5' x 6'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Mahi Herati Fish Design | Wool & Silk | Never Used

This is a small, seriously well drawn Mahi from the Tabriz group, woven in the 2000s and never put on a floor. At 5' x 6'2" it is the size people hunt for and rarely find in this quality: a full classical layout, medallion, spandrels, three main borders and a dozen minor stripes, all compressed into a piece you can carry under one arm. The pile is wool with silk worked into the pale areas, which is why the ivory medallion and the cream spandrels in the photographs throw light differently than the surrounding field. The back shown in the last photograph is tight and even, with a clean navy selvage and original cotton fringe, exactly what you want to see on a piece that was woven for the retail market and then stored instead of used. Every rug we ship travels with our certificate of authenticity. If you are comparing it against other Persian Tabriz rugs, pay attention to how small and uniform the individual herati elements are here.

Design and Motifs

The design is Mahi, the fish pattern, known in the trade as herati. The field is covered edge to edge with the classic unit: a small rosette set inside a diamond lattice, flanked by 4 curling lancet leaves that read as fish circling the flower. The repeat runs on a tiny scale, which is the whole test of a Mahi, and it continues straight through the elongated hexagonal medallion and the 4 stepped corner spandrels without breaking stride. The medallion itself is outlined with a notched, staircase edge and anchored by slim pendants at the top and bottom, as seen in the close-up photographs. Borders are layered: a wide ivory main band carrying palmette cartouches and 8 petal rosettes, a red band of flowering vine, and narrow navy and gold guard stripes that frame the whole composition. The drawing is drafted rather than improvised, each quarter mirrors cleanly, and the corners resolve properly, which is the signature of a workshop cartoon rather than a village memory weave.

A Midnight Blue Field With Deep Red and Ivory

The field reads midnight blue, so dark in places that it drifts toward black, and across it the herati lattice is drawn in deep madder red, so the overall impression from standing height is a rich blue red plum. Inside that ground sit tiny flowerheads in soft rose pink, pale sky blue, olive green and warm gold, each only a few knots across, which is what gives the surface its shimmer in the angled photographs. The medallion and the 4 spandrels are a warm ivory that pulls toward sand and honey where the silk catches light, and they are filled with the same fish motif in rose and wine red. The outer main border repeats that ivory, while the next band returns to a clear brick red with olive and brown leafwork, and the final guard stripe closes in navy. Brown tones appear in the vine work and in the darker leaves, keeping the palette grounded rather than bright. It is a traditional, dressy color scheme that sits naturally with dark wood, leather and antique furniture, as the room photograph suggests.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and technical center of Persian weaving for well over a century. Its workshops weave on cotton foundations with a hook, work from a drawn cartoon, and measure fineness by Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches. Mahi is the house pattern of the city and the design by which Tabriz weavers are judged, because the motif only succeeds at a high knot count: coarsen the weave and the fish blur into mush. On this piece the units stay crisp and the lattice stays square, and the back shows small, regular knot nodes with no slackness or drift in the rows. The wool is dense and springy with a short, even clip, and the silk is used sparingly in the light fields where it earns its keep. Woven in the 2000s and kept unused since, it has its full pile, its original ends and sides, and decades of service still ahead of it.