9'9" x 13' Persian Kashmar Rug | Exotic Ancient Persepolis Design | Inscribed Cartouches, 1980s

This 9'9" x 13' Persian Kashmar is one of the most story-driven rugs we carry, a hand-knotted wool piece from the 1980s that treats the whole field as a picture rather than a pattern. Ink-dark ground, a turquoise medallion holding a flower urn and two songbirds, gazelles and long-tailed peacocks moving through the vine work, and a wide camel border built from the fluted columns and bull capitals of ancient Persepolis. The pile is full and even across all 4 corners, the selvages are tight, and the colors have the deep saturation that only real wool dyes hold after 40 years. It falls squarely into the most useful large format we sell, sitting alongside our other 10x13 Persian rugs, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a turquoise oval medallion woven with a footed urn of blossoms, curling acanthus leaves and 2 small birds perched on the stems, ringed first in ivory and then in a rust palmette cartouche. Out from there the navy field fills with drawn objects rather than repeats: lidded vessels and shallow bowls in ivory and rose, striped ewers, standing gazelles with raised heads, and pairs of long-tailed birds whose plumes sweep in great arcs toward the ends. Small cartouches carry woven Persian script in a fine ivory outline. The inner guard turns to ivory with blue rosettes, and the main border is the signature Kashmar statement: fluted golden columns with paired bull and lion capitals, guardian birds standing at their bases, Greek key panels in red, and large turquoise cartouche medallions at the centers and 4 corners. Every element is drawn, not stamped, and the mirrored halves line up cleanly along both axes.

The Night Sky Palette of Navy, Gold and Turquoise

The field reads as a near black navy, so dark in low light that it looks like ink, and it exists to make everything else glow. Against it the drawing is done in camel, honey gold, ivory and a soft sea green that runs through the vine tips. The medallion is a clear mid turquoise, the single brightest note in the rug, answered by matching turquoise cartouches in the border and by smaller sky blue lozenges along the field edges. Rust orange and deep garnet red carry the palmettes and the urn bodies, with flashes of rose pink in the blossoms and in the striped vessels. The border ground shifts from camel to warm ivory as the light moves, and the outer stripe returns to the same near black navy so the whole composition is framed twice. In a room with warm wood and brass the golds come forward; under cooler daylight the blues take over.

Kashmar and the Khorasan Weaving Tradition

Kashmar is a town in Khorasan, the northeastern province of Persia, in the same weaving region that produced the city workshops covered in our guide to Persian Mashad rugs. Khorasan wool is long stapled and takes dye deeply, which is why Kashmar pieces hold saturated navy and clear turquoise without going flat. From the middle of the 20th century Kashmar weavers built their reputation on exactly this kind of pictorial cartoon, drawing on Achaemenid stone reliefs and palace architecture instead of the usual medallion and corner formula, and the town became the address buyers went to for it. Executing that drawing takes a full cartoon and a tight, regular knot on a cotton foundation, because curved column flutes, animal profiles and legible script all fall apart at a loose weave. This example is dense, straight and square on the floor, with the weave regular enough that the mirrored halves of the border match motif for motif from one end to the other.