The Orient

(Fiction - By Karel Capek, 1923)

The well-known Czech journalist Karel Capek wrote about buying oriental carpets in Prague at the beginning of the last century. In his short tale 'The Orient,' he describes Old Europe's fascinating world of carpet connoisseurs and carpet sellers – both honest and not so honest.

It can happen that you win the lottery, or that you get married, or that one day it simply strikes you that you want something beautiful at home; whatever the reason, you decide to buy a Persian carpet. But in the process of actually purchasing an oriental rug, your life turns upside down. First of all, you will have to smoke -- a lot -- because smoking is part of the oriental atmosphere. Second, you will have to walk over mountains of valuable carpets with the air of one who has never set foot upon anything else. You will have to assume the look of a connoisseur, fingering the pile and the back of each rug as you mumble to yourself. There will be a whole array of initiation ceremonies, from special Persian jargon to passionate Turkish haggling, until finally you reduce a carpet seller to tears as he says he feels so close to you that he is ready to give you his rugs almost for free, even at a loss, and simply as a present between equals. There will be, I say, an entire string of extraordinary moments but still you will have only reached the threshold of the Orient. And then, thinking you have finished, you will safely choose a modestly priced Kazak and race home with rosy visions of how it will look beside your bed. In so many ways, a first carpet is like first love.

The next day, someone will ring your doorbell. It is a polite, lively little fellow pushing another, silent, man in front of him. Immediately, he blurts out in the doorway that he is coming to you because you are an exceptional and extraordinary connoisseur of Persian carpets and that he has brought his business partner with him who just arrived yesterday from uh, well uh ... Constantinople ... with some carpets that, truly!, are just for specialists, and he has brought them first to you so that you can just look, nothing more than look, at them, just for the pleasure of it. And already he is opening the door again and shouting, “Vaclav! Come here!” And in comes a delivery boy with a huge pile of carpets on his back. The man from Constantinople really does have a kind of Persian air but he never says anything, and the active little man starts laying out the first carpet with Vaclav. “Now, this is a fine piece, isn’t it? This one is worthy of you ...” You mention it isn’t quite the kind of thing you are looking for. “That’s just what I thought myself!” the vivacious little fellow shouts victoriously. “You, sir, are a marvelous connoisseur; but here I have a Shiraz which is truly perfect for you, that only a real specialist can appreciate!”

This Shiraz seems horrendously pricy and now your lively guest is whispering something to the silent oriental man in a language that might be Persian or might be Turkish. “Also meinetwegen,” the Persian mutters in German, or “fair enough,” and the lively man announces that his friend is giving you the Shiraz simply as a present, almost completely free, because you are you, and just for 40,000 crowns. You fight off the temptation, you will neither accept as a gift a Shirvan, nor a Gendje, nor a Bukhara, nor even a Baluch, not to mention a Kerman and a Senneh and all sorts of prayer carpets; this time you defend yourself against everything, until this obliging fellow asserts that you have truly prodigious taste and that the really valuable rugs he has are still tied up in customs and if you could see those, well, you would cry with joy. Then, he leads out the Persian and Mr. Vaclav, promising to come back later.

So far, so good. But three hours later, a man in a top hat rings your bell. He hands you his visit card and introduces himself as Mr. So and So, an industrialist who is in momentary financial difficulty. He has decided to sell his private rug collection and ... already he is calling down the corridor “Vaclav! Komm hier! ... and Mr. Vaclav is bringing in a new load of carpets on his shoulders. The man in the top hat discreetly speaks of family problems, saying he has to sell at any cost, even way below market price, but only to a real judge, to a true authority, who knows how much a beautiful carpet means. For example, this authentic Hamadan, the man in the top hat sighs, or this fabulous Mosul. To your surprise, each piece in his family collection seems to still have its inventory tag and its customs seal.

You escape from the heavy-hearted monsieur. A day later, a thin man appears who wants to speak to you very privately about things that are “just for four eyes.” Then he tells you that he has … that he has Persian Carpets ... perfect museum pieces ... that he has obtained under rather special circumstances that, well, to be honest, that he personally spirited out of a Sultan’s seraglio, only please don’t speak about it. In short, they are one-of-a-kind pieces for connoisseurs only and staggeringly underpriced. And already Mr. Vaclav is back with a cargo of rugs on his back and on all of them, too, are customs seals and inventory numbers.

