What is a Tribal or Nomadic Rug?

One of the most familiar labels applied to Oriental rugs and carpets, antique and new alike, is the term “tribal.”  The label evokes a range of associations, most of which suggest something romantically antithetical to our modern western civilized or urban existence.  Tribal rugs were or are presumably made by people with a tribal social organization, very likely nomads dwelling in tents, moving from place to place with the herds of sheep and goats that provided the wool for therugs. Such rugs are thought to be woven in designs that have been handed down faithfully in tribal tradition with little or no change for generations beyond recall. We assume that such rugs were woven for the use of their makers as an integral facet of their material culture. There is something untamed and timeless, even atavistic about this conception of rug weaving.  No doubt, such notions are very much a part of the allure of the rugs we call tribal, perhaps as much as the striking beauty of the pieces themselves.

But however charming and attractive this conception of the tribal rug may be, it is hopelessly simplistic and in some ways downright erroneous. The presumption of a tribal social structure underlying this concept is certainly valid. Many rug-producing groups had and still maintain a tribal identity, even in the face of brutal official attempts to suppress it in various parts of the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.  But the equivalence of such a tribal identity with a nomadic life-style or economy is less clear-cut. Many nomadic groups have settled down in the course of time, not only under governmental duress but also by choice. Often, nomadic peoples opted to spend the warmer part of the year in encampments while retiring to permanent sedentary homes for the winter months. Yet none of this had any effect on therugs they wove, at least in terms of design. But it probably did affect the size of the carpets they produced. Here we have the example of the main carpets woven by the nomadic Salor Turkomans of Central Asia.  Such carpets have long been regarded as the oldest and most authentic Turkoman  carpets.

Similar affinities to urban Middle Eastern tradition appear when one looks at the design and weaving technique of Turkoman carpets, especially the ones we consider to be particularly early. The recent studies of Jon Thompson and others have shown that many Turkoman designs or motifs come from the repertory of sophisticated Islamic textiles or carpets. The Turkoman carpets displaying the earliest form of such motifs, those attributed to the eighteenth or seventeenth centuries, turn out to have cotton in their foundations, and/or they have corrosive dyed brown outlines in place of the more standard natural brown wool outlining of Turkomanrugs. They also have a depressed warp structure and tight weave reminiscent of urban rugs rather than nomadic ones.

All this evidence converges to suggest that the great refinement of Turkoman design and weaving technique betrays the strong impact of urban rug production from nearby Persia in this early period. In fact, we can take this all the way back to the famous nomadic carpet from the fourth-century B.C. frozen tombs at Pazyryk in Siberia. The analysis of both the wool, which is that of local sheep, and the red dye, which is Polish lac, suggest a northern, nomadic origin. But many of the motifs in the rug and the fineness of the weave show the clear influence of Persian court textiles, examples of which were discovered in the other tombs at Pazyryk. The more closely we look, the more we see that the notion of an essentially autonomous nomadic or tribal rug production separate from urban rug and textile design or technique is, and probably always was, illusory.

There is no reason to doubt that tribal weavers developed established repertories of patterns and motifs that were handed down from generation to generation as a cultural patrimony. But that does not mean that tribal weavers developed these repertories from scratch or that they did not change over time in response to new ideas from urban cultural centers. Turkoman rug design continually absorbed ideas from the Persianrugs and textiles they acquired in trade or as booty from raids. Similarly, the highly prized main carpets of the Timuri Baluch tribe are typified by a design of palmettes clearly derived from classical Persian prototypes of no earlier than the seventeenth century.  As modern people we may be charmed by the idea that tribal rugs have designs that go back unaltered to the dawn of time. But the reality is that many of their designs are three or four hundred years old at best, and that they came to acquire their familiar tribal appearance slowly with subtle changes from mother to daughter over the centuries.