mudbottle

Bulgarian
uses a good-quality yarn in a quite fine weave - although the production is fairly small, the quality is considerably above that of the standard grade of other Balkan countries..

ARDEBIL
It is confusing that there are five quite different types of carpet sold as Ardebil. The easiest to deal with is what is known as the Ardebil design, the Sheikh Safi carpet, which does not come from Ardebil at all. Then there are the old-style kelleyis and runners from a fairly far-flung group of surrounding villages, woven in typical bold Azerbaijan designs and the heavy weave that characterizes the Persian southern Caucasus. elsewhere . The modern production of this same area apes the Russian Shirvan style: the goods are known in the trade as new-style Ardebils . Then there is an Ardebil town production which has the same structure as the old-style kelleyis but makes clumsily executed Tabriz designs. The clumsiness is accentuated by the fact that the designs are never unequivocally curvilinear or rectilinear..

Ghiassabad rug
What this example lacks is the finesse of Mashayekhi's colour-balance, but it is a very good rug nevertheless..

Mashayekhi
Is a manufacturer who, reviving a traditional Saruq idea, has exactly captured the half-geometric, half-floral nature of the Herati design. By retaining just the right amount of the rectilinear in a stitch which could easily produce perfect curvilinear designs, he has established a standard version of the design which is widely admired and widely copied..

Mashayckhis
Are made in Bulgaria and the author himself was responsible for starting one of the Mashayekhi copies made in India but none of the copics have the flair of the Persian original. The prices of the originals, it must be admitted, are horrific, but the results produced rank with the best Bijar and Enjilas rugs as the modern pinnacle among goods using the Herati design..

Ghiassabad rug
The copy illustrated uses a good-quality yarn in a quite fine weave - although the production is fairly small, the quality is considerably above that of the standard grade of other Balkan countries..

SARUQ
Saruq is the name of a village on the edge of the Ferahan region which has given its name to the products of the whole area around Arak, the centre where the goods are marketed. The Herati is an old-established traditional design of the Saruq carpet, although today more carpets are perhaps made in other designs., from the village of Viss, illustrates a type that would normally be called a Mahal, i.e. a grade II (but still quite good) Saruq.

Zagheh
Just over the mountains from Assadabad, on the Hamadan side, lie Zagheh and Tajiabad and a group of villages weaving a full range of rug and runner sizes in the design illustrated in . It is the shape of the medallion, together with the 'teeth' motif around it and the corners which help one remember the Zagheh design; the ground, however, is yet another version of the Herati motif. The quality is quite good, although the yarn is often suspect and the dyestuffs more than suspect. Another version of this design uses the same layout on a ground covered with biggish boteh motifs..

ALAMDAR ,
In the Hamadan region proper there are several other villages that produce their own version of the Herati design. Typical of Alamdar are dozars and zaronims with a blue ground and the rather angular version of the design shown here. Alamdar lies to the south of Malayir in the direction of Borujird, and both the colourings and weave remind one of the latter -- the warps, for example, appearing as very prominent white specks on the back of the rug..

KEMERE H To the south, outside the Hamadan region proper, there is a group of villages known as the Kemereh, some of which are still inhabited by descendants of the Armenians transported there by Shah Abbas I after the partition of Armenia between Persia and Turkey in the early seventeenth century. The two best known are Lilihan ) and Reihan (cf. fig. 467), which have their own designs. The others produce single-wefted rugs in the Hamadan mahi style which the layman can perhaps best distinguish by the lighter shade of red used in the area, for the Kemereh lies in a region that otherwise produces Saruq carpets,.