If you don’t make use of this exceptional purchasing opportunity, there is no reason to worry, because tomorrow a Russian couple will come to you, from a noble family which has had to flee the country and which escaped with nothing but some rare Persian carpets and now, out of the most dire necessity must part with them. Mr. Vaclav is already waiting in the corridor. And, afterwards, you will get a visit from a resplendent Levantine who does a little business with carpets here and there and the other day came across some pieces that he has not shown to anybody, that are only for true enthusiasts. And after him will come a juvenile delinquent who won’t have Mr. Vaclav with him but who knows of a superb Persian carpet that could be sold to a discreet and well informed collector. And then there still will be the solicitor from Vienna, the widow in need, and the Greek who has no money to pay customs and so has to sell at least one precious Persian carpet -- far below its price, of course, and only to an initiate.

In short, if you keep your eyes and ears open, in a little over a week you will learn how to evaluate the weave, material, age, color quality, and finesse of the design of an oriental carpet. You will meet rogues, cognoscenti, eccentrics, entrepreneurs, and small-time crooks; you will make a kind of pilgrimage to the Orient and, doing so, you will discover a strange, wily, ancient, modern form of business that you will never encounter anywhere else and that richly repays your investment.

(‘The Orient’ was published in the newspaper 'Lidove Noviny' in 1923; Photo of carpet is courtesy of Ali Majdfar/Persian Carpet Museum Photo Gallery.)

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Karel Capek

Barry O'Connell: Notes on Oriental Carpets and Persian Rugs

From Table To Wall To Floor: Oriental Rugs Keep Moving Around European Homes

PRAGUE, May 9, 2008 -- Oriental carpets are the great nomads of European homes

Over the centuries, few furnishings have moved around as much as they have. Rugs have been put on tables, hung on walls, stretched over sofas, displayed on floors and, finally, tucked under the furniture.

In the process, they have helped express the social values of their owners – from medieval merchants looking for status symbols to modern families looking for creature comforts.

All this makes the history of rugs in Western homes a fascinating study.

Rug experts date the first imports of oriental carpets into Europe to around 1200 – the time of the fourth Crusade – or earlier. The knights leading the crusades were keen observers of Eastern court life and eager to acquire the trappings for themselves.

By 1300, Europe’s court painters began to show some of these acquisitions in their artworks and by 1450 the depictions are so highly detailed they can be cataloged. The carpets – then all from Anatolia with geometric motifs – appeared in many paintings with Christian religious themes and were usually placed at the feet of the Virgin Mary or on the steps of alters. One example is Alessio Baldovinetti’s Madonna and Child with Saints, circa 1454.



Giving the carpets such a place of honor in religious paintings may have been a reflection of the awe the oriental rugs inspired in the European public. And it may show how easily the Eastern textiles found a place within Europe’s own tradition of using luxurious tapestries as symbols of power and prestige.

Through the 1400s, carpets began to become sufficiently available to rich Europeans to also appear in portraits of the nobility and wealthy merchants. By 1450, paintings of festivals in cities like Venice and Florence show wealthy merchant families draping their rugs out their windows for all to see.

The public displays seem intended to emphasize the wealth of the merchant families and their growing social status as Europe moved into the Renaissance. And the rugs from distant lands seem a perfect symbol of the cosmopolitan mood that accompanied Europe’s emergence from centuries of feudalism.

By 1550, Persian carpets began to be imported into Europe along with Anatolians. The Persian court pieces, with their curving floral patterns, equally became part of the portraits of the rich and powerful – only now oriental carpets were displayed most frequently on top of tables.


At times, the tables included conference tables, as in a famous portrait of British and Spanish officials concluding a treaty in 1604 over an Anatolian. This painting is The Somerset House Conference, by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz.

Carpets continued to be draped over furniture in European houses through the 1600s and 1700s, but by 1800s they were on the move again.

