their projection of power. The trees and sky in the background are equally European.

Fath Ali sought diplomatic contacts with the West. And he had an urgent reason to do so.

During his reign, Persia lost two wars in the Caucasus with the Russian Empire.

In 1813 it had to accept Russian annexation of Georgia and most of the north Caucasus region.

In 1828, it had to accept Russian sovereignty over the entire south Caucasus north of the Aras river (also known as the Araxes river and today's border between Iran and Azerbaijan).

This painting by Russian artist Franz Roubaud illustrates a scene from the Russo-Persian war of 1804 to 1813, when outnumbered Tsarist forces made a "living bridge" to transport their cannon to safety.

It was advances in artillery, many developed during the Napoleonic wars, that gave the Russian army a decisive advantage.

As part of their effort to secure the north of the Persian Empire against Russian expansion, the Qajars moved capital to Tehran.

And it is in the oldest historical building in this city – the Golestan Palace – that the empire's struggle to adapt to the West becomes still clearer.

By the time Nasr ud-Din, the best known shah of the Qajar dynasty, took the throne in 1848, Persian royal culture had adopted many of the trappings of European imperial style.

He alternated between wearing Western and Persian clothes, but preferred Western for official photos. As he posed, his empire was being flooded with cheap textiles from Russia and Britain, progressively putting traditional textile producers out of business.

Nasr ud-Dinh made several trips to Europe -- the first shah to do so – and encouraged the introduction of Western science, technology, and educational methods.

He also dramatically changed the Tehran skyline by building a new wing of the Golestan Palace with two European-model towers. Completed in 1867, and blending Eastern and Western designs, the towers were the first of their kind in the capital.

At the same time, Nasr ud-Dinh furnished some of his palace rooms in Western style and created museum rooms to display gifts received from European monarchs, especially chinaware.

Similarly dramatic changes happened in the world of traditional Persian carpets.

With Europe as the world's richest consumer market, Persian producers came under enormous pressure to adapt to that market's tastes.

That taste was no longer for court carpets – the shared culture of Renaissance days – but for carpets that fit middle class European homes with no equivalent in Persia at all.

Arto Keshishian, a London rug dealer, describes what happened next in his fascinating article 'Ziegler and Their Carpets,' published in Antiques and Fine Arts Magazine.

He notes that the traditional decorating scheme for the 'reception' room of a Persian home was one central rug surrounded by runners on all four sides.

But when these rugs were imported as individual pieces to the West they were considered “generally either too long or too narrow” for Western homes.

So, carpet designers – especially in Tabriz – began expanding production specifically to supply the Western market.

Focusing on the region around Sultanabad (now Arak), they encouraged weavers to weave larger carpets that could accent or fill large rooms. They also began modifying designs with Western styles in mind.

But that was hardly the only change.

By the 1880s, several Western companies moved into northwest Persia themselves, commissioning rugs to still more closely fit the home market. The most prominent was the Ph. Ziegler & Company, which would operate in Iran for 50 years and export tens of thousands of rugs to London and New York.

At the turn-of-the-last-century, Ziegler had about 2,500 looms in more than one hundred villages around Sultanabad.

The rugs traveled west on the same caravans that took Shi’ite pilgrims to the shrine city of Karbala in Iraq. At Baghdad, they were transferred to small steamers going downriver to Basra and then onto ships for London. (Patrice Fontaine’s ‘The Carpet Weaving Industry in the Arak Region,’ Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies III, Part I, 1987.)

Keshishian says the Ziegler carpets “were made to achieve a balance and symmetry in keeping with the scale of a room and its furnishings.”

Whether they were designed with a medallion or all-over floral pattern, they were “never overcrowded” so that they would “give a sense of open space and elegance.”

He writes: "The airy visual effect of Ziegler carpets resulted from the design as well as from a weave that was much coarser than that of traditional carpets."

As for color, “fewer color combinations were used, resulting in a simpler balance and harmony; the color green was liberally incorporated, perhaps to echo the English fondness for the countryside.”

The foreign companies' success had a direct impact on the other producers around Sultanabad.

Patrice Fontaine’s writes in her ‘The Carpet Weaving Industry in the Arak Region’ that to compete, Iranian merchants tried to lower production costs. They supplied weavers with lower-quality wool colored with new Western chemical dyes. And they commissioned designers to simplify rug patterns to speed up weaving and reduce the chance of mistakes.

