6'9" x 9'10" Persian Tabriz Mahi Rug | Black & Ivory Fish Pattern | Wool & Silk, Never Used

Tabriz weavers call this pattern Mahi, the fish, and this 6'9" x 9'10" piece shows why it holds up at small scale: the entire black ground is covered in a repeat of tiny rosettes framed by curled leaves, and each unit stays legible from standing height instead of blurring into texture. The pile is a low 1/4" of wool carrying silk highlights, knotted on a cotton foundation, which is what lets the drawing stay this tight. It has never been used, and at just under 7 by 10 feet it falls into the proportion most buyers are hunting for, so it sits with our 7x10 Persian rugs. It ships from our Freeport gallery with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The Mahi, or Herati, unit is a small diamond holding a single rosette, flanked by four sickle shaped lanceolate leaves that old dealers read as fish circling a pond. Here that unit repeats without a break across the whole field, under and around a lobed central medallion whose scalloped outline is drawn with a fine ivory tracery and a green arabesque core. Slender pendant finials rise from the top and bottom of the medallion, and the 4 corners carry matching spandrels drawn in the same repeat but set on a lighter ground, so the composition reads as one continuous pattern with lighter passages cut into it rather than as separate panels. The main border is an ivory band of alternating palmettes and rosettes joined by a dark scrolling vine, framed on both sides by narrow floral guard stripes and a fine outer stripe that keeps the whole rectangle crisp.

Black Ground, Ivory Medallion, Olive Corners

The field is black, and because every rosette inside the repeat is picked out in ivory, soft rust and pale blue, that dark ground behaves like a night sky full of small points of light rather than a heavy mass. The central medallion is ivory, warming to apricot and soft salmon through the middle where the silk sits, with a green tracery holding the innermost arabesque. The 4 spandrels shift to a muted olive and khaki, a quiet halfway tone between the black field and the ivory border that keeps the corners from jumping forward. In the border, ivory carries deep green palmettes, terracotta rosette centers, gold tipped leaves and a near black vine, and those greens echo back into the medallion so the two ends of the rug speak to each other. The silk highlights are what change through the day: seen from one end the ivory and apricot passages gleam, and from the other they settle into matte cream against the dark ground.

Tabriz Weaving and the Mahi Tradition

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and technical center of Persian weaving for centuries, the town that trained the workshops around it and set the standards everyone else is measured against. Fineness there is counted in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches of width, and the Mahi is the design that exposes a weaver's Raj count immediately, because the repeat is so small that a coarse weave turns the fish and rosettes into mush. On this piece the units stay separated and the curved outline of the medallion stays smooth through its scallops, which is the tell of a properly fine Tabriz loom. The wool is clipped short so nothing in the drawing is lost in the pile, the silk is used sparingly for lift rather than shine, and the cotton foundation gives the rug the flat, disciplined handle that makes a Tabriz lie perfectly on the floor from the first day.