Fars is a province rather than a town: roughly 122,000 square kilometers of south-western Iran, running from the Zagros highlands in the west towards desert in the east, with Shiraz as its capital. Its older name was Pars, which the Greeks wrote as Persis and which gave English the word Persia; Arabic has no p sound, so after the Islamic conquest Pars became Fars. Persepolis and Pasargadae both stand inside its borders. On a rug label, though, the name works as an umbrella over several quite different weaves, and knowing which of them you are looking at matters far more than the province itself.

Four names carry most of the province's output into the trade: QashqaiSee in the carpet dictionary, Shiraz, Abadeh and GabbehSee in the carpet dictionary, with Khamseh and Luri weaving alongside them. Persian rug making is usually described in three registers, city workshop, village and tribal, and Fars sits almost entirely in the last two. Qashqai and Gabbeh are tribal, woven by nomads. Abadeh is a village rug, made by settled weavers who have better tools, more dye and looms in more sizes, but who work without the paper cartoon a city workshop follows. Shiraz appears on both lists, which fits a weave made by settled former nomads on the edge of a large city. The fine curvilinear floral work of the northern workshop towns is not part of the repertoire here.

The Qashqai are a confederacy of tribes, long nomadic, recorded in this corner of Iran since at least the sixteenth century and mixed in make-up, with TurkomanSee in the carpet dictionary, Arab, Kurdish and Lur components. Their pastoral year sets the weaving calendar: spring, summer and autumn are spent moving with the sheep and goats in search of pasture, and the loomSee in the carpet dictionary comes out once the camp settles for the winter. Tribal dyeing works from whatever the surrounding country supplies, the vegetables, flowers and other natural material of wherever the camp happens to be. The rug simply carries the tribe's own name, as Baluch and Turkoman rugs do.

No blueprint is used. Every design is carried in the weaver's memory and handed down a generation at a time, so the pattern itself does the work a written record would do elsewhere. Motifs come from what the tribe lives among: animals, plants, flowers, trees and ordinary household objects, arranged in geometric and medallionSee in the carpet dictionary layouts. Color runs to jewel tones, reds, saffron, gold, indigo, blue and green, usually over a deep red or a dark navy ground. A Qashqai reads as improvised rather than composed, and small irregularities in the drawing are part of how it is meant to look.

WoolSee in the carpet dictionary comes from the tribe's own sheep, and it is a hard weaving wool: thicker and more awkward to work than the soft clip a city workshop buys, which is exactly why the finished rug wears so well while still feeling soft to the hand. The foundation may be cotton or wool, the pileSee in the carpet dictionary always wool, medium in height and dense underfoot, a combination that suits hallways and other hard-used rooms. Sizes stay small to medium, commonly around 1.2 by 1.8 meters or 1.5 by 2.1 meters, sometimes runners, because a camp on the move can only carry a compact loom. Large Qashqai rugs are rare.

Shiraz rugs are woven in and around the provincial capital by local tribal families, on fixed looms set up in their own houses, and go to the city bazaar when finished to be sold on to merchants. Their design is a hybrid found nowhere else, mixing Abadeh and Qashqai styles together, and the reason is migration: weavers moving into the city from the surrounding country brought with them the patterns they already knew. Layouts stay geometric, whether a single central medallion, a column of repeating medallions or an allover geometric field, and the botehSee in the carpet dictionary, the teardrop figure familiar from paisley, appears regularly.

Structurally these are straightforward rugs. The foundation is cotton or wool with a wool pile in either case; a wool foundationSee in the carpet dictionary gives a looser, more relaxed pile, a cotton one a tighter and more compact weave. Wool-foundation pieces are tied with the symmetrical, or Turkish, knot, which resists wear strongly and lends itself to crisp geometric drawing. DensitySee in the carpet dictionary is low to medium, averaging about 120 knots per square inchSee in the carpet dictionary (KPSI). Fields are usually red or brown, lifted by cream, yellow, green and blue. Wooden looms move over time and a wool foundation shifts more than cotton, so tribal and village rugs are often slightly out of true; that is a signature of the making, not a fault.

Abadeh is a small town on the road north from Shiraz towards Isfahan, too small to support a rug market of its own, so its weavers carry their finished work to Shiraz to sell, which makes the capital the collecting market for a good deal of the province's output. The town's early rugs were not what made its name: they used vase patterns and colors too muted to stand out. The signature came later, and deliberately, to give the weave something recognizable, and it is a hexagon, a large one laid over the field, smaller ones stepping in towards the center, and a rosetteSee in the carpet dictionary medallion at the middle filled with dark navy, red or cream.

Around that framework the field and borders fill with small stylized figures, horses, sheep, birds, trees, stars, flowers and colored polygons. Those miniatures are the reason the weave is as fine as it is, at roughly 225 KPSI, which is high for a village rug and simply necessary if motifs that size are to read at all. The pile is wool on a cotton foundation. Fields are dark navy or a deep dark red, with cream, orange, green, blue and yellow carrying the detail. Like Qashqai, Abadeh takes heavy traffic well.

Of the four, Gabbeh is the plainest and the most immediately modern-looking, woven by tribal families across the province, in its villages, and in Shiraz itself; the groups most often credited with it are the Qashqai and the Luri of the Zagros. Documents place it at around 1600, so roughly four centuries of recorded history, although that date is approximate. The pile is wool over a foundation of wool or goat hairSee in the carpet dictionary, cotton being very rare, and it is left thick and long rather than cropped short, which makes a Gabbeh feel noticeably denser underfoot than an average Persian rug.

