Excerpt from A Century of Carpet and Rug Making in America: 1825-1925

Hieroglyphic representations of carpets and weavers have been found in Egypt, where began the world's first known civilization, yet many designs always present in Turkish and Persian carpets, even down to modern examples, can be found in the carvings of the temples of Yucatan, temples that were constructed when Egypt was an undiscovered waste-land, and Babylon a wooded spot between two rivers. With the exception of the myths and the more enduring representations in stone on the rock-cut tombs of Beni Hasan, and a few frail fragments of tapestry occasionally unearthed from Egyp tian ruins, the first widespread knowledge of the carpet came from the East - from Persia, from India, and from Turkey.

The organized manufacture of Oriental carpets is a comparatively new phase of the industry. For centuries they were wovenin the homes by domestic labor. The women of the tribes gathered around the looms while the head woman made a rough design upon the ground and apportioned the wool, sometimes chanting in weird singsong the number and the color of the stitches. It was the task of the men to make the dyes, to gather alizarin roots, seeds, herbs, nuts, and berries, from which natural sources literally thousands of shades of one color could be derived. With these simple materials they produced rare shades ranging from the poignant red of spilt wine to the delicate pink of a faded rose, from the pastel green of the spring's first birch tree to the living green of the laurel leaf - colors which We know not in our day, like the undiscovered purple made from Mediterranean shellfish, which was probably a glowing crimson, and was the chosen color of royalty.

The earliest known carpets of the Orient possessed a flat surface, rather than the velvety face of the cut or loop-pile. Such were the carpets of Soumaki*, a no longer existing Khanate west of Shirvan.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.