3'8" x 10'3" Persian Tribal Runner Rug | Caucasian Diamond Lattice | 1950s, Excellent Condition

This is a village-woven Persian runner from the 1950s, 3'8" x 10'3", carrying a Caucasian style column of 8 serrated diamond medallions from one end of the field to the other. The wool is hand spun and the pile has worn down to a low, even surface that shows every knot and makes the drawing read sharply, the way a good old tribal piece should. At 44" wide it is broader than a standard hall runner, which lets it work as a long narrow floor piece in a gallery hall, beside a kitchen island or down the foot of a bed. Among Persian runner rugs of this period, pieces with this much saturated natural color and this little repair are getting harder to find. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is hand-knotted and Persian.

Design and Motifs

The field is a single file of large diamond medallions, each one built from 4 or 5 concentric frames of latch-hook and reciprocal hook bands, finishing in a small square center that holds a blue, gold or ivory rosette. No two medallions repeat exactly: the weaver changed the frame colors, flipped the hook direction and swapped the center motifs as she worked up the loom, which is the clearest sign of a drawing held in memory rather than copied from a cartoon. The spaces between the diamonds fill with dark navy triangles carrying more hooked combs, and both ends close with a banded panel of diagonal blue, gold and ivory stripes. Three ivory guard borders of 8 petal rosettes and star flowers frame the whole run, separated by thin barber pole stripes. Collectors looking for this kind of angular drawing usually search the geometric Persian rugs group first, and this runner sits squarely in it.

A Multi-Color Palette Built on Rust, Navy and Gold

The dominant tones are rust and terracotta in the medallion frames, set against a deep indigo navy that fills the ground between the diamonds and reads almost black in the lower light of a hallway. Over that the weaver runs a bright saffron gold, an unusual olive green that turns toward mustard where the dye lot shifts, soft ivory in the hook bands and the guard borders, and a clear brick red in the rosettes. Camel brown and a warm honey tone appear in several medallion frames. There is gentle abrash across the navy, visible as faint horizontal banding in the full-length photographs, which is natural in hand dyed wool and adds depth rather than detracting from it. The ivory borders have aged to a soft cream, and because the pile is low the colors sit close to the surface and stay crisp instead of looking muddy.

Persian Village Weaving and Quality

Runners like this come out of the village and tribal weaving tradition of northwest Persia, where weavers worked on narrow upright looms and borrowed the hooked diamond vocabulary of the Caucasus across the border. The knotting is moderate in count but very firm, with a tight beat-down, dark wool wefts visible on the reverse and a hand spun wool pile that still has oil and spring in it. The back photograph shows an even, legible knot structure with clean color and no patching in view, and the selvages and fringe are intact. Features such as the wool quality, the dye behavior and the weave structure are exactly what a specialist reads when learning how to date an Oriental rug, and everything here is consistent with a 1950s weaving that has been lightly used and well kept.