AFSHARI Rugs

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151, 152 AFSHARI

The Afshari tribes, settled mainly around the three centres of Sir] and, Shahr Babak and Rafsinjan in the region of Kerman in south-east Persia, weave perhaps the widest range of different designs produced in any one area of the Orient. A visiting buyer could easily find a hundred different designs in current production, maybe many more, and certainly enough to produce a book devoted to Afshar designs alone. The author of a more general survey is obliged to select a few typical examples and simply disregard the rest. The boteh appears in many variants, two Shahr Babak examples being illustrated here. The geometric form of the motif seen in the second of these is the more typical of the Shahr Babak region — indeed the first Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 might well have been woven not in Shahr Babak but in Pariz village, on the road to Rafsinjan. A fascinating feature of fig. 151 lies, however, in the links it suggests with north west Persia and the Caucasus. In this case the historical connection is well documented, for the Alshars are of Turkoman origin and for many years lived in the Lake Urmia region. Several Persian rulers from the seventeenth century onwards deported rebellious Afshar groups at various times. Most notably, when Nadir Shah, himself an Afshar, seized power in Persia in the early eighteenth century after the Afghan invasion, he smashed the opposition of the Afshars of the north­west by transporting thousands of tribesmen to the inhospitable desert area between Shiraz and Kerman where their descendants still live. Many Afshars still remain in northern Persia, however, and in Turkey as well, and their influence on carpet design in the north-west is strong. Some of the finest Bijars are made by Afshars, for example. Is it pure coincidence that the rather odd shape of the botehs in fig. 151 is the same as that of the main pair of botehs in fig. 131? In the case of our second example the botehs are of course used as a background pattern. This is a common feature in several Shahr Babak designs, more details of which will be found in chapter IV. Note here the 'barber's pole' binding of the selvedge, and in particular the general colouring of the rug. The rosy-brown shade is the key clue to the recogni­tion of the Shahr Babak rugs, as this colour is not used anywhere else in the Orient. Another distinctive feature is the subdued grey-green used as a subsidiary colour.

 

Shirvan Rugs

persian rugs