8'2" x 10'1" Egyptian Bijar Design Rug | Wool & Silk Pile | Approx. 240 KPSI

This 8'2" x 10'1" rug is hand-knotted in Egypt on a cotton foundation, with a pile of wool blended with silk that gives the surface its low, liquid sheen in the raking light of photo 5. The drawing is a full Bijar design: an ivory hexagonal medallion held inside a brick red field, deep navy corner spandrels, twin navy side panels, and a wide ivory main border framed by four narrow guard stripes. At roughly 240 knots per square inch the weave is finer than most village work of this pattern, tight enough to carry the small 8 petal rosettes and hooked leaf sprays cleanly. It is preowned and shows no structural repairs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity that records size, material, knot count and origin.

Design and Motifs

The centre is a 6 sided ivory medallion outlined by a sawtooth ribbon and a dotted inner line, filled with paired curling leaf clusters, 8 petal rosettes and small tulip heads arranged around one central star. From the medallion tips run slender ivory pendants, the lower one clearly visible in photo 3. The red field around it is not open ground but a continuous lattice: diagonal vine lines cross to form diamonds, each holding a rosette, with serrated sickle leaves curling back on themselves in the Herati manner between them. Navy spandrels fill the 4 corners with the same vocabulary on a dark ground, and 2 narrow navy panels set into the long sides carry a single file of rosette discs, an unusual touch that breaks the field like columns. The ivory main border alternates a large fan palmette with a squared red cross-form cartouche and blue leaf pairs, and the guard stripes repeat a small diagonal flower chain. Photo 10 shows the reverse, where the knot nodes read crisply enough to trace the pattern from the back.

A Red, Navy and Ivory Palette

Three colors carry the rug and a dozen more do the shading. The field is a warm brick red, slightly tomato under direct light and deeper toward the border, and it sets off a cool midnight navy in the spandrels, the side panels and the outer field band. The medallion and the main border are ivory, closer to a soft cream than a stark white, with a faint oatmeal cast in the close-up frames. Inside that framework the weavers worked in light sky blue for the leaf tips, camel and old gold for the palmette fans, a dusty mauve rose for the rosette discs, dark burgundy for the border flowerheads and small touches of aubergine at the flower centres. The silk content sits mainly in the lighter tones, so the ivory and pale blue lift and change as you cross the room while the red holds steady. It is a traditional palette that lands comfortably against wood floors, cream plaster or a navy sofa.

Woven in Egypt to a Classic Bijar Drawing

Egypt has one of the oldest continuous pile weaving histories anywhere, and its modern workshops built their reputation on fine hand-knotted reproductions of classic city patterns, often with silk blended into the wool for sheen. This piece is one of those: an Oriental rug made in Egypt, drawn after the Bijar medallion-and-corner tradition of northwest Persia, which is a design attribution and not a claim about where it was tied. What it does share with the tradition is discipline: at approximately 240 knots per square inch the lattice stays square across 121 inches of length, the medallion outline holds its 6 sides without wobble, and the border palmettes repeat at even intervals to the corners without the clumsy corner resolution you see on coarser copies. The pile is evenly clipped at a medium height, the selvages are wrapped in red, and the fringes are the warp ends of a cotton foundation, finished plain.