9'10" x 12'11" Afghan Khal Mohammadi Rug | Tribal Turkman Gul Design | Brand New, Never Used

This is a heavy, tightly packed tribal weaving at a genuinely useful room size, and it has never been on a floor. The wool pile is thick and springy, the back is even and firm, and the hand-tied ivory fringe is still crisp at both ends. Khal Mohammadi weaving is prized for exactly this combination: a saturated madder red ground, glossy hand-spun wool and a weave dense enough to take decades of traffic without thinning. Among 10 x 13 Oriental rugs this one reads as the dark, formal option rather than the soft or pastel one. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is hand-knotted, its materials and its origin.

Design and Motifs

The field carries a strict all-over composition of stepped octagonal guls, arranged 3 across and repeating down the length, each one filled with paired hooked scrolls and a small central rosette drawn in rust and ivory. Between the medallions run vertical columns of stylized flowering plants, candle-like stems and small paired discs, the vocabulary that makes Afghan tribal rugs instantly recognizable. Every line is angular, drawn knot by knot without a curve anywhere, and the symmetry holds cleanly across all 4 corners. The border system is unusually deep for a village weaving: a wide main band of black cartouches and hooked vine figures, flanked by 6 narrower guard stripes of running scroll, tiny rosettes and reciprocal dashes that step the eye out to the flat selvedge.

A Field of Deep Red Worked Against Black

The ground is a deep madder red that shifts between cherry and oxblood depending on how the light hits the pile, clearly visible in the rolled-pile photograph where the nap changes tone from one direction to the other. The gul medallions and the main border are near black with a blue cast, which is what gives the rug its weight and keeps the red from turning sweet. Inside those dark shapes the drawing is picked out in burnt rust, copper and a warm caramel brown, with small ivory highlights on the outlines, the star tips and the tiny floral fillers. There is no white field anywhere, so the overall read at normal viewing distance is rich and dark, and the detail only opens up when you stand over it. Against light oak or wide-plank flooring the contrast is dramatic; against dark walnut it settles into something quieter and more library-like.

Woven in Northern Afghanistan

Khal Mohammadi rugs are woven by Turkman weavers in the north of Afghanistan, in and around the Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif weaving belt, on cotton warps with a dense wool pile and a hard, flat finish. The wool from that region is long-stapled and high in lanolin, which is why the surface has a slight sheen straight off the loom and why the color deepens rather than fades with use. The knot count sits well above what most village production reaches, which you can see on the reverse: the pattern is legible from the back with clean, small knot nodes and no slack. If you are weighing this against Persian work, the differences in design language and construction are worth understanding before you buy, and our guide to what separates a Persian rug from an Oriental rug covers it in plain terms.