In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum a 16th-century Iranian carpet reigns over the Islamic collection and mesmerizes visitors. In Threads of Empire, Dorothy Armstrong writes, “The carpet transports us away from South Kensington to wherever our personal Arabian Nights dreams are located.” While the beauty of the pile side of her 12 rugs entrances her, she looks deeply at the knotted side, to explore the complex stories of their origins. Through both picture and pattern she teases out the history of these carpets, which, she argues, can reveal much about the history of our world.
Her first example is a case-study for her method, where science has its limitations but history does not. The Pazyryk carpet, housed in Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage, is the oldest knotted carpet in the world, dating back to 300 or 400 BCE. Despite its age, it appears almost new, as a result of preservation in Siberia’s permafrost. The images of the carpet bring to life the world of the ancient Scythians. But while we can do ancient DNA tests on the mummies found alongside the carpet, and even analyze the grains found in their burial food, the wool and dyes cannot tell us where it was woven and by whom. On the other hand, the story of the discovery of the carpet and the fate of the archeologists—sentenced to build Stalin’s White Sea Canal—speaks volumes about the Scythian inspiration behind Russia’s sense of itself as an Eurasian country, never so evident as today.
From carpets with murky histories, Armstrong passes to others with impeccable pedigrees. The V&A’s Ardabil carpet is unquestionably one of these. It hosted the faithful praying at the Shrine of Sheykh Safi, the eponymous progenitor of Iran’s Safavid dynasty in Azerbaijan. Yet, as Armstrong points out, there was little understanding of this history when the carpet first attracted Western curiosity, and not a small amount of mythmaking about it. Excellent marketing by the original dealer, Stebbing, managed to convince admirers that this was the most beautiful carpet in the whole world. Armstrong debunks the mythmaking with her incisive and far-ranging analysis of the dealers and curators… but this reviewer still clings to the view that it is the most beautiful in the world.
Carpets are themselves rather tight-lipped about their own past.
Carpets are remarkable in as much as we tell so many stories about them, while they themselves are rather tight-lipped about their past: they are often made of abstract patterns, with undecipherable symbols, made by illiterate and unnamed weavers—the polar opposite to the figurative sculptures and paintings that fill our museums. Perhaps because the rugs are mute yet at the same time act powerfully on our imaginations, we are keen to hear their stories.
Many of the stories that Armstong recounts concern historical relationships. Since carpets have often been important commercial commodities, we can learn much about the connections between, say, Safavid Iran and Hideyoshi’s Japan, between Transylvania’s Lutheran community and the Ottoman empire. Rugs are a marker, too, about power, flows of money, and cultural identity. The Lutherans of Transylvania might have found the Turkish carpets attractive because, having removed images from their churches, they needed the abstract designs of their Muslim neighbors to add warmth and color to their otherwise stark places of worship.
Rugs also signpost major cultural changes. As evidenced by the Ardabil piece, elite collectors and museums in 1900 prized, above all, rugs from Safavid Iran. No one considered woven kilims worth collecting. Starting in the 1960s, a change of perspective on traditional crafts made art lovers open their eyes to the amazing design and color of these textiles. Armstrong explains how the collecting world opened its eyes to the aesthetic genius behind the so-called tribal craft:
The cognitive challenge of this is huge. The kilim-weaver is a mathematician thinking about geometry, an engineer thinking about tension and strength, and an artist thinking about palette and design. And as she thinks she also feels, noting changes in tension, adjusting physically to the creative process. She holds all this in her head and body as she works inch by inch while the wind blows, children cry, and food and water supplies run down.
Rugs tell stories mainly about the people who collected them, rather than the people who made them. In most cases the weavers remain unknown. Armstong recovers tantalizing traces, though. A large Persian style rug in the V&A is the product of inmates in the Lahore Jail. One of the inmates confessed to a visitor that he was depressed because visitors looked on them as savages.
In the case of the brilliant red Bukhara carpets, she retraces the fate of the weavers, as they progress from proudly independent pastoralists producing textiles for daily use, to Soviet collective farmers, to refugees in Afghanistan, and then refugees in Pakistan.
Armstrong’s best stories are of forgery and (often associated) self-deception.
Not all of Armstrong’s stories are equally compelling. The reviewer did not find much of a connection between the Caucasian rug under the feet of the big three at Yalta (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin), and the fate of Poland or the Crimean Tatars. Sometimes a carpet is just a carpet. While full of beguiling and diverting anecdotes, Armstrong’s attention to historical detail is much stronger in areas relating to the rugs themselves; elsewhere she’s given to sweeping panoramas that remind one of tour brochures.
Yet Armstrong’s best stories are of forgery and (often associated) self-deception. We often don’t use our eyes when we admire a rug. We rely on provenance to judge the importance of a rug, and in a circular way, we let price determine what is a great rug. Many a collector or museum has been hoodwinked by unscrupulous dealers’ making up a glorious provenance for a rug. Safavid Iran is always the best bet, followed by the golden age of Ottoman Turkey. The huge premium this commands motivated some talented, uninhibited craftsmen to recreate such carpets in the 20th century. One went so far as to publish a pseudo-scholarly “catalogue” of rugs, under an assumed name with a suitable PhD, and then sell his own works on the basis of the catalogue.
Readers with only a passing interest in oriental rugs will find treasures of insights about the material world we live in, and how those agile fingers on the loom in an imperial workshop in 16th-century Iran down to a dusty refugee camp in Peshawar can show us what paradise looks like.