Kilim, soumak and jajim

A flatweave has no knots and no cut pile: the pattern is made by the wefts themselves. Flatweaves are lighter than pile rugs and quicker to make, and in many households they did the daily work while the knotted carpet was kept for guests. They served as floor covers, bedding wraps, tent dividers and bags, as well as the sofreh, the cloth spread on the floor for a meal.

The gelim, Persian for what English calls a kilim, is a tapestry weave. Coloured wefts are packed down hard so that they hide the warp entirely, and each colour is woven only as far as its own area before turning back. Where two colours meet along a vertical line, a small slit opens between them. That is why kilim designs favour diagonals, steps and lozenges: they keep the slits short. Hold a good kilim to the light and you will see the drawing in pinpricks of light. Those from Senneh, in Kurdistan, are among the finest.

Wrapped and striped

In soumak, the wefts are wrapped around the warps, forward over several and back under fewer, so that the face looks like stem-stitch embroidery and the back is a mass of loose ends. It is denser and heavier than a kilim, and carries finer detail without slits. The name is often linked to Shemakha, in today’s Republic of Azerbaijan, but that derivation is not certain. Soumak is common in the bags of north-west Iran and the Caucasus, and in the saddlebags, khorjin, of the south.

The jajim reverses the logic. Here the warps carry the colour and the weft is hidden, and the cloth is woven in long, narrow strips that are then sewn edge to edge. The result is a field of stripes and tiny checks, soft enough to wrap bedding or to throw over a cushion.