Fine Antique Silk Rugs & Carpets & Textiles

Carpets made in silk are the most luxurious productions of their kind. Silk culture and silk textile production began in China, although silk rugs are unattested there until the seventeenth century. Silk textile manufacture was well established in Persia by the Sassanian Period (third to seventh centuries). Consequently, it would have been possible for the Persians of this period or those of Early Islamic times to have adapted silk to rug production. But it is so far unclear whether China or the Islamic Orient initiated the manufacture of silk carpets.

At any rate, the earliest extant all silk carpets are in fact Persian pieces of the Safavid Period. Eventually rugs with all or part silk construction came to be made in virtually all Oriental rug-producing regions - Persia, Turkey, Turkestan, Tibet, and China. In the finest examples, not only the pile but even the foundation (wefts and warp fringes) are made of silk. Silk rugs are luxurious not only because of the fine texture and the reflective, luminous properties of the pile, but also because of the quality of their color. Silk allows the dyes to achieve a richness and intensity that can never be matched by even the finest wool.