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

This 5' x 6'6" Tabriz was woven in northwest Persia in the Mahi drawing that made the city famous, and it has never been on a floor. The pile is wool with silk worked into the outlines and the medallion, laid at about 1/4" over a cotton foundation, so the surface has two levels of light: a matte ivory ground and a quiet shimmer wherever the silk runs. At 60" x 78" it is the useful size that fits in front of a sofa, at the foot of a bed or under a small breakfast table without crowding anything, and among 5x7 Persian rugs a piece this finely drawn is not common. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity that records the origin, materials, size and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field carries the Herati, known to weavers as mahi, the fish pattern: a small diamond lattice, a rosette at each intersection, and 4 curved lanceolate leaves turned outward around it like fish circling a pond. It repeats hundreds of times across the ivory ground without a single break in the count, which is the real test of a Tabriz workshop. At the center sits a lobed rose medallion filled with its own miniature Herati, ringed by an olive and pale green cartouche outline and closed at top and bottom by matching pendants. Around the medallion runs a scalloped cloudband surround, and the 4 corners repeat the same shape as spandrels drawn in deeper brown. The main border is a rose-brown band of alternating palmettes and ivory 8 petal rosettes joined by fine vinework, framed by narrow guard stripes of flowerheads on cream.

Color: Ivory Ground, Rose Medallion, Olive and Brown Detail

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than white, and because the lattice over it is drawn in dark chocolate brown and navy the field reads brown from across a room and ivory from 3 feet away. The medallion is a soft dusty rose with terracotta shading, lifted by olive green outlines and small touches of gold and pale blue inside the rosettes. The main border repeats that same rose in a slightly darker tone, so the frame and the center answer each other while the ivory field stays neutral between them. Green here is muted sage rather than bright, and the navy is used only as a drawing line, never as a mass. It is a restrained palette that sits easily with oak floors, warm white walls and antique wood, as the photographs on parquet show.

Tabriz: The Weaving City and the Quality of This Piece

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia at the foot of Mount Sahand and has been a commercial and court weaving center for centuries. Its workshops measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches, and they are the houses that standardized the Mahi design now copied all over the region. The weave on this piece is tight and even: the back photograph shows small, regular knots, straight rows and a firm cotton warp with the original ivory fringe intact and untrimmed. Silk is used the way good Tabriz weavers use it, as outline and highlight rather than whole areas, which keeps the wool doing the structural work while the silk catches light along the medallion and the cloudbands. Handled new and unwalked, this is a rug at the start of a very long life.