Oriental Rugs and 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 first millennium BC. A threshold rug represented in a stone carving from the 8th-century-BC Assyrian palace of Khorsabad (now 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. The carpet, possibly of Persian origin, measures 6 × 6.5 feet. 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 specimens from Noin Ula in northern Mongolia (1st century BC to 1st century AD; in the Hermitage) or those in the Shoso Repository (Japanese Imperial storehouse) in Nara near Osaka (before the 8th century).

The costly Oriental carpet 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 Sasanid palace in Ctesiphon is the most famous; 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 Kufic 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 Ala al-Din Kay-Qubad I at Konya in Anatolia and now in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic 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 Oriental 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.

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