During the 1800s, the accelerating industrial age made many Europeans and Americans wealthier and they began acquiring the luxury goods of the rich, including oriental carpets. The new owners experimented with putting rugs of many different sizes in many different places in their homes.

The first half of the century saw carpets move onto the walls and, in small formats, onto the floor. They were status symbols to be displayed and, when they were on the floor, other furniture was pushed back to give them pride of place. Different designs became associated with particular rooms. A lady’s boudoir would have a bright and floral Persian rug. A man’s study or smoking room would more likely have a red-and-black Turkmen.

But by the second half of the 1800s, the trend was toward big format carpets covering more and more of the floor. As a result, carpets began to go under furniture. Compared to the earlier taste for putting carpets on top of tables, this was history stood on its head. Yet the practice, and the sense that a carpet – or carpeting – adds comfort to a room but need not be considered as artwork continues today.

Could carpets one day come off the floor again? If they do, there are two directions in which they might go.

One direction is suggested by Europe’s periodic taste for draping colorful carpets over sofas. The famous Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, raised his couch to iconic status partly by covering it with a beautiful nomadic Qashqai rug. He maintained that the mysterious motifs in the carpet helped his patient relax and wander back into their memories more easily.

At times, carpets even have become the upholstery of the furniture itself. Jon Thompson writes in his 1983 textbook 'Oriental Carpets' of a fad in the 1870s and 1880s for cutting up tribal carpets to use them as the covering fabric for armchairs. He credits the destructive practice with saving at least parts of some valuable rugs that might otherwise have been worn out by use on the floor. The fad inspired one German businessman, Carl Wilhelm Koch, to machine-weave furniture fabrics in Turkmen and Qashqai designs.

The other direction is for carpets to go back onto the walls, the usual place for artwork. They have often been there before. The 19th century craze for prayer rugs from across the Islamic world made many homes look like museums. And still today, a small silk rug of almost any design is more likely to be hung than walked upon.

The future is never possible to predict. But it is interesting to think that putting an oriental carpet on the floor – so automatic today – is historically a recent trend in Western interior design. And if history is a guide, it may only be a step on the way to something else.

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

Turkish Rugs In European Paintings

Kilim Sofas

Natural Dyes Return To Oriental Carpets But Without The Famous Insect Reds

CHAHARMAHAL District, Iran; May 2, 2008 – When Iranian photographer Javid Tafazoli was walking through a weaving village in the mountains of Chaharmahal va Bakhtiyari province, far to the west of Isfahan, he saw an arresting sight.

It was a cascade of recently dyed red wool hanging from a tree. In a world grown used to garish colors, the mellow brick-red shades looked like a startlingly natural part of the landscape. He snapped the picture and entitled it simply “Red.”



The same picture could be taken in many villages in Iran today, where weavers are increasingly returning to using natural dyes. They hope that going back to traditional materials will raise the quality of rugs and the value people put on them.

But if there is a new desire to derive red from age-old sources such as the root of the Madder plant, which gives hues ranging from pink to rose to scarlet, another ancient group of reds seems certain not to return. They are the once famous insect reds.

For centuries, dyers dried and powdered insects to produce colors ranging from pink-lilac through bright crimson to deep-brown-purple. In many areas where the dyes could not be produced locally, they were prized imports.

The first insect dye to be traded in large commercial quantities was Indian lac, derived from the Caccus lacca bug. The insect, which feeds on ficus trees in India, was also a source for lacquer and shellac used on furniture.

The fame of Indian lac grew so great that it was exported over huge distances. In their authoritative book ‘Oriental Carpets,’ Murray L. Eiland and Murray Eiland III say the dyes have been detected in Safavid and Ottoman court carpets as well as on 19th century Turkmen rugs. That is despite the fact that madder was the standard and abundant source for red from Turkey to Central Asia.

Later, lac gave way to still higher quality reds obtained from the Indian’s bug’s distant cousin, the South American cochineal. The cochineal reds -- traded in the Aztec and Mayan empires and still used in Mexico and Peru (below) -- were discovered by Spanish conquistadors in 1519.



The Europeans considered cochineal to be the perfect red dye because it is stable, easily absorbed by fabrics, and extremely resistant to fading.

