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Tribal Rugs

Antique tribal rugs are the rugs that nomadic, semi-nomadic and village weavers made for their own tents and houses rather than for a city workshop, and the difference shows in the drawing. Tribal rug patterns are geometric far more often than floral, and the design usually runs across the whole field in repeating rows rather than building up to a single central medallion. The pieces gathered here come from every region where that way of weaving held: the villages of Northwest Persia and Kurdistan, the Caucasus, the Oushak district of western Turkey, the Baluch country on the Persian and Afghan border, and the Navajo weavers of the American Southwest, whose flat woven blankets and rugs are the largest single type in this collection.

The vocabulary is small and repeated with variation: the boteh or paisley, the herati fish and leaf, trellis and lattice grids, eight pointed and four pointed stars, the mina khani flower lattice, cypress and weeping willow trees, the prayer rug format, and the protective symbols a weaver worked in for the household. Designs were carried in memory rather than drawn on a cartoon, so a motif can change scale from one row to the next and a border may be resolved differently at the two ends, and abrash, the banding where a new batch of dyed wool entered the weaving, is part of the character rather than a fault.

Nearly all are wool. Most are hand knotted pile, and about one in five is flat woven, the kilims, soumaks and Navajo blankets among them. Sizes run small and narrow: scatter rugs, hallway runners and long gallery pieces outnumber room size carpets two to one, and fewer than a quarter are wider than eight feet. Most are 19th century, with the eighteen eighties and nineties the most common dates and nearly three in four dated 1900 or earlier. Blue grounds lead, with ivory, red, coral and brown earth tones behind them and gray on the Navajo pieces; yellow and purple grounds are rare.

Antique Tribal rugs are deeply rooted in tradition, woven by nomadic and semi-nomadic artisans whose designs reflect cultural history and personal journeys. These unique pieces often feature geometric designs motifs and powerful symbols, much like those found in Moroccan Berber tattoos, offering a window into the ancient narratives of the weavers, especially those crafting rugs of Central Asia.

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