A famed Tabriz workshop begun in the early 20th century by Hassan Alabaf and run through three generations of his family, from Hassan to his son Abbas, who took over on his father's death, and on to a third generation that continues it. It reportedly ran over 300 looms with a thousand or more weavers. Its rugs in traditional Tabriz designs are regarded as among the finest made in Iran, often likened to the Rolls-Royce of Persian rugs, and pieces bearing its signature are sought by collectors and command higher prices.
Rugs from Arak, a city in central Iran formerly called Sultanabad, and the villages around it, a weaving region that grew in the Qajar era when exports of Persian rugs to Europe and America thrived. Rug texts also use the city as a reference point: the town of Sarouk lies about 50 km (31 miles) to its north, and the Malayer villages lie between Arak and Hamadan. Older pieces of the area are still sold under the old name Sultanabad.
Rugs woven today chiefly in Pakistani workshops by Pakistani and Afghan weavers who rework older Persian-Turkmen designs rooted in Central Asia; in the trade they count as Oriental rather than Persian rugs. The hallmark is an allover repeat of guls, stylized octagonal (sometimes diamond-shaped) flower motifs, on a field most often red, then cream, sometimes blue or green, and more recently black, with black, peach, blue, and green accents, all in plant-based dyes. The pile is soft, silky-looking 100 percent wool on a cotton foundation, medium in height, and some pieces come oversized; a finer grade has higher knot density, more detailed drawing, and premium Ghazni wool.
An animal fiber from camels, used less often in rugs than wool, cotton or silk and found mostly in tribal Persian rugs. Its natural warm tan tone has also become a color name: camel hair is a recurring field color in Mehraban rugs, alongside dark blue, dark red, cream and peach, so the phrase can refer to the fiber or merely to the shade.
A Persian rug made in a city, often inside a workshop, one of the three families (city, village, tribal) into which Persian rugs are commonly sorted. Weavers usually follow a designer's drawn plan under experienced or master weavers, and a workshop can buy wool in bulk and color it all at once, so standards are stricter than in memory-based village and tribal weaving. City rugs generally reach the highest knot densities and the widest range of sizes, colors and designs, most often florals (Tabriz, Kashan, Isfahan, Kerman, Nain, Mashhad, Sarouk). Workshop origin usually signals higher quality, but not every workshop rug is signed.
A construction in which two weft threads, rather than one, are run through the warp between successive rows of knots. The doubled weft covers the foundation, so on the back of a finely and tightly woven rug only knots and weft show, without the white flecks of warp that give away a single-weft rug, and the rug is thicker, denser and heavier. Bijar and Heriz are typical double-wefted types, as are finely woven Persian rugs in general.
Traditional Persian rug sizes based on the zar, an old unit of measure of roughly 104 cm derived from the arm. A dozar ("two zar") measures about 2 × 1.3 m, while a zaronim ("a zar and a half") is around 1.5 × 1 m. Terms like these reveal how deeply rug making is woven into daily life: sizes were standardized around rooms, doorways, and bodies centuries before metric measurements.
One of the three principal design families of Persian rugs, alongside geometric and Herati: patterns of flowers, leaves and vines drawn in flowing curves. It dominates city and workshop rugs such as Tabriz, Kashan, Kerman, Sarouk, Nain and Isfahan, where high knot density allows fine detail, and it typically draws on forms such as the Shah Abbasi design and rosettes. Floral motifs, though known to weavers earlier, are said to have become common in Persian rugs from the 16th century. Floral rugs come in two layouts: with a central medallion, where flowers and branches are smaller, or allover, with larger flowers.
A style of rug drawing built from angular shapes such as hexagons, diamonds and squares, outlined by straight lines, in contrast to the flowing curves of floral designs. It goes back to some of the oldest Persian rugs, before floral designs, and is typical of village and tribal rugs (Heriz, Hamadan, Zanjan, Abadeh, Karaja, Qashqai, Kazak, Turkmen), though city workshops such as Tabriz also weave it. Many shapes carry symbolic meaning. It comes as an allover pattern, a single central medallion or repeating medallions, and geometric rugs are known for strong borders. Because the shapes need little fine detail, a low-to-medium knot density is enough, as in Heriz and Karaja rugs, and Heriz is still known for durability.
