- Key People:
- William Morris
- Erastus Brigham Bigelow
Carpets developed in Central and western Asia as coverings for beaten-earth floors. From time immemorial, carpets covered the floors of house and tent as well as mosque and palace. In the homes of wealthy Eastern families, floor coverings serve an aesthetic as well as a practical function. Rugs are often grouped in a traditional arrangement, partly to allow for simultaneous display; the carpet’s size and shape are determined by the intended place within that arrangement. There are usually four carpets. The largest, called mīān farsh, usually measuring some 18 × 8 feet (5.5 × 2.5 metres), is placed in the centre. Flanking the mīān farsh are two runners, or kanārehs, which are mainly used for walking and which measure some 18 × 3 feet (5.5 × 1 metres). The principal rug, or kellegi, averaging 12 × 6 feet (3.7 × 1.8 metres), is placed at one end of the arrangement of three carpets, so that its length stretches almost completely across their collective widths.
The intended use sometimes determines both design and size, as in the prayer rug, or namāzlik. Design, naturally linked to religious imagery, is characterized by the mihrab, or prayer niche (an imitation of the prayer niche in the wall of a mosque), the apex of which could be pointed toward Mecca. But other religious motifs also appear, such as hanging lamps, water jugs, or “hand prints” to mark the place of the worshiper on the rug.
Until the mid-17th century, Asian carpets imported into Europe were considered too precious to serve as permanent floor coverings. Placed on the floor only on church holidays or in an aristocrat’s presence, they were otherwise hung on the wall or used to cover tables, benches, and chests; and, particularly in Italy, they were hung over balconies as decoration during festivals. Taking this European attitude into account, the Egyptian manufacturers created several unusual shapes and sizes for the European market: square, round, and cruciform carpets, obviously designed for tables rather than floors. During the 17th century, covering the entire floor with costly knotted carpets became fashionable. The mid-20th century witnessed a boom in antique-carpet prices that resulted in choicer pieces ending up back on the wall.
Oriental carpets served many uses besides covering floors. They made handsome curtains, served as tribute money, and were frequently gifts of one state to another. They were used as blankets, canopies, coverings for tent openings, and tomb covers. They have also made excellent saddle covers and storage bags for use in tents. Such modest rugs were always close to the life of the people, who lavished care on them and into them wove life-protecting symbols. Other, more bizarre, uses have included assisting in the demise of al-Mustaʿṣim, Baghdad’s last caliph—who in 1258 was wrapped in a carpet and beaten to death—and dramatically enhancing Cleopatra’s introduction to Julius Caesar, when she stepped out of an unrolled rug. In less well-documented instances, they have assumed magical properties and taken flight.
Periods and centres of activity
Oriental carpets
Oriental carpets are those made in western and Central Asia, North Africa, and the Caucasus region of Europe. Rug design, in western Asia at least, had gone beyond felt and plaited mats before the 1st millennium bc. A threshold rug represented in a stone carving (now in the Louvre) from the 8th-century-bc Assyrian palace of Khorsabad (in modern Iraq) has an allover field pattern of quatrefoils (four-leafed motifs), framed by a lotus border. Other Assyrian carvings of the period also show patterns that survive in modern designers’ repertories.
The oldest known examples of knotting were uncovered during an excavation of royal graves, dating from the 5th to the 3rd century bc at Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. The finds include various articles of felt with appliqué patterns and a superb carpet with a woolen pile, knotted with the symmetrical, or Turkish, knot (in the Hermitage). The carpet, possibly of Persian origin, measures 6 × 6.5 feet (1.8 × 2.0 metres). The central field has a checkerboard design with a floral star pattern in each square. Of the two wide borders, the inner one shows a frieze of elk, the outer one a frieze of horsemen.
Knotting was not necessarily the only or even the most important method of carpet making. Felt carpets were used for a long time in Central and East Asia, as indicated by magnificent 1st-century-ad specimens from Noin Ula in northern Mongolia (1st century bc to 1st century ad; in the Hermitage) or those in the Shōsō Repository (Japanese Imperial storehouse) in Nara near Ōsaka (before the 8th century). The costly rugs with figure motifs and gold mentioned by Greek and Arab writers may have been woven or embroidered and were probably exhibited on the wall as well as on the floor. The large carpet made in the 6th century for the Sāsānid palace in Ctesiphon is the most famous (see above Ornament and imagery: Symbolism of overall design); but other Oriental courts, such as the caliphate at Baghdad (8th–13th century), also used valuable carpets.
In the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, Asia Minor and the Caucasus produced coarse, vividly coloured rugs with stars, polygons, and often patterns of stylized Kūfic writing. A special group with simple, highly conventionalized animal forms was also woven; the most important of these carpets are represented by seven fragments of strong, repeating geometric patterns in bold colours—red, yellow, and blue—found in the mosque of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Kay-Qubād I at Konya in Anatolia and now in the Museum of Turkish and Islāmic Art, Istanbul. They probably date from the 13th century. In the State Museum of Berlin and in the National Museum of Fine Arts at Stockholm are two primitive rugs, one, a highly conventionalized dragon-and-phoenix combat, the other, stylized birds in a tree. Both of these rugs are probably early 15th-century Anatolian.
Later, many rugs of finer weave, more delicate patterns, and richer colour—mostly geometric and possibly from Asia Minor—appeared in Europe. They were depicted by Flemish painters, such as Hans Memling, Jan van Eyck, and Petrus Christus, with such skill that the separate knots are sometimes visible. Many of these designs are repeated in the Bergama district of Asia Minor and the southern Caucasus today, which complicates dating work.