Who Invented Rugs?

Nobody invented rugs, in the same way that nobody invented bread. Weaving wool into a warm floor covering is so old that it has no inventor and no single birthplace. People kept sheep and goats for their fleece thousands of years before anyone wrote down what they made with it.

So when were rugs invented? No one can put a date on it. The oldest knotted rug that survives is roughly 2,400 years old.^[1] Its fine, assured design shows the craft was already well established by then.

What we do have is one remarkable survivor, the Pazyryk carpet, and an argument about it that has been running since 1949.

The oldest rug that survives: the Pazyryk carpet

In 1949 the Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko excavated a burial mound in the Pazyryk Valley, in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia.^[1] Water had seeped into the tomb and frozen solid.^[2] The ice preserved things that would otherwise have rotted centuries earlier: textiles, a chariot, horses and a knotted wool carpet roughly 1.83 by 2 meters, or 6 by 6 and a half feet.

It is usually dated to the fifth or fourth century BC, which makes it roughly 2,400 years old.^[1] It is the oldest knotted pile carpet that survives anywhere, and it is kept in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.^[1]

What surprises people is how accomplished it is. It has around 360,000 knots per square meter, which is finer than many rugs made today.^[1] The design is fully worked out. The central field holds 24 cross-shaped figures. Around it run a band of griffins, a band of deer and a wide band of horsemen, some riding and some leading their horses on foot.^[1]

A design this confident comes from a tradition that was already old when the carpet was woven. Rugs were invented long before this one, and we have no record of when.

Part of the reason is that wool is a poor survivor. Moths eat it, damp rots it and feet wear it out, so almost every early rug has simply gone. The Pazyryk carpet lasted only because the ice sealed it away. The weaving went on for a very long time before it, but the evidence did not keep.

Who made the Pazyryk carpet?

Three answers get argued. The question is not settled.

Persian. The row of horses and horsemen draws on the art of the Achaemenid kings, the Persian rulers who built Persepolis.^[2] The floral drawing also fits the court art of that empire. On design alone, the carpet looks Persian.

Armenian. The carpet uses the symmetric knot. Some analyses of its red have pointed to a dye made from a scale insect found in the Armenian highlands. Both points are used to argue for a workshop in the Caucasus.

Local. A third view is that it was woven where it was found. On this reading, the nomads buried in the valley made it themselves and copied the art of the powerful empire to their south.^[1]

These views fit together more easily than people often assume. A nomadic weaver working local wool into a borrowed court design would be doing something ordinary, not something strange. What the carpet does prove is contact. Siberia and Persia shared a visual world around 400 BC.

What came after: the Persian court workshops

Much later, in the thirteenth century, pile rugs were being woven in Anatolia.^[3] A group of Seljuk rugs from that time was found in the Alaaddin Mosque in Konya.^[3]

In Persia, the next point where the record fills in is the Safavid period, from 1501 to 1736. Royal patronage turned carpet weaving from a village craft into an organized workshop trade, with designers, dyers and master weavers.^[4] It produced the carpets that museums still treat as centerpieces. The best known is the Ardabil Carpet in London, which our Ardabil guide describes.^[5]

That period set the look most people now call “Persian.” Picture a central medallion, corner pieces that echo it and a dense field of curving flowers.^[6] Most of the rugs we sell descend from that drawing, handed down through four centuries and countless village looms.

A vintage Kashan works from the same grammar in a city workshop. A Hamedan works from a simplified memory of it, woven at home in a village. The difference between the two kinds of weaving is set out in tribal, village and city rugs.

Far fewer Safavid carpets survive than were woven, for a plain reason: people walk on rugs, and nobody walks on paintings. Even so, age alone does not make a rug valuable. We go through what actually determines the price separately.

When was carpet flooring invented?

Wall-to-wall carpet is far younger than the hand-knotted rug. In the United States, a carpet industry first appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, with skilled weavers working on handlooms.^[7] Erastus Bigelow brought power looms into carpet making in the early 1840s.^[7] Most wall-to-wall carpet in American homes today comes from tufting machines rather than looms. Makers around Dalton, Georgia, adapted wide tufting machines to produce room-size rugs and wall-to-wall carpet.^[8] Tufted carpet sold wholesale for about half the price of woven carpet.^[7] By 1960, most carpet made in the country came off tufting machines, in synthetic fibers such as nylon.^[7]

So a fitted carpet and a hand-knotted rug have two separate histories. The difference between a rug and a carpet explains how the two words are used.

What the Pazyryk carpet has in common with a rug you can buy today

Our rugs were mostly woven between the 1940s and the 1980s, not two thousand four hundred years ago, and we would be lying if we suggested otherwise. In the trade they count as vintage, not antique, and antique vs vintage rugs explains what those labels mean.

The method, though, has not changed. The knots are tied one at a time onto the warp, the lengthwise threads, with no glue anywhere in the structure. That construction is why the Pazyryk carpet held together while the ice preserved it. It is also why a 1970s village rug is still worth putting on a floor today.

If you want to see where the two main lines of that tradition ended up, browse the Persian and Turkish collections.