History & Evolution of Oriental Rugs & Carpets

Classical textual references to carpets exist, but they are ambiguous; they could simply refer to flatwoven floor coverings or blankets. Not until late antiquity in the burials of fifth-century A.D. Roman Egypt do we again encounter actual pile carpets, made now in a looped technique. Around the same time there is also continued evidence of carpet production from Central Asia and the Caucasus, where pile carpet fragments have been discovered in caves.  Fragments of first century A.D. pile rugs discovered on the western periphery of China and Tibet suggest that the nomadic tradition of the knotted carpet spread east and southward from the Altai region as well.

It is not until the Early Islamic period (seventh to ninth centuries) that the evidence for carpet production again picks up in the archaeological record, and once again it is the dry climate of Egypt that has facilitated the survival of the actual carpets or fragments, especially at Fostat outside old Cairo. This site was actually the rubbish dump for the city, and it it has produced an extensive series of carpet fragments, a number of which are Early Islamic in date. The fragments are small, but one can discern designs of simple floral and geometric type in what would have been allover repeat patterns. Given the limited evidence available, it is hard to generalize about the scale and extent of carpet production in the early Islamic Middle East. It is not until the thirteenth century in Anatolia or Turkey that we finally encounter an actual corpus of surviving large fragments or nearly complete pile rugs. These are preserved in the mosques founded by the new Seljuk Turkish dynasty that has recently come to power there.

The Seljuk Turks were originally nomads from Central Asia who entered Persia and then Anatolia in the eleventh century after their conversion to Islam. Over a century ago, even before the discoveries at Bashadar and Pazyryk, the great pioneer rug scholar, Alois Riegl, was of the opinion that it was such nomadic Turkic peoples from Central Asia who first introduced the knotted pile carpet to the Islamic Middle East around this time. The discoveries at Fostat, however, show that the knotted carpet was already known in the Early Islamic period. Still, Riegl was probably correct in emphasizing the role of Turks from Central Asia, who would have brought with them the ancient tradition of pile carpet weaving from their ancestral Altaic homeland. Turks were already a political and military force in ninth century Egypt, and they were probably responsible for the earliest pile rug production evidenced at Fostat. It is therefore highly probable that when the Turks became a dominant elite across the Islamic Middle East in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the knotted carpet finally achieved its position as a major medium of artistic production under their patronage. From this point on, from Turkey into Persia, the tradition of the Oriental knotted pile carpet as we know it began to evolve continuously down to the present time.