Tribal Rugs

A tribal rug was woven without a drawing. Nothing was squared onto paper first, so the pattern existed only in the weaver's memory and now exists only in the rug. That produces ends that do not quite match, borders that run out of room at a corner, and colour that shifts in horizontal bands. Every one of those is evidence rather than error, and reading them is most of what there is to learn here.

No paper, no plan

In a city workshop one person draws the pattern onto squared paper, a square to a knot, and another person executes it. Tribal weaving leaves that step out. The weaver holds a repertoire of stepped medallions, latch-hooks, boteh, combs, birds and small animals, and assembles the rug as she goes, judging the spacing by eye against the few inches already finished under her hands. There is nothing to check the work against, so almost nothing is unpicked. What the rug records is the sequence of decisions, in the order they were taken.

Three things that give it away

The two ends of a field rarely match. Motifs at the top run slightly larger or smaller than those at the bottom, because the remaining space was judged rather than counted. A border will reach a corner, find half a repeat left over and either stop or squeeze a motif in sideways. And the rug is frequently not square: a horizontal ground loom is unpegged and reset when the camp moves, and the tension is never identical twice. A seller who apologises for any of this has misunderstood what the object is. The equivalent irregularity in a fine Kashan would be a fault, because a Kashan had a drawing to be faithful to.

Abrash, and where it comes from

Dye lots in a tent are small. When one pot of madder or indigo is used up the next is close but not the same, and the join shows as a band running the full width of the field, a shade lighter or darker. That is abrash. It follows from hand-spun yarn dyed in batches, and it is one of the reasons tribal pieces sit comfortably in the multi-colour register even when the palette is really only three dyes. On a plain ground it is very visible. People who want an even field should not be shopping in this family.

Her own flock, and a wool foundation

The other half of the definition is material. The wool came off the household's own sheep, was hand-carded and hand-spun, and was dyed at home. Older tribal rugs are usually wool on wool: warp and weft both wool, often with goat hair worked into the selvages for strength. That makes the rug supple and light for its size, and it also makes it restless. A wool-foundation rug creeps on a hard floor and wants an underlay. A cotton foundation in a piece of this kind normally means settled village production rather than a migrating household, which is not a criticism, just a different rug.

What the portable loom will not do

A ground loom is two beams pegged into the earth, and it has to come apart and travel. Width is limited to what the weavers can reach sitting side by side, which is why the natural formats here are accent sizes, small rugs and long narrow runners. Genuinely large tribal weaving is uncommon, and a very big rug described as tribal is more often village workshop work in a tribal idiom. Matched pairs barely exist. If a room needs two rugs that agree with each other, this is the wrong family to look in.

Where the label stops being useful

The trade uses the word for two different things: how a rug was made, and what it looks like. Qashqai, Afshar and Yalameh weaving satisfies both. So does the Gabbeh, which is the same practice reduced to colour and a few figures. But Bakhtiari garden panels and much Hamadan village work are settled, semi-repeatable production that reads tribal; Abadeh draws the nomadic vocabulary with a ruler; and a good deal of new Afghan weaving copies tribal designs from a cartoon. Those are tribal in appearance and not in method. The honest test is not the name on the label but whether the rug argues with itself, so look at the two ends and the four corners before anything else. For the opposite discipline, the whole point of which is that both ends match, go to traditional drawing.