Persian Empire
Deep Dive 11 min read

Persian Carpets and Rugs: History, Regional Styles, and Techniques

The Pazyryk carpet was found in 1949 by Sergei Rudenko in a Scythian burial mound in the Altai Mountains — the earliest surviving pile carpet in the world, dated to the late fourth or early third century BCE, now in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The high quality of its wool, the precision of its symmetrical (Turkish or Ghiordes) knotting, and the sophistication of its composition of horsemen, deer, and griffins arranged in formal rows, all suggest an established weaving tradition on the Iranian plateau by the Achaemenid period. The Pazyryk carpet is the first document of a craft that has continued, with a technical and aesthetic continuity that is unusual in the history of the textile arts, into the present.

The English literature begins with Jon Thompson’s Milestones in the History of Carpets (2006) and the related exhibition catalogues, Charles Ellis’s edited Early Caucasian Rugs (1988), and Sheila Canby’s Islamic Art of the Safavid Period (2010) for the high period. Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom’s The Art and Architecture of Islam (1994) gives the Islamic-period context. For the textile arts of the Sasanian period, Prudence Rice’s chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran (2013) is a useful starting point, and Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, Michael Simpson, and St John Simpson’s edited The Sasanian Era (2008) has the textile tradition. Arthur Upham Pope’s A Survey of Persian Art (1938–39, with the 1977 reprint) is the older comprehensive treatment. The catalogues of the great museum collections — the V&A, the LACMA, the Metropolitan, the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul — are the principal sources for the individual pieces.

Origins: the Pazyryk carpet

The Pazyryk carpet was found in Pazyryk Valley, in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, in mound V, by Sergei Rudenko of the Hermitage, who excavated the Pazyryk burials between 1929 and 1949. The carpet was preserved by the ice that had been packed into the tomb; the Pazyryk chiefs were Scythian nomads who had been buried in wooden chambers, and the climate did the rest. The carpet is about 2 by 1.85 metres, with a knot density of about 3,600 knots per square decimetre (roughly 230 knots per square inch in the main field), and a composition of horsemen, deer, and griffins in three rows, with a border of horsemen and another border of griffins. The technique is the Turkish (symmetrical) knot, and the colours are natural: indigo, madder, weld, and possibly a yellow from another source.

The attribution of the Pazyryk carpet to a Persian workshop is a reasonable inference, not a certainty. The style is consistent with the art of the Iranian plateau of the late first millennium BCE, and the use of the symmetrical knot is a feature of the Achaemenid-period and earlier Iranian tradition. Whether the carpet was actually woven in Media, in Achaemenid Persia, or in the Saka-Scythian tradition itself, is debated. The general consensus is that the carpet is evidence of an established Iranian weaving tradition, not necessarily of Achaemenid workmanship. The Pazyryk carpet is the best piece of evidence for the existence of a developed carpet-weaving tradition in the Iranian world by the fourth century BCE.

The Spring of Khosrow: Sasanian imperial carpets

The most famous Sasanian carpet is the Bahar-e Khosrow, the “Spring of Khosrow,” attributed to the reign of Khosrow I Anushirvan (r. 531–579 CE). The carpet is described in detail by the Arab historians al-Tabari and al-Masʿudi: a formal Persian garden, with a flowing stream of worked crystal, flowering plants, and trees studded with gold and silver thread and precious stones, the fruit of emeralds, sapphires, and other gems. The carpet, when not in use, was said to be rolled up and stored in the royal treasury. When the king sat upon it, the ground beneath him appeared to be a flowering meadow.

The Bahar-e Khosrow was carried off as booty by the Arab armies that sacked Ctesiphon in 637 CE. According to tradition, it was cut up into small pieces, and the various governors, soldiers, and merchants who received the fragments sold them for their weight in gold. No fragment is known to survive. The literary tradition is rich and consistent, and the existence of such a magnificent Sasanian royal carpet is supported by the many references in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Chinese sources to the luxury of Persian textiles. The Bahar-e Khosrow is the most famous of a class of Sasanian imperial textiles; the Taxt-e Taqdis (the “Throne of Glory”) of the Sasanian king, the hunting carpets, the silk hangings of the royal palaces were all part of the same textile tradition.

