Village and tribal weaving

Most Persian rugs were never made in a city. They were made in villages and in the tents of the ashayer, the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples who move their flocks between summer and winter pastures. Here the design is usually carried in the weaver’s head, not drawn on paper, and the loom may be horizontal, pegged to the ground, so that it can be taken down and rolled up when the camp moves. Lines come out straighter, corners sharper, and motifs drift from one rug to the next like words in a family.

The villages around Heriz, east of Tabriz, take the curving medallion of the city carpet and redraw it in angles: a huge, stepped medallion on a brick-red field, with heavy corners and thick wool. Heriz rugs are known for their durability. In Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, in the Zagros, village weavers favour the kheshti design, from khesht, ‘brick’ or ‘tile’: the field divided into square panels, each holding a tree, a vase or a flower.

Qashqai and the gabbeh

The Qashqai are a Turkic-speaking tribal confederation of Fars, in the south. Their rugs are tight and bright, often with small medallions and a scatter of birds, animals and stars. Carpet-weaving in Fars was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage in 2010.

The gabbeh is something else: a thick, coarse, deep-piled rug woven by Qashqai and Luri weavers for their own use, with long wefts between rows of knots and very little pattern. A field of one colour might hold a single lion, a goat, a tree, a couple of human figures. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film Gabbeh (1996) made it famous outside Iran, and its plainness looks surprisingly modern.