The brilliant red comes from the carminic acid in the body of the female cochineal larva, which also makes the bug unpalatable to predators. The Spanish bred the bugs for size and color and created huge ranches of cactus – the bugs’ favorite home. To produce a kilogram of the dye required some 155,000 dried insects and, by 1770, at the peak of the trade, Mexico was exporting some half a million kilos a year.

The global business in cochineal dyes is documented in the 2005 book ‘A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire’ by Amy Butler Greenfield.

Eventually, the Spanish expanded cultivation of the bugs to the Canary Islands and North Africa. But the lucrative business finally came to an end with the invention of chemical dyes in northern Europe in the mid 19th century. Within decades, cochineal red, along with madder, virtually disappeared from use under a tide of synthetic replacements.

Now, in a world saturated with artificial colors, natural dyes are slowly making a comeback. But, in a strange twist for the carpet industry, the once so abundant and highly sought cochineal dyes remain forgotten. The reason is economics.

After they were swept from the textile industry by synthetic dyes, cochineal reds – also known as carmine – found a new and more profitable place in the cosmetics and food coloring industries. Today carmine is a high-priced specialty dye that puts the red in red pistachio nuts, maraschino cherries and Italian aperitifs. Its advantage over man-made red dyes is that it is not toxic or carcinogenic.

That means that making a rug with cochineal dyes today would cost a fortune. The giant cactus farms in Mexico may still exist and the dyes may still be exported, but carpets with insect reds belong to the past.

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Related Links:

Wikipedia: Cochineal

A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire, by Amy Butler Greenfield.

Book: The Red Dyes: Cochineal, Madder And Murex Purple: A World Tour of Textile Dying by Gosta Sandberg

Javid Tafazoli: Photographs

Central Asian Kyrgyz Felt Carpets Search For A Role In The Modern World

BISHKEK, April 25, 2008 – When one imagines the vast steppes of Central Asia, yurts and felt carpets come quickly to mind.

It is from sheets of plain white felt that yurts are built, and it is with colorfully patterned felt that they are decorated inside. The result is a warm and cheerful shelter that served Central Asia’s nomads well for thousands of years.

If you drive along Kyrgyzstan's endless chains of Celestial Mountains (Ala-too in Kyrgyz), you will indeed spot yurts dotting the slopes with flocks of sheep nearby in an idyllic picture of nomadic life.

But, it can be a little disappointing for felt enthusiasts to arrive in modern Bishkek and hardly find a yurt, or even a felt, in sight.

In Kyrgyzstan’s capital city -- population about one million -- yurts today are only set up in the garden of someone’s home when a family member dies. The lady of the house faces the inner wall of the tent each time mourners approach the house and start a dirge. Female newcomers join her in lamenting, while men remain standing outside, facing the wall of the yurt and wailing.

Even in the marketplaces it is hard to find nomadic felt carpets. The carpets for sale are machine-woven imitations of sophisticated Turkmen and Iranian pile carpets.

Janyl Chytyrbaeva, a Kyrgyz journalist, explains why. “Everyone wants a house like you see on TV,” she says. The machine-made carpets from artificial fiber are given as gifts at weddings and funerals and most people’s apartments and houses are covered with them.

Does this mean that felt has disappeared from Kyrgyz life? No. But like so many traditional handicrafts elsewhere, it is endangered and its only protectors are female artisans from poor rural area and artists.



Chytyrbaeva, who herself stitched her own felt dowry rugs as a teenager, says the only place to find it in use in Bishkek is where the poorest migrants from the countryside have settled on the outskirts of the city. There, they cover the floors with plain yet colorful felt mats or with patterned Ala-Kiyiz, which are made by rolling colored felt into a plain felt background. More highly patterned carpets, Shyrdaks (Shirdaks, Shurdoks), are made by sewing together felt of different colors and then stitching them onto a plain felt basecloth.

All these kinds of felt carpets provide warm flooring in a country where the winters are bitterly cold. For additional warmth, laborers’ families will also put sheepskins here and there on top of the felt. Sometimes, pieces of sheepskins with black, brown, or white wool are stitched together to give these mats, too, an interesting shyrdak-like pattern.