It is possible today to view this Western tailoring of Persian rugs as an early example of globalization – of the same process of simplifying rug designs to match mass market tastes that characterizes much of the global carpet industry today.

And, indeed, there are some carpet experts who reject calling ‘American Sarouks,’ for example, oriental rugs at all.

As Murray L Eiland Jr. and Murray Eiland III, note in their book Oriental Carpets (2005):

“One might go as far as to say that there was nothing Persian about these rugs except the technique of pile knotting, and the same judgment could be made about thousands of Turkish rugs of the early 20th Century.”

But perhaps the first Western-designed Persian carpets tell a larger story than that.

They are equally a fascinating record of a time when the East’s whole relationship with the West was radically changing and ancient empires were desperately trying to adapt in order to survive.

The Persian Empire, like the Ottoman Empire, did not succeed. Here is a map showing its progressive loss of territory in the 19th and into the early 20th centuries.

With its territorial losses went ties to some of the most famous cities associated with the Persian Empire's traditional artistic culture, including Bukhara and Samarkand.

Meanwhile efforts to regain another key city, Herat, from Afghanistan failed definitively in 1857 with the Anglo-Persian war. Thereafter Russia and Britain directly vied for influence over the region, ending with the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 dividing nominally independent Qajar Iran into British and Russian spheres of influence.

By the start of the 20th century, the Persian dynasties were so weak that every shah thereafter would die in exile. The country has had to re-invent itself in a process that continues today.

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Orientalism And Oriental Carpets

PARIS, March 20, 2010 – Europe’s fascination with oriental rugs dropped off markedly from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s, as the French baroque decorating style, with Savonnerie and similar carpets, swept the Western world.

But by the late 1700s, oriental rugs were back.

And throughout the 1800s and well into the early 1900s, European interest in oriental rugs reached heights never known before or since.

It was a rapid comeback, which went from importing small-format rugs in the first half of the 1800s to importing large-format, room-size carpets in the second.

At the same time, oriental carpets went from being exotic accent pieces shown in isolation on the floor to being fully integrated into the Western concept of interior decorating, including being placed beneath sofas, tables and chairs.

And, in a final measure of success, even Europe’s machine-made rug industry began making copies of hand-made Eastern rugs in addition to European styles.

What happened to make oriental carpets not just the status symbol of the wealthy, as in previous centuries, but a standard part of Western homes?

Part of the answer is Orientalism, the art movement that swept the West from the early 1800s to well past the turn-of-the-last century.

If Orientalism had a starting point, it was probably Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798.

This picture is ‘Bonaparte Before the Sphinx,’ painted many years later by the Orientalist artist Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1868.

Napoleon’s expedition set off a wave of enthusiasm across Europe for rediscovering the Eastern world. The enthusiasm was not unlike earlier generations’ desire to rediscover ancient Greece and Rome via The Grand Tour.

Of course, Napoleon was not a tourist in the usual sense of the word.

His purpose in trying to seize Egypt, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, was to protect French trade interests and undermine Britain's access to India at the height of the French Revolutionary Wars.

But while Napoleon was ultimately forced to withdraw by British naval power and a newly reformed Ottoman army, the fact that his Armée d'Orient campaigned in Egypt and Syria for three years had an electrifying effect on his countrymen.

One result is this building in Paris (No. 2, Place du Caire) which was erected in 1799.

On its façade are hieroglyphs and busts of the goddess Hathor, regarded by ancient Egyptians as the goddess of motherhood and the annual flooding of the Nile.

The building includes an entrance of the “Passages du Caire,” a shopping arcade built at the same time and inspired by the Grand Bazaar in the Egyptian capital. It and other “passages” offered the novelty of covered shopping in the period before the streets of Paris had sidewalks.

By 1833, Paris had its own obelisk, as well. The Obelisk of Luxor, a gift from the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, was erected in the Center of the Place de la Concorde.

The fact the obelisk had spent most of its 3,000 years marking the entrance of the Amon temple at Luxor, and in no way matched French architecture, caused no-one alarm. Instead, that seemed only to make it more desirable.

Other cities followed suit.

London put up its obelisk, also a gift from an Egyptian ruler, in 1878.

New York did the same in 1881, after loading its obelisk into the hull of a steamship.

