The Origin of the Art of Knotting Carpets
Up till the 1950’s, the prevailing school of thought was that knotted carpets developed out of nomadic conditions around the time of Christ’s birth. The oldest known discoveries up till this point dated back to 300 – 600 A.D. They were found by Sir Aurel Stein and the German turfan expedition in the towns of the east Turkistan part of the silk route (the expedition took place in the years 1913 – 1915 in the area of the turfan oasis and Lou-Lan, today known as the Chinese province Sinkiang Uighur). One assumes that the art of carpet knotting was originally just a further development of the weaving technique, aimed to create a structure similar to that of fur, which would be more fitting for providing insulation on cold foundations.

However, there is a time span of more than 600 years between these fragments and the oldest preserved carpets from the Near East. Analyzing literary sources also hasn’t been able to fill in any gaps. The first accounts written by Arabian and Persian author’s come from the 8-14th centuries and do not give much additional information about technique or appearance.

Greek sources talk about “soft carpets” from the Babylonians and Persians, but also don’t say anything about the appearance or design of the mentioned carpets. Therefore, the interpretation of such sources is left up to the imagination.

This changed however very abruptly when a Russian explorer (Prof. S. Rudenko) found such a carpet in 1949 in Pazyryk Valley in the Altai Mountains. This carpet could be dated back to the 5th century A.D. and was found in a grave of a Scythian king as a burial offering. There are lots of very different opinions as to where this carpet actually originated from.

The most probable supposition from a modern day point of view is: After the Urartu Kingdom was dissolved in the year 590 A.D., an important contemporary from Syria was in Mesopotamia, around the year 590 A.D., the scattered ethnic groups mixed with the Scythians and formed the Armenian Nation. The carpet most likely came from (Sakis), the Scythians capital city, where it was knotted by Armenians.

This piece of workmanship shows a fineness of 360, 000 symmetric knots per square meter with the original size having been approximately 183 x 198cm. The outer field shows circulating Frisian deers and riders, the inner field, on the other hand, cross-like ornaments.

There are two questions that arise out of these explanations: Was the oriental knotting technique discovered twice? How long was the period of development that preceded the great technical perfection of the Pazyryk Carpets?

The first question remains open for the time being and can only be answered in the future with the help of further archeological research. To the second question one can say that the period of development must have lasted several hundred years in order to reach such a high standard.

The Pazyryk carpet is today still the oldest knotted carpet in the world and is exhibited in the Eremitage in St. Petersburg.

Modern Museum Carpets
Oriental carpets were passionately sought-after in Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th century and were considered as essential for the representation of courts and churches. The famous collector and art connoisseur from Berlin, Wilhelm von Bode, can be seen as the founder of the modern interest for the history of art and culture of hand knotted Oriental Carpets, which had almost completely been forgotten during the 18th and 19th century. In 1886 he purchased an animal carpet in the roman art trade, which awakened and set free his enquiring mind. Von Bode concluded that the carpets time of origin was before 1440 by comparing it to some Italian pictures (Domenico di Bartolo).

This means that this carpet goes back to the time of the Seljuk Empire in Turkey (14th and 15th century). The Seljuks were of the opinion that representing animals in pieces of artwork was completely compatible with the Islamic rules and therefore produced the so-called animal carpets. When the Ottomans took power in the 15th century, they abandoned figured representations out of religious reasons.

Encouraged by the success of having been able to date and categorize the animal carpet, Bode and Andere continued trying to get an overview of carpet production during the 16th and 17th century by analyzing carpet representations with the help of paintings, especially those painted by Italian and Dutch masters. This project seemed more promising seeing as there were only copies and hardly any preserved originals from the 14th and 15th century which however changed in the 16th century. From then onwards there is a larger number of originals that have survived and now constitute the essence of museum collections.

The circumstances were made difficult by the fact that the Italian painters on the one hand (Paolo Veronese etc.) often reproduced the carpets in a very stylized fashion and the Dutch on the other hand artistically screwed or crumpled them up which made them harder to identify.

As a result of this research work, individual types of carpets became known according to the name of the painter who frequently portrayed this particular type of carpet in his works. Nevertheless, it also came to misnomers like with the Dutch painter Hans Holbein the Younger. The carpets that were named after him (besser) were portrayed by an Italian master (Rafaellino del Garbo) long before his time. Altogether, three completely different types of Anatolian carpets were named after him: large- (Bergama), small- (Ushak) and Arabesque Holbein carpets. He never even portrayed the latter himself which is why they were later renamed after the Italian painter Lorenzo di Lotto and are nowadays referred to as “Lotto” carpets.

In the following period, von Bode built up a significant collection, which he later left to the Berlin Museum. From a modern day point of view, the complete collection didn’t cost him more than what one would now pay for one of the medium priced carpets. (Wilhelm von Bode writes in his memoirs: “In Italy at that time, the carpets were virtually lying on the streets and being given away for next to nothing.”). Despite the fact that several of the most important pieces were destroyed during the Second World War, the collection is still outstanding. Part of it can be found in the West Berlin Museum in Dahlem (collection of Prussian cultural property), and part of it in the Berlin Museum in the eastern part of the city.

Till now, the main devices used for dating and research work, besides scientific methods, are on the one hand the reproduction of carpets in Oriental and Western pictures and on the other hand passed down written documents, e.g. estate inventories and travelogues and, last but not least, the preserved carpets themselves, in as much as they have, which seldom occurs, reliable records and dates.

Apart from the already mentioned Museum in Berlin, we highly recommend a visit to the following museums for anyone who is interested in carpets: The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum für Kunsthandwerk in Vienna and the Türk-ve-Islam Eserleri Müzesi in Istanbul which has the biggest collection of Turkish carpets.