Still, if these furnishings seem humble, the ancient felt-working tradition of Kyrgyzstan itself is rich. Skilled felt-makers can produce pieces of effortless sophistication and great art just as readily as ordinary villagers make plain felt floor mats.

Highly complicated Shyrdaks are created by cutting the same design into several sheets of brightly colored felt and then switching and refitting the pieces together like jig-saw puzzles.

The flowing and harmonious patterns, filled with symbolism, complement the unstructured texture of the felt. With additional techniques, including appliqué, more detailed designs become possible.

Kyrgyz felts are gradually gaining a place in the Western market, yet they still remain little known compared to the other great textiles of Central Asia: the red pile rugs of Turkmenistan or the Suzani embroideries of Uzbekistan.

A handful of rug importers are scouring the Kyrgyz countryside for artisans but many more Western businesses seem content with just importing Kyrgyz-made felt slippers and hats or, more recently, stuffed toy animals.

That seems modest for a nomadic culture that in many ways was unique. The Kyrgyz, who live in a mountainous country, migrated up and down their slopes with the seasons while most of their steppe neighbors wandered widely across the plains.

Today, they can date their presence in the mountains to thousands of years ago and have many traditions all their own. That includes the design of the national flag. It is the only one in the world that has at its center a stylized representation of the roof of a traditional yurt.

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Kyrgyzstyle Company, Kyrgyzstan

FeltRugs Company, Britain

Shirdak Silkroad Textile Company, Netherlands

Photos of Kyrgyzstan: Jonathan Barth

YouTube: How Nomads Make Felt (Mongolia)

Drawing Oriental Carpet Designs Is An Artform Of Its Own

BAKU and TEHRAN, April 18, 2008 -- Long before most town and city carpets are woven, the design is recorded on paper.

The drawing, or 'cartoon,' is what the weavers follow to create their patterns. And when the designs are complex, preparing the cartoons becomes an art form in itself.

Traditionally, cartoons have been drawn by hand on graph paper. Many producers maintain that system. Their designers use colored pencils or paint to create a portrait of part of the carpet that shows the border and as much of the field as needed to establish the pattern.

Vugar Dadashov, the head of Baku-based Azerbaijanrugs, uses this life-size design of one-quarter of a 1.5 x 2 meter Akstafa rug. It took a designer four days to draw and his weavers have been using the cartoon for three years.

Because this Akstafa design is symmetrical, the weavers can complete the remainder of the rug's pattern themselves – though they have to mentally flip and reverse the cartoon to do so. It is an exercise in abstract thinking for everyone involved, and one that dates back to the very earliest days of the settled carpet trade.

But when carpets are non-symmetrical, or contain surprise elements in some parts of the field but not others, the cartoons have to show more. Then designers may draw a half of the rug or even the full rug. And at that point, drawing a carpet can become as time-consuming as any other form of portrait art.

Hossein Attaran, of Carpet Heritage in Tehran, says it can take a month to hand-draw a full carpet with an all-over design. For that reason, he and many other producers have increasingly turned to digital design systems to speed the work.

Attaran says that a designer can produce this digital image of the full-field pattern of an antique Bidjar in about a week. The image is later printed out on paper sheets that are sent to a village weaver near the town of Bidjar to hang on her home loom as she works part-time on the rug through the course of a year.

But even with software, designing remains a painstaking job and the designer still must make what traditionally are his or her own contributions to the drawing. That is, to give a personal interpretation to the motifs and choice of colors so as to infuse the work with life.

Where do the designers get the training to do this?

In many rug-producing countries, the education was once solely by apprenticeship but today it is increasingly formal.

Dadashov's designer is a professional painter who graduated from the Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Art. She works full-time for him and their inspirations come mostly from photos of rare antique Caucasian rugs.

In Iran, universities in many cities now offer courses in rug design. Tehran has two such famous schools. One is the University of Art, which offers a Bachelor of Arts program in carpet design for both men and women. The other is Al Zahra University, which includes studies of carpet design as part of its Bachelor of Arts program for women.

