Reading the motifs

A Persian rug is built from a vocabulary that weavers in different places use in their own accents. Learn five or six words of it and the floor starts to make sense. The boteh (a Persian word for a bush or shrub) is the teardrop with a curled tip that Europe came to call paisley, after the Scottish town whose mills copied Kashmiri shawls. People have read it as a flame, a cypress bent in the wind, an almond, a pine cone; none of these readings is settled, and it may be better left as a shape. The herati, named after Herat, is a small flower inside a diamond, flanked by four curved, serrated leaves. Weavers call the leaves mahi, ‘fish’, and repeated across a field the pattern is often simply called mahi.

The shah abbasi motif is a large, layered palmette, a flower seen in cross-section, which takes its name from Shah Abbas I, who ruled from 1588 to 1629 and whose court workshops made such flowers the language of Safavid design. It lives on in city rugs from Kashan, Isfahan and Mashhad, linked by long, looping vines.

Medallion and niche

The commonest layout of all is the medallion and corners. The toranj, a word that also means citron, is the central medallion; the lachak is the quarter-medallion in each corner, which suggests that the field continues beyond its frame. The same arrangement appears on bookbindings and ceilings, and it is no accident: designers worked across all three.

A prayer rug, jaynamaz (literally ‘place of prayer’), has a direction. At one end is the mihrab, the pointed niche of a mosque wall facing Mecca, sometimes with a lamp hung in its arch. Laid down, it turns a patch of floor into a small, portable mosque.