Shiraz and Qashqai rugs

A loom laid on the ground, in Fars

Fars is the province of south-west Iran of which Shiraz is the capital. The rugs sold under that name come from the tribes that move across the region: the Qashqai confederation, Turkic-speaking, with its Kashkuli, Amaleh, Darrehshuri, Shishboluki and Farsimadan groups; and the Khamseh confederation, brought together in the 1860s by the governor of Fars, which gathers Arab, Basseri and Turkic-speaking groups. Their pieces came down to the Shiraz bazaar to be traded there. That is where the trade name comes from. A Shiraz rug was therefore, most often, not woven in Shiraz.

These tribes moved between the winter pastures, towards the Gulf, and the summer pastures, high in the Zagros. The loom is horizontal, laid on the ground, dismantled and rolled up at every move. That constraint explains a great deal: the limited width, the tent formats, the long narrow bands, and the irregularities of tension you can read on the piece. A rug interrupted during a migration and taken up again three months later never picks up exactly the same tension.

The knot, the wool, the density

The knotting is the asymmetric Persian knot, known as senneh, open to the left or to the right depending on the group. The foundation is generally all wool: woollen warps, woollen wefts, often two weft passes between two rows of knots. The selvedges are overcast in wool, sometimes mixed with goat hair for strength, in alternating colours.

The density stays modest, in the order of 80,000 to 250,000 knots per square metre depending on the fineness of the group. That is well below a Kashan or an Isfahan, and it says nothing about quality: in tribal weaving it is not the knot count that makes the piece, it is the wool. The sheep of the Zagros give a long fibre, heavily charged with lanolin, greasy to the touch and lustrous under raking light. It is the wool that takes madder deep into the fibre and gives an old Qashqai the sheen that town rugs do not have.

The pile stands at around six to ten millimetres. The ends are finished with a flat-woven band, often decorated with wrapped wefts, sometimes plaited.

What you can see: three medallions, animals, an abrash

The design is drawn from memory, without a cartoon. No half is exactly the copy of the other. The most common scheme lines up two or three diamond or hexagonal medallions along the axis, on a madder-red or indigo-blue field, ringed with hooks. Around them the field fills with small scattered motifs: boteh, birds, dogs, gazelles, combs, human figures. The borders are numerous and narrow rather than wide and learned.

The palette is short: madder, indigo, the ivory of undyed wool, the blackish brown of walnut husk, the yellow of weld or vine leaf, green more rarely. You can almost always read an abrash, those horizontal bands where the shade changes outright. It is the mark of a small dye bath run down and then made up again. It is not a fault, and it is not corrected.

On the back, the rows of knots are legible and slightly irregular, the warps are wool, the rug stays supple. A stiff, perfectly regular back on a piece sold as tribal should raise questions.

The gabbeh, another object altogether

The gabbeh comes from the same region and has little in common with it. Very loose knotting, very few knots per square metre, a pile of two to three centimetres, a design reduced to almost nothing: a plain field, ladders of colour, a single animal. It was a rug for domestic use, to sleep and sit on. The Western market discovered it in the 1980s and it has been made deliberately for export ever since. A gabbeh is not a fine rug gone wrong: it is a different object, and it is washed differently, as any deep pile is.

What makes the value

Counting in the piece's favour: natural dyes, which held on in Fars far later than in the urban workshops, sometimes until the middle of the twentieth century; greasy, living wool; a design held together; original ends and selvedges; the absence of chemical washing. Counting against: a piece shortened or cut down, a pile re-sheared to even out the wear, and the first synthetic reds, which appeared from the 1870s-1880s onwards and have often bled.

It has to be said plainly: a Qashqai is not valued as a silk Isfahan is. It is valued as tribal weaving, on criteria of material and condition rather than fineness. That market exists, it is solid, it is narrower. We say so at the valuation rather than afterwards.

In the workshop: what moves, what breaks

The all-wool foundation is the point to watch when washing. Warp wool and weft wool swell and shrink more than cotton, and not in the same proportions as the pile. A Shiraz that goes into water can come out slightly out of square or ripple along the sides. Cold washing, flat, drying flat on a rigid surface with a gentle, symmetrical re-tensioning while it is still damp: that is what prevents distortion, and there is no other method.

The second point is red on ivory. Well-mordanted madder is generally stable; a synthetic red from the 1900s to the 1940s is much less so. The test with a damp white cotton cloth is done before the bath, on a discreet area, and it decides the temperature and any prior fixing.

The third point cannot be repaired: the corrosion of the browns. Brown and black wools dyed with walnut husk and an iron mordant break down slowly. The dark areas sink, drop below the level of the rest of the pile, and then open up. Reweaving is possible once a hole is through; the corrosion cannot be stopped.

What goes first after that is always the same: the overcast selvedge, then the outer warp, then the field, which starts to run. Taken in hand in time, a selvedge is the most economical repair in the trade. The fringes, on a piece with a wool foundation, are the warps themselves: once they have gone there is nothing to reattach, so an end is rebuilt and the last row of weft secured. Reweaving and repiling are possible; the difficulty lies in finding the wool again, its grease and its abrash, not in the handwork.

Two things we do not do to these rugs: the chemical wash meant to age the piece artificially, and shearing the pile to even out wear. Both of them show, and both of them cost value.