Khorasan is the old name for the whole northeastern corner of Iran, usually read as the land where the sun comes up. Historically it stretched well past the modern border to take in HeratSee in the carpet dictionary, Balkh and Merv, which is why the herati or mahi (fish) pattern found on so many rugs from here carries the name of a city that now lies in Afghanistan. The Iranian part was divided in 2004 into three provinces: Razavi Khorasan, whose capital is Mashhad; North Khorasan, centred on Bojnurd; and South Khorasan, centred on Birjand. On a rug label the word still means the older, wider region.

That makes it an umbrella rather than a single style, and the distance between the weaves gathered under it is considerable. Mashhad is a city weave, drawn on paper and worked to a blueprint in the manner of Tabriz, Isfahan, Kashan and QomSee in the carpet dictionary. KashmarSee in the carpet dictionary and Moud are town weaves with their own settled repertoires. Quchan, northwest of Mashhad toward the TurkmenSee in the carpet dictionary frontier, is tribal: no cartoon, no paper, the designs carried in memory and handed down. A carpet described as Khorasani could be any of these, so it is worth knowing which town it came from before judging what is in front of you.

Mashhad grew up around the shrine of Imam Reza, and weaving there is traced back to the late middle ages. Its modern standing was made in the nineteenth century, when English and German buyers drove a vast export trade in Persian carpets and the city became one of the handful of manufacturing hubs supplying it, alongside Tabriz, SultanabadSee in the carpet dictionary and Kerman. It is now the second largest city in the country, and one of the few places whose name alone places a rug at the top of the Persian range.

The Kurdish presence in the northeast is the result of a deliberate policy. The Safavids could not hold this stretch of frontier against the neighbouring tribes, the Turkmen among them, so they moved Kurdish clans east and settled them here, knowing them to be formidable fighters. The settlers brought their Anatolian design vocabulary with them and it never left. Quchan rugs still look closer to Caucasian and Anatolian Kurdish work than to anything woven further south in Iran, although four centuries in Khorasan have given them a character of their own.

Design in Mashhad is curvilinear almost without exception. The classic layout is a single large Shah AbbasiSee in the carpet dictionary medallionSee in the carpet dictionary on a field packed with flowers, finished with floral corner piecesSee in the carpet dictionary; those corners are unusually elongated, and the stretched corner is the readiest field mark for a Mashhad. Floral all-over versions with no medallion at all are just as common, and the branch work carrying the flowers ranges from thick and emphatic to hair-thin, or disappears entirely. BotehSee in the carpet dictionary, the budding teardrop form, and the herati lattice both turn up as secondary motifs.

Colour is the other identifier. The Mashhad red is a wine red or burgundy rather than a bright crimson, drawn from local vegetable dyes, and it usually takes the field, set against dark and light blues and cream. Pieces that combine silk with woolSee in the carpet dictionary go darker still, with black or burgundy grounds lifted by beige, gold, light green and yellow. Measured against the wider Persian range, Mashhad counts among the brighter weaves, in the company of Tabriz, Nain and Kashan, rather than among the muted ones.

Kashmar, a small town southwest of Mashhad whose rugs travel into the city to reach the market, works in a wholly different idiom. Its signature is the garden or panel design: the field is divided into compartments, each holding a scene of its own, a tree of lifeSee in the carpet dictionary, birds in flight, deer in a wood, a lake, the four seasons, so that the rug reads as a run of pictures rather than one pattern. Pictorial pieces with figures from ancient history belong to the town as well, and a vase designSee in the carpet dictionary that spreads vessels of flowers across the field. Large local flocks mean Kashmar spins its own wool and dyes it with plants gathered nearby, and the palette is subdued and earth-toned, built on an orange-rust brown hard to find in any other Persian weave.

Quchan is geometric where the rest of the region is floral. Two layouts account for most of what it makes: a column of repeating geometric medallions running the length of the field, and an all-over version of the same vocabulary with no centre at all. Grounds are strong, in red, blue or ivory, with highlights in several browns plus gold, grey and black. The construction is tribal throughout, a wool or goat-hair foundation carrying a wool pileSee in the carpet dictionary with no cotton anywhere in it, and the knotting averages around 120 knots per square inchSee in the carpet dictionary (KPSI), well above average for a rug made this way.

Moud, in South Khorasan near Birjand, is the region's herati weave: the small repeating fish-and-leaf lattice covers most of its output, in beige, blue, rust and red. The foundation is cotton under a wool pile, with silk worked into the pile of some newer pieces, and Moud rugs usually carry a signature, a good deal of the production coming from the Iran Carpet CompanySee in the carpet dictionary. It is the quietest of the Khorasan weaves, and because the lattice repeats evenly across the whole field, the pattern still reads when furniture covers part of it.

Materially a Mashhad is normally wool on a cotton foundation. Silk, where it appears, sits in the foundation rather than the pile, though newer silk-and-wool pieces put it in the pile as well. At the top of the range the wool is kork, the first clip from young sheep, oilier and softer and taking dye with more shine. Not all of it is local: workshop pieces woven in imported New Zealand woolSee in the carpet dictionary exist, so the lustre belongs to the grade of fleece and to the dyeing rather than to the mountains around the city. Fine branch work needs knots to resolve, which is why Mashhads generally begin above 250 KPSI, and exceptional workshop pieces have been woven at close to a thousand. At that level the foundation has to be silk, because cotton cannot carry the count.

Pile height is where these weaves differ most in daily use. Mashhad belongs with HerizSee in the carpet dictionary, BijarSee in the carpet dictionary and SaroukSee in the carpet dictionary among the deep-piled Persian rugs, which makes it a sound choice for a hallway, an entrance or any floor under constant traffic; Kashmar, cut thinner, suits a dining room where chairs have to move. Sizes cover the full span. Mashhad and Kashmar are both known for room-size and oversized carpets, while Quchan rarely runs wider than about 1.8 metres or longer than 4, held there by the compact tribal loomSee in the carpet dictionary, with small bags and mats making up part of what it weaves.

Signature workshops are a Khorasan speciality, and Mashhad is where they cluster. Astan Quds RazaviSee in the carpet dictionary, the shrine endowment, wove only for the shrine's own halls and courtyards before expanding in 1983 into one of the largest handmade carpet enterprises in the country; its reputation rests on dyeing that yields unusually deep reds and blues. KhadiviSee in the carpet dictionary, founded by a designer who rose to foreman at the Amoghli workshopSee in the carpet dictionary, is still run by one of his sons. Saber, which specialised in monumental carpets, stopped applying its signature after the founder's death, and ZarinehSee in the carpet dictionary, remembered for cream grounds and hair-thin branches, shut decades ago. Signed rugs from those two houses are therefore finite in number, which is what draws collectors to them.

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 colours, 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 practised 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, colour 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 colours 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.