Antique Carpets

The hand-knotted pile carpet probably originated in southern Central Asia between the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC.

The earliest surviving pile carpet in the world is called the "Pazyryk Carpet", dating from the 5th-4th century BCE. It was excavated by Sergei Ivanovich Rudenko in 1949 from a Siberian burial ground where it had been preserved in ice in the valley of Pazyryk. The origin of this carpet is attributed to either the Iranian Scythians or the Persian Achaemenids. This carpet is 200 x 183 cm (6'6" x 6'0") and has 360,000 knots/m².

The earliest group of surviving knotted pile carpets was produced under Seljuk rule in the first half of the 13th century on the Anatolian peninsula. The eighteen extant works are often referred to as the Konya Carpets. The central field of these large carpets is a repeated geometrical pattern. The borders are ornamented with a large-scale, stylized, angular calligraphy called Kufic, pseudo-Kufic, or Kufesque.