Islamic period: Seljuk and Ilkhanid carpets

The Persian carpet tradition continued without interruption in the Islamic period. The earliest surviving Islamic pile carpets, fragments from the ninth and tenth centuries, were discovered in the mosques of the eastern Islamic world. The Seljuk period (11th–13th centuries) saw a great expansion of the carpet industry, and the Saljuq carpets, large geometric medallion-and-corner designs with broad borders, are the first substantial body of medieval Islamic pile rugs to survive. Many of these carpets were exported to Anatolia, the Caucasus, and the Byzantine world, where they have been preserved in church treasuries; the Konya carpets from the Alaeddin Mosque (c. 1200–1250) are the most famous. The “Konya carpet” in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul is one of the great pieces of Seljuk textile art.

The Ilkhanid period, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, saw a further development of the Persian carpet tradition, with the introduction of Chinese-influenced cloud bands, lotus blossoms, and phoenixes, motifs that were absorbed into the Persian repertoire under the Mongol dynasty. The Maragha carpet fragments, dating to the late thirteenth century and now divided among several museums, are among the most important surviving examples of Ilkhanid carpet art.

The Safavid court carpets

The great age of the Persian carpet is the Safavid period, in particular the long reign of Shah ʿAbbas I (1587–1629) and his successors. Shah ʿAbbas, who moved the Safavid capital to Isfahan in 1598, established royal carpet workshops in the city, and the great court carpets of the period, woven in silk and gold-and-silver thread and given a deep, saturated palette of indigo blue, madder red, saffron yellow, and ivory, were presented as diplomatic gifts to European kings, the Ottoman sultans, and the Mughal emperors. The famous Ardabil Carpet, with its great medallion-and-corner design, its inscription naming the maker Maqsud Kashani, and its dated foundation inscription of 946 AH (1539–40 CE), is the most famous of all Safavid court carpets. It is now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, having been sold from the Victoria and Albert Museum (where it was on display for decades) to LACMA in 2010.

The Safavid court carpets of the early seventeenth century, designed in the great imperial workshops of Isfahan, were exported in substantial numbers to Europe, where they appear in the paintings of Holbein, Lotto, Vermeer, and many other artists. The Polish and Portuguese carpets, with their animal-and-flower designs, are a distinct Safavid sub-genre that was produced for the European market. The great collection of Polish and Portuguese carpets in the Hermitage is a testimony to the European demand for Safavid textiles.

Regional styles: Tabriz, Isfahan, Kashan, Kerman, Heris

Beyond the court workshops of the Safavid period, the Persian carpet tradition is organised by region. Each major city, town, or village has its own characteristic palette, design vocabulary, and knotting technique, and the regional styles of the Persian rug are as distinctive as the wines of France.

The carpets of Tabriz, the great commercial city of northwestern Iran, are the most diverse of the Persian regional traditions. The Tabriz rug typically has a tightly knotted wool or silk pile on a cotton foundation, a central medallion design, and a palette dominated by reds, blues, and ivories. The bazaar of Tabriz has been the principal centre of the Persian carpet trade since the nineteenth century, and Tabriz carpets are still exported in large numbers to the West.

The carpets of Isfahan, the Safavid capital, are distinguished by their fine knotting — often more than 500 knots per square inch — their use of silk pile on a silk foundation, and their refined floral designs. The Isfahan rug typically has a central medallion, a richly detailed floral field, and an exceptionally fine weave. Modern Isfahan carpets, woven in the workshops of the city and its surrounding villages, are among the most expensive of all Persian rugs.

The carpets of Kashan, a city south of Tehran famous since the Safavid period, are characterised by a central medallion design with a deep red field, finely detailed floral borders, and a fine wool pile on a cotton foundation. The Kashan tradition includes both large room-sized carpets and smaller prayer rugs, the latter often with a mihrab (niche) design pointed toward Mecca.

The carpets of Kerman, in southeastern Iran, are among the most varied of the regional traditions. Kerman rugs range from finely woven silk pieces with naturalistic floral designs to more robust wool pieces with bold medallion-and-corner compositions. The Kerman tradition, like that of Tabriz, includes both court production and village weaving.

The carpets of Heris, a small town in the foothills of Mount Sabalan in East Azerbaijan, are the most distinctive of the northwest Persian tradition. The Heris rug typically has a geometric medallion design, a wide border of angular floral and animal motifs, and a wool pile on a wool foundation. The Heris tradition is among the busier in the contemporary Iranian carpet market.

