Rugs and Carpets from central Asia

Rugs and Carpets from central Asia - Elena Tzareva

History.;Setting out the early history of carpet weaving in Central Asia is complicated by the absence of firmly datable examples. The oldest well-preserved knotted-pile carpets and equally ancient examples of flat-woven and felt rugs were excavated at Pazyryk in southern Siberia by the Soviet archeologist Sergeĭ Rudenko, who originally dated the finds to the 5th or 4th century b.c., a date that has recently been revised to the late 4th or early 3rd century b.c. (pp. 298-304; see vi, above). Excavations in Eastern Turkestan have unearthed tiny fragments of felt and both knotted-pile and flat-woven textiles (Stein, passim) that are quite possibly more than a thousand years old, but the patterns are impossible to ascertain; on the other hand, in medieval wall paintings from Bezeklik and other sites in the Tarim basin early textiles resembling carpets are depicted (Le Coq, passim), but no comparable examples have survived. Despite this lack of early evidence, a number of scholars have held that the history of the knotted-pile carpet is closely linked to that of the Central Asian Turkic tribal groups, which are believed to have carried their designs and techniques with them as they migrated westward with the Great Saljuqs in the 5th/11th century (Erdmann, p. 3; Denny, pp. 329-30). According to this hypothesis, the earliest well-preserved carpets in the Islamic tradition (cf. carpets vii, viii), those woven in Anatolia in the 8th-9th/14th-15th centuries, are the artistic descendants of Central Asian Turkic weavings, many incorporating in their designs both the;tamḡas or;damḡas (tribal brand marks, used for a variety of purposes) and the;göls or;güls (from Pers.;gol;“flower”; tribal symbols, used in carpets only), the latter often in the form of small medallions, that are associated with various Turkic groups. The origin of the;gol;itself is still a matter of controversy, but the most convincing explanation has been put forward by the British scholar Jon Thompson, who has linked it to a pre-Islamic Buddhist tradition.