Step 1
What is an oriental rug?
The basics: where oriental rugs come from and what defines them.
An oriental rug is a hand-knotted or hand-woven rug from a belt stretching from Morocco in the west across Iran, the Caucasus, and Central Asia to China and Nepal. The tradition is at least 2,500 years old — the oldest known surviving knotted rug (the Pazyryk rug) dates from the 5th century BC.
The defining feature of an oriental rug is that every knot is tied by hand around the warp threads of the loom. At medium-fine density of 200,000 knots per square meter, a 2 × 3 m rug contains 1.2 million knots — months or years of work by one or several weavers.
Three things that make an oriental rug
- Handwork: every knot is individual, recognizable by slight irregularities on the back.
- Natural materials:mostly sheep’s wool, with cork wool or silk on a cotton warp for finer qualities.
- Symbolic language: patterns and motifs tell of the culture, tribe, or workshop they come from.
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