There is no fixed Gabbeh design. Most are geometric, with trees, animals and people reduced to near-abstraction; the low knot count is the reason, and the weavers work with it rather than against it, which is precisely why these rugs sit so easily in contemporary rooms. Two color families exist. Colored GabbehSee in the carpet dictionary uses dyed wool, so any palette is possible and strong, bold color is the norm. Natural Gabbeh is woven from undyed white and black fleece blended into creams, browns, greys and blacks, usually over a cream ground. Sizes cluster tightly, around 0.9 to 1.2 meters wide by 1.8 to 2.1 meters long, with smaller pieces occasionally found.

Two cautions are worth carrying into a purchase. Gabbeh woven in the city of Shiraz is close to a city rug made to look like a Gabbeh: well woven, but without the character a tribal or village piece carries. And very fine, heavy Gabbeh is sometimes offered under the Qashqai name, which is not the same thing as a true patterned Qashqai rug. Knot count itself is better read as a guide to style than as a grade of quality: Gabbeh and Qashqai sit under 80 KPSI, Shiraz near 120, Abadeh near 225, and each figure describes a different kind of rug rather than a better or worse one.

A Persian rug is an Iranian rug — a rug hand-knottedSee in the carpet dictionary in Iran — and the tradition behind it is the oldest documented anywhere. The earliest surviving carpet, the Pazyryk rugSee in the carpet dictionary, was found preserved in a frozen burial mound and dates to the fifth century BC — roughly 2,500 years ago — and it is already accomplished work, not a beginner's craft. What began as warm, hard-wearing floor coverings for tribal households grew, over those centuries, into the art form that every other rug-weaving country has borrowed from.

Two later chapters shaped what a Persian carpet looks like today. Under the Safavid dynastySee in the carpet dictionary, from 1501 to 1732, the court promoted weaving alongside painting and calligraphy, and the workshops of Tabriz, HeratSee in the carpet dictionary, Kashan and Kerman produced the masterpieces that now sit in museums. This is when the great central medallionSee in the carpet dictionary appeared, and when designs grew elaborate enough that a separate designer — often a miniature painter — drew the pattern onto a cartoon for the weaver to follow. The second chapter came in the nineteenth century, under the Qajar dynastySee in the carpet dictionary, when production reached its historical peak, exports to Europe and America boomed, and the workshop industry whose descendants still weave today took its modern shape.

The trade sorts Persian rugs into three families. City rugs — Tabriz, Kashan, Kerman, Nain, Isfahan — are woven in workshops from a drawn design, carry the highest knot densities and come in the widest range of colors, sizes and patterns. Village rugs such as HerizSee in the carpet dictionary, BakhtiariSee in the carpet dictionary and KarajaSee in the carpet dictionary sit in between, mostly geometric and largely woven from memory. Tribal rugs — Baluch, TurkomanSee in the carpet dictionary, QashqaiSee in the carpet dictionary, each named after the people who weave it — are made on small portable looms, so they run smaller, and their bold geometric drawing comes from the weaver's own head rather than from paper.

The design vocabulary draws on a deep stock of motifs: Shah AbbasiSee in the carpet dictionary palmettes, flowing arabesques, the small repeating Herati patternSee in the carpet dictionary, medallions, garden and tree-of-life compositions. These combine with regional habits into styles a practiced eye can place at a glance, from the bold geometric medallions of Heriz to the fine curvilinear florals of Isfahan.

The classic palette is built on natural dyes: madderSee in the carpet dictionary reds, indigo blues, saffron yellows and the soft whites of undyed woolSee in the carpet dictionary, settled into combinations refined over centuries. Natural dyes age gracefully, mellowing into the patina that older rugs are prized for, and slight shifts of tone between dye batchesSee in the carpet dictionary — the effect called abrashSee in the carpet dictionary — are a mark of small-batch natural dyeing, not a flaw.

The pileSee in the carpet dictionary is almost always woolSee in the carpet dictionary, and in a Persian wool rug the wool itself decides much of the quality. The best fleece comes from high-altitude flocks, where it grows thicker and richer in natural oils; spring-sheared wool beats the autumn clip, and hand-spun yarnSee in the carpet dictionary gives a finer, softer thread than machine spinning. Fine pieces add silk highlights to a wool pile, and at the very top sits the Persian silk rug, woven in pure silk. Foundations are usually cotton in city weaving, wool in tribal and older pieces, silk at the very top of the range.

Every knot is tied by hand, one at a time, in one of two forms: the asymmetric Persian knotSee in the carpet dictionary, usual in central and eastern Iran, or the symmetric Turkish knotSee in the carpet dictionary, common in the north-west ever since Seljuk weavers introduced it in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A large rug holds in the region of two million knots and can occupy a weaver for about a year.

Knot densitySee in the carpet dictionary is the figure newcomers fixate on, and the finest silk-foundation pieces do reach as much as 1,000 knots per square inch. But densitySee in the carpet dictionary only matters as far as the drawing demands it: a curvilinear Isfahan needs a fine weave to stay sharp, while a geometric Heriz is famously durable at a modest count. Material, symmetry, color harmony and condition say more about quality than any single number.

Persian carpets settle into modern rooms as naturally as classical ones, as a focal point in a living room, a foundation under a dining table or a quieter accent in a bedroom. Care is undemanding: gentle vacuuming without a rotating brush, an occasional turn for even wear, and a professional wash about every five years — sooner in a hallway or entrance, less often in a quiet room.

A hand-knotted Persian rug tends to outlast its owners. Pieces a century old regularly survive in fine condition, their colors settled and their pile supple, often looking better than when they left the loomSee in the carpet dictionary. A well-chosen, well-kept rug holds its worth and passes down as a family heirloom rather than being replaced — which is precisely what the knots, the wool and the dyes were always for.