And, of course, Rome already had one - in St. Peter’s Square - imported by Emperor Caligula in 37 AD.

The burgeoning interest in the East, mixed with the Romanticist spirit of the time, inspired thousands of 19th century artists, writers, and travelers to journey east to personally discover the Orient for themselves.

What they saw and depicted, in paintings and travel literature, made even those who never left home eager to take part – even if just by having a carpet.

Gérôme’s ‘The Carpet Merchant’ (painted in 1887) shows the Court of the Rug Market in Cairo, which Gérôme visited in 1885.

Rug expert Jon Thompson writes in his book ‘Oriental Carpets: from the Tents, Cottages, and Workshops of Asia’ (1993):

“The resurgence of interest in carpets was stimulated by the so-called Orientalist painters, artists working in the Middle East, who presented to the European public a romantic and dramatized view of local life. This type of painting … became extremely popular.”

Not all Orientalist painters were particularly strict about what they saw and what they later added to the scenes from their imagination.

One good example of liberties taken is Charles Robertson’s ‘A Carpet Sale in Cairo.’

The most prominent "carpet" on display is in fact an embroidered cloth, an Uzbek suzanni, of supernatural size.

The figures in the painting are made deliberately small in relationship to everything around them -- a standard Orientalist trick for emphasizing the exotic nature of the setting.

Orientalist writers offered their readers a similar mix of fact and fiction.

Some writers, reflecting the expanding power and self-certainty of Europe in the colonial age, passed harsh judgment on what they saw.

Edith Wharton's described the people in the marketplace of Marrakech with a string of stereotypes in her book ‘In Morocco’ (1920):

"Fanatics in sheep skins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the mosque....consumptive Jews with pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, lusty slave-girls with earthen oil-jars resting against their swaying hips."

That was in the same spirit as pictures like this one: ‘Her Master’s Choice’ by Fabio Fabbi.

But other writers saw the East as not so different from Europe itself, despite the outward dissimilarities.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife to the British ambassador in Istanbul, wrote about Turkish women to her sister in 1717:

"It is true their law permits (husbands) four wives, but there is no instance of a man of quality that makes use of this liberty, or of a woman of rank that would suffer it. Thus you see dear sister, the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would make us believe."

This picture by John Frederic Lewis seems more in line with her impressions. It is entitled “Indoor Gossip, Cairo.”

It is interesting to note that throughout this period, Eastern visitors to the Europe were just as filled with mixed emotions as Orientalist artists and writers seemed to be.

Zeynab Hanoum, the daughter of the minister of foreign affairs for the Ottoman Empire, wrote in her book ‘A Turkish Woman's European Impressions’ (1912):

"One thing to which I never seem to accustom myself is my hat. It is always falling off. Sometimes, too, I forget that I am wearing a hat and lean back in my chair: and what an absurd fashion - to lunch in a hat! Still, hats seem to play a very important role in Western life. Guess how many I have at present – twenty."

Travel between West and East did not become easy until the large scale use of steamships and, ultimately, the railroad.

In 1833, the newly inaugurated Orient Express still only took passengers as far as Vienna. But by 1889 passengers could travel direct all the way to Istanbul.

Suddenly, it was very possible for tourists to travel to the same exotic Orient once reserved for artists, writers, diplomats, and soldiers. And this, too, fed the appetite for carpets back home.

As Thompson notes:

"Paintings of 19th century interiors often include a rug or carpet, usually a tribal or village weaving from the Middle East. Some of these were bought in the local bazaar and brought home by those tireless Victorian travelers, while others were imported by merchants from Turkey, which became the center of the carpet trade."

Here is a painting of the sitting room of the artist-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is by Henry Treffry Dunn, Rossetti's studio assistant after 1867.

Not all the carpets that came to Europe as part of the now booming carpet business were collectibles. Far from it.

The exploding Western demand for carpets brought an explosion of supply in response, and Turkey soon began producing large quantities of coarsely made, crudely patterned carpets for export.

Many of these low-quality carpets are now staples for sale in bric-a-brac shops, where they sometimes shock modern rug lovers. But they once were just as commonplace on hotel and parlor-room floors as were the better quality pieces we so much more often associate now with the 19th century.

(The photo at the top of this story is a detail from Charles Robertson’s painting ‘The Bazaar Khan El Khaleelee Cairo’.)

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Orientalist Art of the 19th Century

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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.

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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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