Some interesting facts about carpets

Some interesting facts about carpets

Despite the many years I have spent cleaning restoring carpets I have never really looked into their history or trivia so I thought it would be fun to see what I could find. In a relatively short time I found a wealth of information so I thought I would do an ongoing article all about the history, forms, trivia and uses of carpets.

The first carpets were hand-knotted pile and probably originated in southern Central Asia between the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE, although there is evidence of goats and sheep being sheared for wool and hair which was spun and woven as far back at 6000BC.

The Pazyryk Carpet is the oldest surviving carpet in the world and, dates from the 5th-4th century BCE. Discovered by Sergei Ivanovich Rudenko in 1949 within a Pazyryk burial mound it had been preserved in ice in the frigid conditions found in the valley of Pazyryk. This ancient carpet has been attributed to either the Scythiansor the Persian Achaemenids. The Pazyryk Carpe is richly coloured, measures 200 x 183 cm and is framed by a border of griffins.

The earliest group of surviving knotted pile carpets was produced under Seljuk rule in the first half of the 13th century on the Anatolian peninsula. The eighteen extant works are often referred to as the Konya Carpets. The central field of these large carpets is a repeated geometrical pattern. The borders are ornamented with a large-scale, stylized, angular calligraphy called Kufic, pseudo-Kufic, or Kufesque.

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