6'7" x 10'3" Persian Tabriz Mahi Rug | Ruby Red Herati Fish Field | Ivory Medallion | Excellent Condition

This 6'7" x 10'3" Persian Tabriz is the Mahi design that made the city famous, drawn small and drawn well. The ruby red field is filled edge to edge with the tiny diamond lattice of the Herati pattern, and a lobed ivory medallion floats at the center with matching quarter medallions in all 4 corners. The pile is a short 3/8" wool clip, which is exactly what this pattern needs: nothing blurs, and every rosette and curled leaf reads clearly from standing height. It sits in the most usable proportion we sell, making it a natural fit among 7x10 Persian rugs for a living room seating group or a dining table for 6 to 8. The rug is in excellent condition with full even pile, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a hand-knotted piece woven in Persia.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, and the name comes from the pair of slim curled leaves that flank each small rosette inside the lattice, reading like fish circling a pond. Here that unit repeats across the entire ground in a true all over Herati field, tiny diamond cells outlined in ivory and green, each one holding a flowerhead at its center. The medallion is built in concentric rings: a scalloped ivory outline, a band of the same lattice worked in miniature, then an 8 petal rosette at the very center. Slim pendants finish the medallion at top and bottom, and the corner spandrels repeat the medallion drawing in quarter form against the red ground. The main border is a wide ivory band of palmettes and serrated leaves joined by a vine, framed on both sides by narrow reciprocal guard stripes, which keeps the busy field contained instead of letting it run into the edge.

Ruby Red, Ivory and Soft Green

The field is a deep ruby red that warms toward brick where the light catches the pile and cools toward garnet in the low areas, the natural abrash of good hand-spun wool rather than any flaw. Against it, the ivory of the medallion and the main border reads almost cream, with the palest blush tone showing in the medallion center where the drawing thins out. The green is the quiet workhorse of this palette: it outlines the Herati leaves, fills the small vine work in the border, and appears as a soft sage in the guard stripes, cutting the red so the rug never looks flat. Small accents of gold, pale blue and dark indigo are worked into the border rosettes and the lattice cells, and the plain red selvedge finishes the edge, seen clearly at the folded corner. Ivory fringe at both ends completes a classic red, ivory and green Persian scheme that works with dark wood, brass and warm neutrals.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been a commercial and court weaving center for centuries, with a workshop culture that grades its own fineness in Raj, the count of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in. Mahi is the design Tabriz weavers return to again and again because it is the hardest kind of test, a small repeating unit that has to stay identical thousands of times over, and any looseness in the weave shows immediately in a wobbling lattice. On this piece the lattice holds its line the full 10'3" length, the medallion outline stays crisp through every scallop, and the reverse shows a tight even knot structure on a cotton foundation. Combined with the short wool clip, that construction is what makes a Tabriz Mahi a rug you can put under a dining table and still read the drawing in 20 years. More work from the same weaving city is gathered in our Persian Tabriz rugs collection.