The Pazyryk carpet

In 1949 the Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko was excavating burial mounds in the Pazyryk valley, high in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. The mounds, kurgans, had been robbed in antiquity, and water that seeped in through the robbers’ shafts had frozen. The ice kept what usually rots: felt, leather, wood, the bodies of horses and, in the fifth mound, a knotted-pile carpet roughly two metres square. It is the oldest one known, and it is now in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

What it shows

The centre is a grid of squares, each holding a cross-shaped star. Around it run several borders. One carries a file of grazing deer; the widest carries horsemen, some riding and some walking beside their horses, moving round the carpet in procession. The pile is tied with the symmetrical knot at around thirty-six knots to the square centimetre, which is fine work by any later standard. Whoever made it was not at the beginning of a tradition but somewhere well inside one.

Whose carpet?

The dating is usually given as the fourth century BCE, though estimates for the burials range more widely, and the origin is genuinely disputed. Rudenko thought it Persian, of the Achaemenid world, and some scholars have compared the riders and horses to the processions carved on the stairways of Persepolis. Others have argued for Armenia, for Central Asia, or for weavers among the Altai people themselves. The evidence fits more than one story, and the honest position is that the question is open. What is not in doubt is the depth it gives the subject. Before 1949, the history of the pile carpet could be traced back only to the medieval period. After it, the history began about two thousand years earlier.