The city workshops

A city carpet starts on paper. A designer draws a naqsheh (a plan or map) on squared paper, each square standing for one knot and each colour marked, and the weavers work from it row by row. This is what allows the long, unbroken curves of a vine and a design that is identical in all four quarters. It also means that a city carpet is the work of a studio: designer, dyer, weavers, finisher.

Tabriz, in the north-west, was the first Safavid capital, and it has been a weaving and trading city for centuries. In the later nineteenth century its merchants did much to revive Persian weaving for the European market, and Tabriz rugs still range from bold to minutely detailed. Kashan, in central Iran, is the town named on the Ardabil Carpet, and it is known for silk weaving as well as for dense wool carpets in deep reds and blues. Its carpet-weaving skills were inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage in 2010.

Shah Abbas I made Isfahan his capital in 1598, and its court workshops produced some of the most luxurious carpets of the seventeenth century, including silk carpets brocaded with gold and silver thread. These are now called ‘Polonaise’, because examples shown at the Paris exhibition of 1878 were taken to be Polish. Kerman, in the south-east, is known for soft wool and a wide palette, and the Safavid ‘vase’ carpets, named after a technique and not a motif, are attributed to it.

Two newer names

Two of the best-known names are recent. Fine silk rugs from Qom are a twentieth-century development. Nain, a desert town near Isfahan, turned to fine carpets in the twentieth century as its older trade in woven woollen cloth declined, and became known for ivory and blue grounds with silk outlining.