Rugs from Herat, a historic city in western Afghanistan that was among the largest rug-producing centers of the Safavid period (16th to early 18th century), alongside Tabriz, Kashan and Kerman. The city also gives its name to the Herati design, a repeated diamond holding a small flower or leaves, with curved leaves at its sides, which is said to have originated there and is still woven in many Persian rugs.
The era of Mongol and Ilkhanid rule over Persia, which some rug histories date from the 1300s into the 1500s. It is credited with blending Chinese and Islamic art in Persian carpet design: pictorial, open-space compositions and motifs such as the phoenix, lotus, cloud band and dragon are traced to this contact, and Persian rug weaving as it is known today may have begun here. Little evidence remains, since much of the period's work was destroyed, but rare glimpses of its rugs show floral motifs and birds starting to appear.
A stylized blossom motif regarded in Persian rug tradition as a sacred flower and linked with long life. The central medallion of a floral-medallion rug is read as a lotus, drawn either as one large flower or as several small ones. The lotus is also a main feature of the Shah Abbasi design, and in the Herati design the fish-like leaves are said to circle a lotus. Lotus blossoms are among the motifs credited to the Mongol period, when designs from Chinese art entered Persian rugs.
A high-grade wool imported from Manchester, England, that Kashan weavers typically use for the pile of their rugs. It is ranked with Ghazni wool and New Zealand wool among the three best-known high-quality wools for Persian rugs, so where a rug's wool comes from is one of the quality points that can be checked.
The long, silky, lustrous hair of the Angora goat. In Persian rugs it is one of several animal fibers, listed together with goat hair, camel hair and cow hair, that can serve as a material but are much less common than the usual wool, cotton and silk; this group is seen mostly in tribal rugs.
Fine Persian rugs from the city of Nain, near Isfahan in central Iran, where rug weaving began only in the 20th century on Isfahan's model and the Habibian workshop made the name known worldwide. The wool pile, often with silk highlights, is knotted on a cotton foundation at roughly 200 to 700 knots per square inch or more (about 31 to 108 per cm²). Density is graded by la (“layer”): the lower the number, the finer the rug, from about 650 KPSI at 4 la to 400-500 at 6 la and 200-300 at 9 la. Designs are curvilinear florals in medallion, allover or Shah Abbasi layouts, mostly on a cream or ivory ground with blue, beige and gray. Most Nain rugs are unsigned, though the Habibian signature is a well-known exception, and large sizes are scarce and costly.
A layout in which most of the field is left open, usually one plain ground color with only a few flowers in curving lines and sometimes a medallion. It comes in three forms: a single central medallion, two or more repeating medallions, or an allover scatter of motifs with generous space between them. The composition is said to echo the cover of a Quran and is found mainly in city-style Persian rugs such as Tabriz, Kashan, Sarouk, Hamadan, and Kerman, and also in Bijar rugs. With so little pattern to hide behind, inconsistencies in the wool or dyeing show plainly.
A hand-knotted rug from the weaving lands of Asia and the Middle East, usually named for the city or region it comes from and known for intricate designs. In the trade pairing “Persian and Oriental,” Persian means made in Iran and Oriental covers the other origins, such as Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and China, for example Pakistan-made Kazak, Oushak-design and Bokhara rugs or Afghan Khal Mohammadi rugs; used broadly, the word also takes in Persian rugs. Look-alikes from Pakistan, India or China are not Persian. Only hand-knotted rugs are authentic; hand-tufted rugs, which are sometimes sold as “handmade,” and machine-made rugs rank below. A rug’s country and city of origin tell a buyer what to expect of its typical colors and quality.
Hand-knotted rugs woven in Pakistan, often by Afghan weavers, that reproduce Persian, Turkish, Turkoman and Caucasian designs; the best-known families are Kazak, Oushak, Peshawar (Chobi) and Bokhara, and Afghan-style Khal Mohammadi rugs are sometimes grouped with them. Compared with Iranian rugs they usually have softer, more muted colors that designers choose to suit modern interiors, a low-to-medium pile from antique-style washing and short cutting, and a wide choice of large sizes. Kazak production is credited to Afghan weavers in Pakistani workshops from the 1980s and 1990s, Oushak-style production to workshop owners who moved from Iran to Pakistan in the 1970s after an embargo on Iran. Because they are not woven in Iran, they are not Persian rugs.
