13'2" x 19'4" Persian Tabriz Mahi Rug | Dark Brown Fish Field with Silk Highlights | 60 Raj, Approx. 400 KPSI, Never Used

This is a palace piece in the true sense: 13'2" x 19'4", roughly 255 square feet of hand-knotted Tabriz Mahi weaving in dark brown wool lifted with silk, woven in the 2000s and never put down on a floor. What separates it from most oversize Persian rugs is discipline. The Mahi lattice repeats at a tiny scale from end to end without the drawing drifting, the medallion sits dead center, and the border corners resolve cleanly on all 4 sides, which is the first thing to check on a weave this long. Pile is wool and silk on a cotton foundation, the ends are original and the selvages are untouched. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, and the name comes from the small leaf forms curving around each rosette inside the diamond lattice, a Herati drawing the Tabriz masters compressed into some of the smallest repeats in Persian weaving. Here that lattice covers the entire field and continues uninterrupted into the spandrels, so the eye reads one continuous texture rather than a pattern with a background. At the center sits a large scalloped medallion, ringed by tiers of cusped outline and finished with a slim pendant at each end. A deeply scalloped inner contour frames the field like a shell edge, and the wide main border carries big palmettes and 8 petal rosettes on a black ground, flanked by rows of narrow guard stripes with turtle and vine motifs. Every one of those guard bands is drawn to full scale rather than simplified, which is where a workshop piece separates itself from a village copy.

A Dark Brown Field Lit by Rust, Peach and Light Green

The field is a deep dark brown that reads close to black under low light and warms to espresso in daylight, which is exactly why the tiny rosettes scattered across it register in peach, rust and ivory the way they do. The medallion is the warm heart of the rug, built in graded peach and apricot over beige with a soft green outline around the innermost cartouche, and the spandrels echo it in beige and honey so the corners glow against the dark ground. Rust runs through the border grounds and the guard stripes, cooled by touches of light green, pale blue and the occasional soft pink in the palmettes. The silk in the pile does not announce itself as shine; it shows up as a change of tone when you walk around the rug, the peach medallion going lighter or deeper depending on where you stand. The overall effect is dark, warm and formal rather than bright, which makes it very easy to furnish around.

Tabriz Weaving and the Quality of This Piece

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the commercial and technical capital of Persian weaving for centuries, with its own counting system: Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches. At 40 Raj a rug is commercial, at 50 it is fine, and at 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, you are into the grade that Persian Tabriz rugs are collected for. Holding that count over 19 feet of length is the difficult part, since the loom must stay in tension for years while several weavers work the same row and match each other's knotting exactly. The back shown in the photographs is tight and even, the knot nodes crisp, the black selvage hand-wrapped and the cotton warps straight. Unused pile at this density means the full depth of the wool and silk is still in front of you.