5'10" x 13' Persian Qashqai Gallery Rug | Tribal Medallions, Tree of Life | Antique 1900's

Woven in southern Persia around the turn of the 20th century, this 5'10" x 13' Qashqai runs long and narrow in the old gallery format, a shape that suits a corridor, a stair landing wall or the long side of a room where a standard rectangle would look stranded. A chain of connected medallions in rust and ivory marches down an indigo field, broken at the center by a large ivory diamond filled with a tree of life. The wool is hand-spun and full of life, the 1/4" pile stands evenly from end to end, and the drawing is far more disciplined than most nomadic work of this age, which puts it near the top of the antique Persian tribal rugs we import. It ships with our certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is built as a single column of stepped, hook edged medallions that touch one another point to point, each one packed with rosettes, checkerboard panels, 8 sided guls and small stepped towers in rust, ivory and sky blue. At the midpoint the weaver opened an ivory lozenge and filled it with a slim tree of life, its branches ending in blossoms, with tiny quadrupeds, birds and a pair of small dogs wandering among the flowers, the sort of detail a village workshop would never bother to include. Ivory spandrels sprinkled with tiny crosses separate the medallion chain from the borders, and the main border carries serrated leaf and boteh forms on a rust ground, framed by narrow guard stripes of reciprocal trefoils and running vine. It is fully drawn, endlessly readable at close range, and a strong example of how the best Qashqai weavers handled geometric Persian rugs without ever repeating themselves exactly.

The Antique Color Palette

The ground is a deep indigo that reads nearly black in the shadows and clearly blue where light hits the pile, and against it the madder tones swing from brick rust through terracotta to a warm salmon, with gentle abrash bands showing where one dye lot of hand-spun yarn gave way to the next. Undyed ivory wool carries the center medallion, the spandrels and one of the guard stripes, and it has aged to a soft parchment tone rather than a bleached white. Scattered through the motifs are a muted sage green, a pale sky blue and a walnut brown that anchors the small flower centers, while the outer border adds a band of straw gold. The result is warm and earthy rather than bright, the kind of antique coloring that sits comfortably with wood floors, leather, brass and layered neutral furniture.

Qashqai Weaving in Southern Persia

The Qashqai are a confederacy of Turkic speaking tribes of Fars province who moved each year between winter pasture near the Persian Gulf and summer highlands above Shiraz, and their rugs were sold through the Shiraz bazaar to collectors worldwide. Their wool is the reason these pieces survive: fleece from flocks grazing high pasture spins into a lustrous, springy yarn that takes madder and indigo beautifully and resists crushing for generations. This piece is knotted on a wool foundation on a horizontal loom, so the weave is supple and the rug drapes rather than lies board flat, and the knot count is high enough to hold the fine outlines and the little animal figures. For anyone learning to date an antique Oriental rug, the hand-spun yarn, natural dye abrash and softly worn fringe here all point to the early 1900's, and at 13 feet long it belongs with our large Persian rugs rather than a standard room size.