Persian Carpets

The oldest surviving knotted-pile carpet — the Pazyryk, recovered from a Scythian tomb in the Altai mountains — was woven in the 5th century BCE in the Achaemenid orbit. Already it shows the central medallion and animal-procession border that remained canonical for two and a half millennia.

A Persian carpet is a hand-knotted pile rug whose density is measured in knots per square inch (KPSI). Two knot types dominate. The asymmetric Senneh (Persian) knot allows higher detail and is used in fine city workshops; the symmetric Ghiordes (Turkish) knot is favoured by tribal weavers for its durability. Warps are usually cotton, weft cotton or wool, pile wool or silk. A fine Qom silk on silk can exceed 800 KPSI.

One of a pair commissioned for the shrine of Sheikh Safi al-Din at Ardabil, the carpet is signed by the slave Maqsud Kashani, dated 946 AH (1539–40 CE), and carries an inscription from Hafez:

"I have no refuge in the world other than thy threshold, my head has no resting-place but this doorway."

William Morris campaigned for the V&A to buy it in 1893; he called it "of singular perfection… logically and consistently beautiful." The companion carpet, badly worn, was sold and survives in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Every Iranian carpet of stature can be placed within a city or tribal tradition by motif, palette, knot and even the smell of the wool. The schools below have, in most cases, been continuously productive since the Safavid 16th century; some — Kerman, Kashan — for a thousand years longer.

A finished carpet hides nine separate crafts. Shearing happens in early summer when the wool is longest; the fleece is graded by region of the body (the shoulder gives the softest fiber, the haunch the most durable). Washing and combing remove lanolin and align the fibers. Spinning on a drop spindle or charkha produces a Z-twist single yarn — the Persian standard, distinct from Turkish S-twist. Dyeing uses madder root for red, indigo for blue, weld and pomegranate skin for yellow, walnut husk for brown; a master dyer (rangrez) judges colour by eye against thirty years of memory.

Cartoon drawing translates the design onto squared paper, one cell per knot. Warping stretches the cotton or silk foundation onto a vertical loom; in Isfahan the loom may be three metres wide and require six weavers seated in a row. Knotting is sung — in city workshops a salim (foreman) chants the colour code aloud and the weavers tie in unison, 8,000 knots per weaver per day. After every centimetre of pile a heavy beater comb compacts the row. Finishing shears the pile to a uniform height, washes the carpet in a river (the famous Isfahan wash brightens the colours), and stretches it on a kilim ground for blocking.

A 3 × 4 m Isfahan at 500 KPSI contains about 6 million knots. Two weavers working ten hours a day, six days a week, finish it in approximately fourteen months. The pricing of a Persian carpet is, at base, the arithmetic of that labour.

Aniline (synthetic) dyes arrived in Iran in the 1870s and were briefly catastrophic — fugitive reds faded to pink within a decade. In 1903 the governor of Kerman banned synthetic dyes outright, with penalties including amputation of the right hand for repeat dyers. The ban held; the great revival of the natural-dye workshop at Yazd (DOBAG was its Turkish counterpart) ensured Persian carpets re-entered the world market in the 1980s on the strength of their colour as much as their knot.

Live Wikimedia Commons photographs of the most important historical Persian carpets — Pazyryk, Ardabil, Sanguszko and the great Safavid medallion carpets.

Images shown here are served from the local media library.