A pictorial rug theme drawn from the classic Persian love story of two young people whose families forbid them to marry. The man, known as Majnun (“madman”), loses his reason from longing and roams the desert composing poems and songs; the woman, Layla, is married off to a wealthy nobleman to safeguard her family's honor and dies of grief, and he weeps himself to death on her grave. The best-known Persian telling is the verse romance of Nizami (1188), and the story appears on pictorial rugs, for example from Tabriz.