The Ardabil Carpet

The Ardabil Carpet is one of very few great carpets that tells you when it was made. At one end, in a small cartouche, is a couplet from a ghazal by Hafez, which says, in substance, that the poet has no refuge in the world but this threshold. Beneath it are the words ‘the work of a servant of the court, Maqsud of Kashan’, and the year 946 of the Islamic calendar, which corresponds to 1539–40. That places it in the reign of Shah Tahmasp, the second Safavid shah.

The design

It is about ten and a half metres long and over five wide, with a wool pile on a silk foundation, tied at roughly 340 knots to the square inch. A central sunburst medallion sits on a deep blue field of scrolling flowers, ringed by sixteen pointed pendants. From the medallion, at either end, hang two mosque lamps. Quarter-medallions fill the corners, so that the whole field reads as a single sky seen through a frame.

Shrine, dealers, museum

Its name comes from the shrine at Ardabil of Sheikh Safi al-Din, the Sufi master from whom the Safavid dynasty took its name, for which it is believed to have been made. That association comes to us largely through the dealers who brought it to Europe in the late nineteenth century, and it is not documented in the carpet itself. There were two carpets. One was repaired using wool from the other, which lost its borders in the process. The repaired carpet was bought by the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, in 1893, and William Morris was among those who urged the purchase. Its smaller twin is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Who Maqsud was remains uncertain. ‘Servant of the court’ may describe a designer, a workshop master or an official, and nothing obliges us to imagine him at the loom. The carpet signs itself as an act of service, not of authorship.