Everu,
which is an important centre for massproduced rugs in the Enjilas style. As often happens in the carpet trade, nomenclature is flexible -- in this particular case Everu rugs are usually sold as Enjilas, but there is in fact no problem in distinguishing the genuine article from the cheaper copy. For one thing the fineness of stitch is easy to check: a good Enjilas will have at least 160,000 knots/m2 (104 knots/in.2) while an Everu will rarely exceed 130,000140,000 (84-90/in.2); in addition, almost every other characteristic sets the Enjilas in a class apart. The only feature Everu has in common with its illustrious neighbour is the fine yarn used; in everything else Everu is inferior. The quality varies from quite good to very poor. The design, as shown in the example illustrated, is pretty clumsy, but the worst feature is the colouring: crude red, heavy dark blue and, above all, a vicious synthetic turquoise-green. A wide range of rug and runner sizes is made, including such things as small squares, which are rarely found in Persian goods. .

ENJILAS ,
products have always been among the very best of all Hamadan rugs. In the past their workmanship, design, colours and materials were all superlative, and to this day remain far above the local average..

LILIHAN
Parallel with the unmistakable production in the American Saruq design , the Armenian village of Lilihan also has a substantial output in the Herati pattern, as illustrated here. As is, this is a single-wefted region, lying to the south of the Hamadan village area. The weave is medium-fine, with a normally very sound structure and good yarn. The colours are regrettably rather variable; not only are some of the subsidiary shades very crude (greens and orange, for example), but also the dark blue, which is the most common ground shade in Hcrati-pattern Lilihans, can have a very dead appearance, with grey, black or mauvy streaks. The red shades are usually sound, however, and the open layout of the Herati motifs creates a very appealing effect if the blue is properly dyed. All rug and carpet sizes are found, including some unusual dimensions like 200 X 170 cm.

MALAYIR
South of Jokar and stretching as far as there is a largish area producing single-wefted rugs of varying quality in a wide range of designs. The production may be as clumsy as the piece or as neat and finely executed as the Herati rug shown here. This piece shows the stylistic influence of Jokar, but has the predominant dark blue which is characteristic of the Malayir and Borujird region (and also of the Nehavend and Tuisarkan group to the west, where Herati designs are normally not woven - . The weave of this area is clearly distinguishable from that of the Jokar/Husseinabad group owing to the use of medium-blue wefts, against which the white warp-strings show up strongly as clear white specks all over the back of the rug. Apart from Alamdar, with its own characteristic design the names of the individual villages of the area are not used and the rugs are sold simply as Borujird or Malayir..

A Jokar piece is fine and neat but a Borehalu is finer and neater one is reminded of Hugh Johnson's description of the individual wines of the Beaujolais region: 'Brouilly is grapy and rich, but Cote de Brouilly is grapier and richer'.

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HUSSEINABAD ,
The Herati design is used in a large number of villages around Hamadan (and generally known locally as the mahi design), especially in a cluster of places to the south-east on the road to Malayir..

RUDBAR
Next to Ferahan to the north is Rudbar whose production, in its weave and colouring, belongs to the Tafrish group , but has its own distinctive version of the Herati design: quite like the Ferahan but more floral, and above all lighter in colour, with many cream grounds, some red and very few blue. A particular distinguishing feature of the Rudbar weave is the frequent use of pink wefts. Another, less easily recognized, feature is the soft, spongy feel to the wool frequently employed there. The lighter colours and the softer wool both link Rudbar with the Shah Savan tribe ofSaveh . A wide range of rug sizes is made..

BORCHALU
Borehalu is the name ofa tribe centred on the villages of Khumajin and Kumbazan, a remote area east of Hamadan and to the west of Ferahan. This tribe is well known for a particularly successful version of the American Saruq design , but a large part of their output is in the standard Hamadan village form derived from the nineteenth-century 'Ferahans' Experienced dealers can recognize Borehalu Herati rugs fairly easily from the neat, fine weave and from certain clues in the colourings; but for most people the principal distinguishing feature is the shape of the central medallion. Most sizes up to 4 m2 (43 ft2) are made, but especially dozars and zaronims. Most Herati Borchalus are on red grounds, but blue and some creams are also found. A similar fine Herati rug is made in the village of Musa Khan Bolaghi, which lies to the west of Khumajin in the direction of Husseinabad..

