The Secrets of Oriental Designs

Oriental designs have always been transborder. That statement may seem to complicate the very heading of this piece — so lean back, relax, and enjoy a journey into the background of some of these designs.

Our story begins in 1947, with the discovery of the earliest hand-knotted carpet of all time. Sergei Rudenko, a Russian archaeologist, was excavating a prehistoric burial mound — a kurgan — once used by the peoples of Siberia and Central Asia, near the Altai Mountains that rise between Russia and China to an altitude of 4,550 metres.

In one of those ice-covered kurgans, the findings were brought out into the sunlight and, after some time, melted free: the skeleton of a man, his horse, and the saddle on that horse. They realized the saddle was covered by a hand-knotted carpet. Known as the Pazyryk carpet — named after the locality — it has been tested using the Carbon-14 method, which places it some 2,500 years before our time, in the age of certain nomadic Turkic peoples of the east.

In the nomadic way of life, horsemen made their living by taking their herds to different pastures, and in those frozen high mountains they raised reindeer. This particular design shows us horsemen riding their horses while others walk right alongside them on the outer border, and a series of reindeer within the inner border. The 24 squares at the center of the field are reminiscent of Osiris — the Egyptian god of fertility and resurrection — because, according to their belief, one day the man would be resurrected and would need his horse. That is why they were buried together.

A shared origin

There is a 2010 PBS film, "The Journey of Man," with Dr. Spencer Wells, a geneticist out of Stanford University, which follows the Y-chromosome of man over the last fifty thousand years. You'll learn how 90% of all men in the world today descend from one Y-chromosome, and the remaining 10% from a second. You may wonder what this has to do with carpet designs — I'll ask you to be patient.

In that film, Spencer Wells visits the Chukchi, an Arctic nomadic tribe living near the Bering Strait who still raise reindeer today — which is exactly why the reindeer motif in the Pazyryk carpet links it all together. We may be talking about the similarity between the lifestyle of the Chukchi and the Pazyryk culture that existed twenty-five hundred years ago. Someday we may even find carpets made before the famous Pazyryk, because we now know that during the last Ice Age — some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, when Alaska was connected to Siberia by the now-submerged land bridge called Beringia — the Native Americans, especially the Navajo, crossed the Bering Strait and ended up using some of the very designs we use today.

That shared ancestry may explain why some Navajo and Turkish designs are strikingly identical. The Pazyryk carpet today resides in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad).

Why experts disagree

You may attend seminars or lectures given by different carpet experts, and there can be professional disagreements among them. In one instance in 2012, I met a lady from San Francisco — a retired insurance adjuster whose company had once asked her to get nine different appraisals from carpet experts in the Bay Area. To her surprise, all nine reports gave different valuations, and when she tried to find out why, each expert simply said the others "don't know much."

This, unfortunately, is a global dilemma that can happen to anyone anywhere. It's quite normal in almost every profession, because our capacity for information — and our personal desire to investigate the details that bring the "correct picture" — is never equal.

If evaluating the price of an oriental handmade carpet were as simple as classifying every Turkish carpet as "double" or Ghiordes-knotted and every other country's as "Senneh" or single-knotted, our lives would be so much easier. By the same token, counting the knots per square centimetre or inch and declaring that more knots make a carpet more expensive — because of more labour — is only partially correct. That's just one side of the medallion. On the other side, when you handle our cloned replicas that were deliberately left with fewer knots, yet won all seven of Atlanta's Magnificent Carpet Awards over the last ten years, you begin to realize there are other criteria in evaluating a Turkish hand-knotted artwork. And that is where the Çintemani design enters the discussion.

The Çintemani design

It was probably in the last three decades that annual awards began to be given to the best oriental handmade carpets, with listings appearing in the Guinness Book of Records. That's when those carpets began to be protected by their producers through patent rights — which is why images of many award-winning carpets are often shown tinted. Before that period, countries were, in a way, borrowing one another's designs and knotting techniques. Today, those secrets are locked away in vaults.

That's exactly why I chose the carpets with Çintemani designs. Originally, the Çintemani pattern comes from China and is composed of triple-ball motifs combined with Chinese clouds. Also known as the tiger-skin pattern, it was a fitting choice for a monarch famous for his enormous physical strength, sporting character, and daring in battle — and it was even used as a religious symbol by Buddhists and Taoists.

Now let us hear from Ms. Ayşe Erdoğdu of Topkapı Palace in Istanbul on how the Çintemani and other Chinese and Asian designs entered the Ottoman inventory:

According to Aşıkpaşazade, a fifteenth-century Ottoman historian, İvaz Paşa — a vizier of Sultan Mehmet the Second (Fatih Sultan Mehmet) — brought Persian craftsmen to Topkapı Palace and was the first to introduce Chinese porcelains into the Ottoman court. From a record dating to 1514, we learn that among the objects Sultan Yavuz Selim took from the palace of Shah Ismail of Persia in Tabriz — after defeating him on 23 August 1514 at the Battle of Çaldıran — were some 64 Chinese porcelains. Today in Topkapı Palace there are some 10,358 pieces of Chinese porcelain from the Sung, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Ms. Ayşe Erdoğdu, Topkapı Palace

Sultan Yavuz Selim — father of Süleyman the Magnificent — also brought 38 craftsmen to Istanbul. The patterns originally invented by the Chinese were bound to influence Ottoman art. The Hatai, cloud motifs, and Çintemani designs shaped İznik porcelains from the 15th to the 18th centuries. In time, the influence of these porcelains was reflected onto Turkish carpets, textiles, and İznik pottery. So the Ottomans imported the Çintemani design from China by way of Iran and — as carpets, porcelains, and kaftans — re-exported it to the world. This is exactly what I meant by saying designs have always been transborder.

Consider a Persian Tabriz wool carpet that we have cloned in wool-on-cotton (as Samsun number 80002) and in all silk — produced in the 19th century using Turkish Ghiordes double knots. By that measure alone, it would be unfair to label it simply as Persian.

The pieces

To wrap up, here are the works referenced throughout:

Until the last three decades, designs were borrowed — not only within the sphere of the Orient, but globally, from the Turkic tribes and the Turks to the Navajo. Perhaps only then can we better appreciate this cultural heritage as a birthright, and become sponsors of our weavers — in Turkey, child labour is not allowed — for the most important tangible asset inherited from our forefathers. We can never be thankful enough for the patience and passion our weavers have shown over the last twenty-five centuries.