The oldest known pile carpet in the world, woven around the 5th century BC and discovered in 1949 in the frozen tomb of a Scythian noble in Siberia's Altai Mountains. Grave robbers left the burial mound open, so cold and moisture froze the chamber and sealed the carpet in ice for some 2,500 years. Its symmetrical knots, about 36 per square centimeter (roughly 230 per square inch), show that carpet weaving was already a mature art in antiquity. It is often described as the oldest Persian rug and as early evidence of tribal weaving, a craft that began as protection against cold and damp. It is displayed in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
A hand-knotted rug woven in Iran, the country called Persia in the West until 1935, in a tradition said to reach back some 2,500 years. It is named after the city, town, region or tribe where it was made (Tabriz, Kashan, Heriz, Baluchi) and belongs to one of three groups: city rugs woven in workshops from a blueprint, village rugs, and tribal rugs, the latter two woven largely from memory. The pile is wool, silk or a blend, on a cotton, wool or silk foundation. Look-alikes woven in Pakistan, India or China are not Persian rugs.
A rug whose pile is entirely silk, woven on a cotton foundation or on a silk foundation; when both are silk, no wool enters the rug. Silk's fineness allows the highest knot density of any Persian rug, roughly 600 to 1,000 knots per square inch (about 9,300 to 15,500 per 10 x 10 cm), so the pile is kept low to show the design, and the fibers give a luminous sheen that shifts with the light. About 90 percent of Qum rugs are silk on both foundation and pile, as are some Isfahan rugs. These are the most expensive Persian rugs; they are delicate and stains are hard to remove, so they suit display, formal rooms or wall hanging rather than dining rooms or homes with pets.
Persian rugs from the city of Qum (Qom), a comparatively young weaving center whose rugs are known for the highest knot density of any Persian type. About nine in ten are pure silk on a silk foundation, at roughly 600 to 1,000 knots per square inch (KPSI; about 93 to 155 per cm²); the rest, with kork wool or silk-and-wool piles, run about 300 to 700 KPSI (about 47 to 108 per cm²). Designs are floral medallions, hunting scenes and pictorials, mostly in soft pastel, ivory, gold and green tones (a pistachio-green field is prized) on light or dark grounds. Newer rugs usually carry a workshop signature, older ones often do not. The local water is said to soften and brighten silk, so silk rugs from across Iran are sent there for washing.
A round, flower-like ornament in which petals radiate evenly from a center, like a blossom seen from above. From about the 16th century, as floral design entered Persian rugs, weavers began placing a rosette at the center of the field, which produced the central medallion of floral city rugs, as in the circular rosette medallion with scrolling lines on a round Shah Abbasi Tabriz. On Abadeh rugs a small rosette worked in navy, red or cream marks the center of the medallion, one way to tell the type apart. Rosettes also repeat along borders, as in Tabriz and Bakhtiari rugs, and among the vines and palmettes of Sultanabad rugs.
The Persian ruling house that reigned from 1501, beginning with Shah Ismail, into the 1730s, whose court patronage of painting, calligraphy and weaving made this the golden age of Persian rugs. Many museum and top-auction masterpieces come from the era, with Tabriz, Herat, Kashan and Kerman the largest centers. As patterns grew more complex, designers, often miniature painters, became separate from the weavers who worked from their drawings; the large central medallion, curvilinear and geometric layouts and richer flowers and vines became hallmarks, and patterns were standardized for export to Asian and European markets. The Afghan invasion of Isfahan in 1722 interrupted weaving in the main manufacturing centers for several years, though tribes and villages carried on.
An antique Persian rug from the Heriz weaving area of northwestern Iran, the middle stage of Heriz design: more structured than the tribal, more open Bakshaish of the 1870s and earlier, yet less busy than the Heriz woven from the 1910s onward. Woven from the late 19th to the earliest 20th century, Serapis keep an open, spacious layout with bold geometric drawing in an earthy palette. All are now over a century old and fairly rare, and collectors prize them for their decorative appeal and durability.
A Tabriz workshop founded in the 1990s, young by the standards of Persian rug making, and known for contemporary designs with innovative, unusual color combinations, using a palette of light colors such as cream along with red and yellow. Its rugs carry the workshop's signature and are woven not only on the usual cotton but also on a silk foundation, which allows very high knot densities. The founder's three sons now run the workshop.