12'3" x 20' Tabriz Mahi Oriental Rug | Herati Fish Field | Wool with Silk Highlights, Excellent Condition

This is the Tabriz Mahi design worked at true palace scale: 12'3" x 20' of hand-knotted wool with silk highlights on a cotton foundation, with a layered ivory and brown medallion floating in an unbroken fish lattice. The drawing is tight and consistent from one end to the other, the pile is even and full, and the ivory cotton fringe and black selvage are original and intact. This is the size that solves a room nothing else fits, and it sits naturally alongside our other oversize 12x20 area rugs. As a hand-knotted Oriental rug it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting the weave, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The field is a continuous Mahi lattice, the fish pattern, built from small diamond cells that each hold a rosette flanked by curved leaves read as fish circling a blossom. Nothing interrupts it: the lattice runs under the medallion, under the corner spandrels and out to the guard stripes, which is the discipline the Mahi drawing demands at this scale. At the center sits a layered diamond medallion, an ivory core outlined in navy, set inside a scalloped brown surround edged in pale cream and turquoise cloudband fringing, with matching pendants stepping away toward each end and a small turquoise and magenta finial closing each one. The main border is drawn on black, with brown cartouche palmettes alternating with rosettes, curling vines and feathered paisley leaves. Flanking it are several narrow guard bands of red, yellow and ivory carrying tiny repeating blossoms, a level of secondary detail that shows in image 13 and image 15.

A Black Border Against a Warm Rose Brown Field

Color is what separates this piece from the standard Mahi. The ground reads as a warm rose brown, closer to old mauve than to the usual ivory or navy, and it is built from thousands of small knots in rose, café brown, dusty blue and ivory that blend at a distance and separate the moment you kneel down. The main border is a deep saturated black, which is unusual and gives the rug a hard architectural edge, and against that black the palmettes pull in cinnamon brown, ivory, magenta, lilac and soft blue. Red and mustard yellow guard stripes provide the warm break between border and field, while acid green vines trace the scalloped outline of the open corner areas. The central medallion lifts everything with ivory, navy outlining and turquoise, and small hits of pink and lime run through the lattice to keep 20 feet of pattern from ever going flat.

Weaving Quality and Origin

The Mahi or fish design is the pattern that made the city of Tabriz famous, and it is the hardest classical layout to weave well because a single dropped knot in the lattice shows across the whole field. This rug was hand-knotted in China by a workshop working to that pattern, and the execution holds up: the diamond cells stay square down the full 20 foot length, the medallion sits centered, and the curved scalloping around the medallion and spandrels is drawn smoothly rather than stepped. The pile is wool with silk highlights, the silk concentrated in the medallion outlines, the cloudband fringing and the brighter accents, which is why those areas catch the light in the close-up photographs. The foundation is cotton, giving the rug the weight and flat lay an oversize piece needs, and the condition is excellent with full even pile, clean sides and original fringe at both ends.