Attaran says the programs include familiarity with the great carpets of the past but focus most of all on the production of the past 50 to 60 years. The students, who must be talented artists to enter, learn the styles of each of Iran's many carpet-producing regions so well that they can draw each one's characteristic 'guls,' or flowers, in their pure form.

That is partly so that the designers can preserve the identity of Persian carpets against ever increasing numbers of would-be imitators abroad.

"I have seen drawings of carpets outside of Iran and they have such a foreign accent, deliberate or not, that they have taken the original character out of the rug entirely," Attaran says. He employs two designers who have graduated from university programs precisely to keep his own production accent-free.

An Iranian designer can make the equivalent of $ 400 to $ 500 a month – a reasonable income in the local market - and has a status comparable to that of a graphic artist in the West. Increasingly, the designers are women, both because there are more women art graduates than men and because of economic reasons.

With Iran’s official inflation rate running around 20 percent, many women welcome a designer’s salary as a supplement to their family income. But many men who are the sole breadwinners for their families say they now must find professions that pay higher salaries than the carpet industry can offer.

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Azerbaijanrugs

Carpet Heritage

How Iranians Classify Persian Carpets – with Table

How Iranians Classify Persian Carpets – with Illustrations

Book: Oriental Carpet Design: A Guide to Traditional Motifs, Patterns and Symbols, by P.R.J. Ford

A Carpet Of Stone Honors Hamburg As Heart Of Europe's Oriental Rug Trade

HAMBURG, April 11, 2008 -- When people think of oriental carpets, they usually don’t think of Germany’s biggest port.

But Hamburg is the major entry point for handwoven carpets into Europe and for trans-shipments to America. One third of the world’s carpets move through here each year, along with many more goods from the East ranging from tea to coffee to computers.

For decades, this was best known only to cognoscenti of the carpet trade. But in recent years, enthusiasts have tried to put Hamburg more openly on the rug map. They have succeeded so well that today anyone visiting Hamburg’s port area can learn a lot about the global carpet business, too.

The place to begin is the port’s storehouse area, a sprawling complex of warehouses built along a maze of canals at the turn of the last century. Called the Speicherstadt (Storehouse City), the district is popular with tour boats which carry visitors up the canals to admire the red-brick architecture of the buildings. But the warehouses themselves, despite their yesteryear gables and turrets, are very much a still-functioning depot area.

In the heart of the warehouse complex is a bridge covered with an oriental carpet. There is a sign at each end that warns any ladies who happen to be walking by in high heels to be careful. The reason is not that they might damage the surface of the carpet, but so that they don’t trip on it.


The carpet is made of stone and is the brainchild of German artist Frank Raendchen. He mobilized scores of sculptors, illustrators, students and photographers in 2004 to join him in sticking 1.5 tons of colored stone to the bridge with synthetic resin to reproduce the design of a Persian carpet.

What are the stone carpet’s dimensions? Length: 37.5 meters. Width: 2.45 meters. “Pile” height: 1 centimeter. It is modeled on a real carpet that Raendchen rented for the project for 70 euros from a dealer.

Raendchen says his goal was to turn the warehouse area “inside-out” to show visitors the exotic things stored inside. He says he focused on carpets because “the oriental rug, besides its economic importance and its decorative value, still possesses some of the magical allure of the great wide world.”

The oriental carpet made of stone is not the only way to appreciate the some 3.6 million square meters worth of handwoven rugs that flood in and out of Speicherstadt each year. There are also several museums that tell the story of the port and its exotic trade.

Among these are the Speicherstadtmuseum, with its hands-on exhibits of bales of rubber and coffee sacks, and the Spice Museum, where visitors can see and smell some 50 spices. Both of them are located in original warehouses.

And there is also one very unexpected museum, squeezed between the Spice Museum and a carpet warehouse. It is the Afghan Museum, with displays of rugs and other artifacts. An Afghan carpet salesman founded it in 1998 to remind himself and other Afghans living in Germany of their homeland. Today, it helps to make ends meet by doubling as a venue for catered parties.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing a carpet lover can see in this sprawling warehouse town is history repeating itself – over and over again.

Despite all the modernization, the warehouse crews still use pulleys to haul pallets of carpets off barges and up to the warehouse windows many stories above the waterline. There the carpets will stay until they are sold to retailers around the Western world, and more rugs arrive to take their place.

