7'8" x 9'5" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Field with Camel Medallion | Approx. 400 KPSI

This 7'8" x 9'5" Persian Tabriz is a fine city weave, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation at roughly 400 knots per square inch, which is 60 Raj in the Tabriz counting system. The field is a quiet ivory with a faint sage cast, and the drawing sitting on it is unusually delicate for a rug of this scale: a camel and sage medallion floating at center, matching camel spandrels at the 4 corners, and a continuous floral vine filling everything in between. The pile stands at 3/8", low and even, and the back shown in the last photograph reads clean and tight with no repairs visible. It is in excellent condition and comes with a certificate of authenticity. At approximately 8x10 it works as a primary room rug, and you can see how it compares with our other 8 x 10 Persian rugs.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Tabriz medallion formula executed with a light hand. At center sits a lobed camel medallion with 8 rounded petals, each petal filled with its own small palmette and blossom cluster, and inside that a diamond cartouche in sage holding 4 rosettes around a single central bloom. A slim pendant drops from the top and bottom of the medallion, ending in a shield-shaped finial, and small lozenge pendants sit out to the left and right on the horizontal axis. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the camel ground and carry larger palmettes, tulip forms and split-leaf arabesques, with a small framed panel inside each one. Across the open field, thin vine scroll carries curling serrated acanthus leaves, fan palmettes, carnations and single-stem blossoms in a balanced mirrored repeat rather than a random scatter. The border system runs to 5 bands: a broad main border of alternating rosettes and cupped palmettes joined by a meandering vine, flanked by narrow floral guards and an outer rosette stripe.

Ivory, Camel and Sage Coloring

The field is ivory with a greenish sage undertone, the kind of muted, slightly cooled cream that reads as a soft neutral in daylight and warms up under lamps. Against it, the medallion and spandrels are camel brown running into salmon and apricot where the shading shifts, a gradation you can see clearly in the close-up of the center. The detail palette is where the rug earns its keep: dusty rose, sky blue and slate blue in the leaf tips, olive and moss green in the vine, ochre and old gold in the palmettes, deep burgundy in the darker blossom heads, and small touches of near-black outlining that hold every motif crisp. The main border ground is a pale sage-tan a shade deeper than the field, with the outer guard reading darker brown, which frames the whole piece without a hard contrast line. Nothing here shouts, which is what makes it flexible. Buyers shopping ivory and beige Persian rugs for a light room will find this one sits easily with oak floors, as the photographs show.

Tabriz: The Town and the Weave

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, the town where the medallion-and-spandrel layout was refined into the standard that the rest of the country followed. Tabriz weavers count fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches: 40 Raj is ordinary commercial work, 50 is fine, and 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, is the grade where the better workshops operate and where curved lines can be drawn without stepping. This rug is at that 60 Raj level, which is why the vine scroll flows in true curves and the small blossoms hold their shape instead of dissolving into blocks. The knotting on the reverse is regular and tightly packed, the selvedges are intact and the pile has been clipped low and even in the Tabriz manner, all of which points to workshop rather than village production.