KHARAGHA N A stylistic neighbour of the Ferahan Heratis is illustrated here. It has the same darkblue background and the angularity of design commonly found in Ferahan, but there are subtle differences which a trained eye will notice..

SENNEH
Mention has already been made of the special distinctiveness of the rugs made in the Kurdish capital of Senneh. This also applies to their use of the Herati design.

FERAHAN
We now come to one of the best known of all nineteenth-century carpet designs, the Ferahan. It is no longer produced, but in its heyday it had a great reputation for quality combined with elegance and restraint..

The Kolyai tribe, whose goods are marketed in Sonqur in the south of Kurdistan, weave their own version of the Bijar design, and, like all Kolyai tribal rugs, the example illustrated is single-wefted..

GOGARJIN , KOLYAI We come now to two further Kurdish examples of the Herati pattern. Gogarjin is a village very close to Bijar, weaving a distinctive form of Bijar rug in the style illustrated; this, like all Bijars, is double-wefted..

The finest Bijars, as it happens, are woven not by Kurds but by a small clan of Afshars who live to the north of Bijar around Tekab and Tekkenteppe presumably descendants of the tribesmen who escaped Nadir Shah's transportation in the eighteenth century .

Herati motifs in Bijar carpets: three examples showing typical irregularities in ex*****on; although of fine weave, Bijar's output is produced in villages, mainly without the controlled design work available in town manufactorie.

Senjabi is the name of one of the southernmost Kurdish tribes, but it is used rather loosely in the carpet trade to describe a range of tribal or village types of the Kermanshah area..

BIJAR
One of the great versions of the Herati design is that used in Bijar, the market for the finest and best Kurdish carpets..

In Kurdish tribal rugs it appears in many guises, two of which -- Senjabi and Bijar are illustrated here..

It is interesting that the centre part of the medallion is used as an independent motif in the repeating-medallion Bijar.

SENJABI , BIJAR
The Herati design is woven throughout western Iran, from Tabriz right down to Khorramabad, each area having its own characteristic version..

Detail of a Herati carpet, known to have been made not later than 1640 (from which date its presence in the palace of the Duke of Braganza is recorded). Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano..

An excellent example of the developing Herati pattern seen in a detail of the flowing, wellbalanced design of a carpet formerly in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Leipzig; although attributed by Grote-Hasenbalg to the first half of the seventeenth century, there is a conflict of chronology since the border seems much closer in style while the layout of the ground is strongly reminiscent (dated by Grote-Hasenbalg to 1500)..

The spread of the Herati design outside Khorassan (assuming it did originate there) is better known. There is a universally accepted but, here too, seemingly not very well documented tradition that in about 1730 or 1740 Nadir Shah transferred large numbers of weavers from Khorassan to central Persia.

Detail of a Herat floral carpet, full size formerly in the Museum fur Islamische Kunst, Berlin (now lost), dated by Grote-Hasenbalg to the first half of the sixteenth century, and by Erdmann to c. 1600.

Detail of a floral Herat carpet, this piece also has the characteristics of the sixteenth-century style. Victoria and Albert Museum, London..

The most brilliant of the Kerman vase carpets: fragment of a sixteenth-century carpet now in the Osterreichisches Museum fur angewandte Kunst, Vienna (another fragment is in the Textile Museum, Washington, D. C.), showing - in the inner guard the same cartouche shapes as those seen in the previous illustration.

Quite early in the sixteenth century eastern Persia saw the beginning of a development in which the fine naturalistic balance and flowing proportions of the original Herat style.

The flowing Herat style, in its most mature form, as seen in the 'Emperor's carpet' in the Osterreichisches Museum fur angewandte Kunst, Vienna.

Ottoman carpets from Cairo, an example of which (formerly in Berlin) is in a style dated by Erdmann to 1540-50.

One of the many variants of the repeatingdiamond idea woven by the Beluch tribes of Khorassan;.