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Early
History
Carpets
were formerly woven to protect
the body from cold, to be spread on a
dais
or before a seat of honor,
to cover a table, couch, or wall, or
to
form the curtains of a tent.
There is evidence of the existence
of hand-woven carpets in antiquity.
On the rock tombs of Beni Hassan,
Egypt,
c.2500 B.C., men are depicted with the implements
of rug
weaving. Other evidence of
the early use of rugs is seen
in the
drawings on the ancient
palace walls of Nineveh.
Oriental
Carpets
In
the mountainous regions of the East
stretching from Turkey through
Persia and
Central Asia into China, where the fleece
of the sheep
and the hair of the camel and goat
grow long and fine, the art of
carpet-weaving
reached its height early in the 16th century The
artisan
worked on a handloom consisting essentially
of two
horizontal beams on which the warp
(the vertical threads) was
stretched; on the lower
one the finished carpet was rolled while
the
warp unrolled from the upper one.
The yarn for the pile, spun and
dyed
by hand, was cut in lengths of about 2 in.
(5.1 cm) and knotted
about the warp threads,
one tuft at a time, after one of the two
established ways of tying—the Ghiordes,
or Turkish, knot and the
Senna,
or Persian, knot.
After
a row of knots had been placed
across the width of the loom, two or
more weft, or horizontal, threads
of cotton or flax were woven in
and beaten into place with a heavy beater,
or comb. The tufts, or
pile, thus appeared only
on the face of the fabric,
which when
completed was sheared
to perfect smoothness. Although
the hair of
the camel and the goat
was used in the weaving of Oriental rugs,
the
wool of the sheep was the
essential component. Beautiful silk rugs
interwoven with gold thread
were also made in the 16th
and 17th
century. To some degree,
the quality of a carpet depends on the
materials used and the number of knots
per square inch of surface,
which
may vary from 40 to 1,000. Also produced
in these regions are
the
geometrically patterned and
flat woven rugs known as kilims.
Bibliography
See
W. von Bode and E. Kühnel, Antique Rugs from the Near East
(tr. of
4th rev. ed. 1970);
G. Robinson, Carpets and Other Textile
Floorcoverings
(2d rev. ed. 1972);
J. Moshimer, The Complete Rug
Hooker (1975);
E. Gans-Ruedin, The Splendor of Persian Carpets
(1978).
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