A Brief History of Rugs..

The earliest carpets which we have evidence of today, are those found in the Pazyryk and other tombs of the Altai region of southern Siberia. Tehy date from 500- 400 BC. Other sources confirm that woollen rugs were in use many hundreds of years before that, although ancient writers rarely distinguish between the five types of rug about to be described beneath.

HOMER....

Homer, writing c. 900-800 BC frequently mentions the practice of drawing up a stool and spreading a rug on it for someone to sit on . The word he uses is kivas, which means animal fleece. This is of course the simplest form of early rug, but occasionally Homer uses alternative words such as 'tapes' which in its context may mean pile rug for tapestry-woven fabrics. The other possibility would be a felt rug, but the most likely meaning is the kind of looped pile rug which is made by weaving a piece of flat cloth into which woolen loops a re sewn or in which some of the wefts are pulled out in the front to hang in loops, producing a kind of single-sided terry-towel fabric. This technique is used to this day for simple rugs in Tibet and was certainly used in antiquity as a rug of this sort has been found in the Pazyryk tombs. These weft-loop rugs may be said to imitate the fleeces of animals and could thus well be the original form of hand-made woollen rug, the knotted rug representing a technically more advanced organic development.

Homer never mentions the design of the rugs or tapestries he refers to. In view of the meticulous detail of his descriptions of other visually striking pieces of craftsmanship it would seem reasonable to assume that rugs had no design of any consequence. This would support the theory that the Achaens' woollen rugs were weft-loop products, for a civilisation as advanced as that which Homer describes would hardly have failed to take advantage of of the decorative possibilities that both tapestry weaving and pile-rug knotting afford. An elaborate ancient Greek tapestry is indeed described by Ovid, in the legend of Arachne, who was turned into a spider after weaving a fabric depicting the amours of the Gods so skilfully that the Gods themselves could not surpass it. It is sometimes suggested that this legend has its origin in commercial rivalry over the flourishing woollen textile trade of the second millennium BC in south-west Anatolia, an area famous to this day for its kilims and tapestries.

THE EARLY NOMADS....

The first piece of physical evidence we have of a pile-rug knotting is also a carpet from the Altai mountains, excavated in 1949 and currently in the Hermitage Museum, Leningrad it is universally known simply as the Pazyryk carpet. The date of the tomb can be established as 5th century BC but the origin of the carpet is not known. The nomads who built the tomb were horsemen ranging far and wide over the slopes of central Asia. Russian archaeologists are very cautious in their identification if these people; they may have been Scythians, but the same general area appears to be the origin of the Turkomans and of the Mongols and the Altai tribesman and are thus referred to as the early nomads. Other items in the Pazyryk come from places as far apart as China and the Black Sea. The carpet, like other figural-weave tapestry items from the Altai graves, is considered by most authorities to have come from western or south Persia, or perhaps the Caucasus. Some scholars have asserted that the art of pile-rug knotting originated with the nomads of central Asia themselves: they sought to improve upon their flat-woven textiles by inserting tufts of pile to produce a fabric more like the fleece of an animal but more durable and more comfortable than either.

Others however take a different view, what distinguishes a knotted-pile rug from a weft-loop pile rug is the opportunity the former offers for complicated designs. Artistically minded ladies of the western Asian leisured classes, or inventive decorative artists working in the textile manufactories for the royal palaces may therefore have transformed the 'imitation -fleece' weft-loop rugs of the nomads into knotted-pile rugs, not in order to make a stronger fabric but to overcome the former design limitations.