Knotting techniques: Persian, Turkish, and jufti

The knotting of a pile carpet is the central technical operation of carpet weaving. The two principal knot types are the Persian (asymmetrical, or Senneh) knot, in which the yarn is passed around one warp thread and under the next, leaving a single thread between rows, and the Turkish (symmetrical, or Ghiordes) knot, in which the yarn is wrapped symmetrically around two warp threads. The Pazyryk carpet uses the Turkish knot; the Safavid court carpets of Isfahan typically use the Persian knot. A third technique, the jufti knot, in which the yarn is wrapped around four warp threads, is faster but produces a coarser pile and is generally considered inferior.

The weft, warp, and pile materials used in Persian carpet weaving are typically wool, silk, or cotton, with the foundation of warp and weft usually cotton and the pile wool or silk. The best Safavid court carpets, in particular the Ardabil carpet, used silk pile on a silk foundation, with the weft of silk and the warp of silk, and the knot density of the Ardabil is around 300–500 knots per square inch in the main field, with some passages higher; the “approached one thousand” claim that sometimes appears in popular literature is an overstatement. Vegetable dyes, principally indigo for blue, madder for red, weld or pomegranate rind for yellow, walnut hulls or oak galls for brown, and indigo-on-madder for green, give the classical Persian palette.

The modern industry

The Persian carpet industry, after a long decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was revived in the twentieth century. The Iranian Carpet Company, founded in 1936, has worked to maintain quality standards and to develop the export market. The contemporary Persian carpet is exported to Europe, North America, and East Asia, and the regional traditions of Tabriz, Isfahan, Kashan, Kerman, and Heris remain active. UNESCO inscribed the traditional skills of carpet weaving in Fars and Kashan on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010.

Tribal and village weaving

Beyond the great urban workshops, the Persian carpet tradition includes a substantial body of tribal and village weaving. The tribal traditions — the Qashqai, the Bakhtiari, the Lurs, the Kurds, the Baluchis, and the Turkomans — are among the most distinctive of the Persian carpet world. The tribal carpets, typically woven by women on horizontal ground looms, are distinguished by their use of natural wool from the tribal flocks, their vegetable-dye palette, and their bold geometric designs. The Qashqai carpets with their all-over diamond lattice, the Bakhtiari carpets with their garden-design, and the lori carpets with their bold geometric motifs are all major elements of the Persian tribal tradition.

The village weaving tradition, in particular the weaving of the villages of the Iranian plateau and the surrounding mountains, is another major element. The village carpets, typically woven by women on simple vertical or horizontal looms, are distinguished by their use of local wool, their vegetable-dye palette, and their traditional designs. The hamadan carpets with their bold medallion and herati design, the bijar carpets with their dense, heavy construction, and the mashhad carpets with their elaborate floral and calligraphic designs are all major elements of the village tradition.

The carpet in Persian literature and ritual

The Persian carpet has a long and rich history in Persian literature and ritual. The great Persian poets, in particular Ferdowsi, Nizami, Saadi, Hafez, and Rumi, all refer to carpets in their works, and the carpet is often used as a symbol of beauty, luxury, and the good life. The carpet of the King is a recurring image in the Shahnameh, and the carpet of the garden is a common metaphor for the ordered world of the Persian state. The carpet is also a major element of Persian religious and ritual life, and the mihrab (prayer-niche) carpet, with its pointed arch directed toward Mecca, is a particular speciality of the Islamic Persian tradition.

For further reading

  • Thompson, Jon. Milestones in the History of Carpets (2006) and Oriental Carpets from the Harkness Collection (2008).
  • Ellis, Charles, ed. Early Caucasian Rugs (1988) and his work on the Pazyryk carpet in the Hermitage.
  • Rudenko, Sergei. Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen (1970).
  • Blair, Sheila, and Jonathan Bloom. The Art and Architecture of Islam (1994).
  • Rice, Prudence. The textiles chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran (2013).
  • Walker, Daniel. Oriental Rugs of the Hajji Babas (1982). The most readable short history.
  • Canby, Sheila. Islamic Art of the Safavid Period (in The New Cambridge History of Islam, 2010).
  • Curtis, Vesta Sarkhosh, Michael Simpson, and St John Simpson, eds. The Sasanian Era (2008).