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Frank Raendchen's Stone Carpet

Speicherstadtmuseum

Spice Museum, Hamburg

Afghan Museum, Hamburg

Antique-Wash: The Great Game of Making New Oriental Carpets Look Old

PRAGUE, April 4, 2008 – A Turkmen friend once was visiting his uncle, who owns a rug shop in Peshawar.

As they drank up their strong black tea, the uncle threw what was left in his glass onto the new carpet at his feet.

The visitor was shocked. “What, you don’t like that carpet?” he asked.

“I do,” the uncle replied. “It’s my favorite. But foreigners want carpets that look old and used.”

What the uncle was doing – in a modest way – was ‘antiquing’ his merchandise. The practice has a long and venerable history, from ‘tea-washing’ carpets with herbal extracts, to dousing them in chemicals, to hand-painting shadings into the pile.

The most famous of old rug forgers, the Romanian weaver Theodor Tuduc (1888 - 1983), reportedly used river stones to abrade his Transylvanian look-alikes. The rubbing helped make his copies look so genuinely used that some were even collected by museums.

Here is a carpet by Tuduc that is inspired by a Mamluke design. Tuduc carpets are so well woven that today they are collectibles in their own right. The carpet is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Early European adventure-travelers to the East reported still other antiquing techniques. Eustache de Lory wrote about two in his 1910 article ‘The Persian Bazaars:’

“The wily Persian has discovered the secret of making new carpets look ancient. He smokes them over a fire made with special herbs, and this gives the carpet a used appearance and fades the colors. It is nearly impossible, when this is well done, to distinguish between a genuine antique and a forgery. A commoner way of aging a carpet (very common in the bazaars) is to spread it out on the street, in order that every passer-by and animal may trample on it.”

Of course, de Lory was an Orientalist, a genre of artists that professionally exoticized the East. No-one knows if his notes are any more reliable than paintings by Charles Robertson in the 1880s of Cairo’s alleys filled with Caucasian carpets.

Still, the question remains. Why is the artificial aging of carpets – with or without the buyer’s knowledge – such a persistent part of the rug business?

One reason might be that many Western consumers find Eastern colors too bold. Aging rugs with chemical washes can mute the hues to better fit those buyers' tastes.

But another answer might be found in the way different societies regard time and the value of handcrafted goods.

In the hyper-modern societies of the west, old people often complain they do not get the respect their years deserve. But old things, such as heirlooms, are venerated.

That veneration seems to be doubled when the heirlooms represent traditional handicrafts that were commonplace in Europe until they faced extinction in the machine age. Today, surviving pieces are seen as something genuine, artisanal, and rare and the older they look the more authentic they seem.

Many of these arts and crafts exist today mostly in museum collections. The museums themselves began to appear from the 1750s onwards, becoming more and more numerous and nostalgic as the industrial era proceeded.

By contrast, more traditional societies seem to have a very different view of their traditional objects. Here, time erodes a thing’s value instead of enhancing it. After all, similar objects are still being made by every new generation in more or less the same way. When something wears out, its value passes on to its replacement.

So, perhaps it is no surprise that strange things can happen when modern and traditional worlds meet – things that not only interest businessmen but also some anthropologists. One is Brian Spooner:

“It is in the nature of things that our search for authenticity is constantly frustrated by the people among whom we seek it. The more we reveal our need for authenticity to the Turkmen, the more they frustrate our search by adapting their wares in ways they imagine should please us.”

Spooner made that observation in his article "Weavers and Dealers: the authenticity of an oriental carpet." It appeared in the 1988 book ‘The Social Life of Things.’

In a footnote, Spooner cites as an example the museum of the University of Pennsylvania once receiving a gift of a genuine Turkmen carpet woven in the design of an American flag. Compared to that, splashing tea over a traditional Turkmen design seems almost like a blessing.

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Travelers’ Accounts: Eustache de Lory, The Persian Bazaars

Rugs in Orientalist Paintings, by Filiberto Boncompagni

Brian Spooner in ‘Weavers and Dealers: the authenticity of an oriental carpet”

The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective