3'9" x 7'11" Antique Persian Tribal Rug | 4 Stepped Diamond Medallions | Rare Yellow-Green Field

Every so often a piece comes through the warehouse with a field color you simply cannot order, and this antique 3'9" x 7'11" Persian rug is one of them: a muted, slightly sickly yellow that leans toward olive and chartreuse in daylight and warms to old gold under showroom lights. Four stepped diamond medallions run up the center in red, salmon and brown, the pile is a comfortable 3/8" of hand-spun wool on a cotton foundation, and the drawing is pure village work, confident and a little irregular in the way only a loom without a paper cartoon produces. The rug handles flat and supple, the pile is even across the whole surface, and the condition is honestly excellent for its age. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording the size, materials, hand-knotted construction and Persian origin.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a classic column of 4 stepped diamond medallions, each one outlined in dark brown with a serrated, staircase profile and each one drawn in a different palette: ivory and brown at the top, deep red with a hooked interior at the second station, a soft gray-green and salmon lozenge at the third, and a large peach and apricot diamond filled with latch hook combs at the bottom. Inside each medallion sits a small nested diamond with a dotted core, the kind of detail that keeps the eye moving. Around them the open field carries scattered tribal fillers: 8 pointed stars in brown and red, small checkerboard squares, and crisp 8 petal rosettes outlined in rose red, one of which is shown in close-up. The border system is unusually generous for a rug this size, with a wide outer band of ivory and brown cross and comb motifs, a sawtooth pink and brown stripe, and narrow reciprocal guard stripes stepping inward. If you like honest, angular drawing, this sits comfortably among the best antique Persian tribal rugs we carry.

The Color: A Yellow You Cannot Reproduce

The ground is the story here. It is a pale, dusty yellow with a green undertone, the shade dealers describe bluntly as sickly yellow, and it drifts in broad horizontal bands of abrash from nearly olive at one end to a soft wheat gold at the other, proof of small hand-dyed wool lots worked in sequence. Against that ground, the reds do all the heavy lifting: a cool rose red in the second medallion and in the rosettes, a brighter brick red in the sawtooth border, and a faded salmon to apricot pink that fills the lower diamond and softens the transitions. Dark brown, almost black, draws every outline and keeps the composition from going hazy, while small reserves of ivory, pale gray-green and a touch of teal sit inside the medallion cores. There is no harsh white and no chemical brightness anywhere in the palette, so the rug reads as warm and settled rather than loud. For rooms built on cream, camel, soft terracotta or walnut tones, it behaves like one of the easiest yellow and gold rugs to live with.

Origin and Weaving Quality

The record for this piece says Persia without a town name, which is common and honest for antique village weaving: pieces like this were woven at home on a village loom from memory rather than a commissioned design, then traded into the city markets where the workshop label that would normally identify them never got attached. What the rug itself tells you is more reliable than any tag. The wool is hand-spun and lanolin-rich, which is why the pile still has sheen after decades of use, and the back photograph shows a tight, regular knot line on a cotton foundation with the geometric drawing reading as clearly from the reverse as from the face, a sign of a weaver who kept consistent tension across nearly 8 feet of length. The dyes behave the way natural dyes behave, fading in tone rather than losing color, and the selvedge and ends are intact. If you want to understand how pieces like this get placed in time, our guide on how to date an antique Oriental rug walks through the same clues we used here.