Afshar & Sirjan Afshari Persian Tribal Rugs

Afshar and Sirjan — tribal weaving from the Kerman highlands

The Afshar are a Turkic Oghuz confederation who moved west out of Central Asia and were long established in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. In the sixteenth century the Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasp resettled large parts of the tribe, sending some north-west into the Kurdish lands around Bidjar and others south-east to the region of Kerman and Sirjan. The tribe was influential enough that one of its own, Nadir Shah, founded a Persian dynasty in the eighteenth century.

Their weaving carries that history visibly. The drawing is Caucasian in its bones — stepped diamonds, hooks, stars — but the wool, the dyes and the finish come from south-east Iran. Rugs from around Sirjan are the group most often met with, and the town produces flatweaves in sumak technique alongside knotted pile. The Jozan Carpet Encyclopedia documents the individual weaving centres.

What the patterns look like

• Stepped medallions — diamonds and hexagons with hooked edges, often one above the other rather than a single centred medallion
• Boteh — the teardrop that became the paisley of European textiles, set in rows or in diagonal stripes
• Gol Farang — the “foreign flower”: naturalistic roses borrowed from European fabrics and redrawn in tribal geometry, a speciality of the Afshar
• Palette — madder red, indigo, ivory, walnut brown, and on Gol Farang pieces a distinctive soft rose

Construction

• Antique pieces: hand-spun wool pile on a wool warp and wool weft — the fully tribal structure
• Vintage and later pieces: wool pile on a cotton warp, with cotton or wool wefts
• Knot: predominantly asymmetric Persian
• Dyes: traditionally madder, indigo, walnut and pomegranate

Living with an Afshar — an honest note

Afshar rugs are small. The typical range runs from about 150 × 90 cm to 250 × 160 cm, and room-size pieces essentially do not exist — the looms were made to be carried. If you are furnishing a living room around a seating group, this is the wrong collection to be in; if you are looking for a rug beside a bed, under a desk, in a hall or layered on a larger plain carpet, it is exactly the right one.

They are also individual to the point of being uncooperative. Weavers worked from memory, so borders sometimes run out of space and get resolved mid-pattern, and colour bands (abrash) shift where a new batch of hand-spun wool began. This is the character of the thing rather than a flaw — but it does mean that a matching pair is essentially not obtainable, and that no photograph fully prepares you for the piece.

Antique examples with wool foundations are supple and can lie slightly unevenly on a hard floor. An underlay solves it and also stops a light rug travelling.

At a glance

• Origin: Kerman and Sirjan region, south-east Iran
• Knot: predominantly asymmetric Persian knot
• Pile: hand-spun highland wool
• Foundation: wool in antique pieces, cotton in later production
• Formats: approx. 150 × 90 cm to 250 × 160 cm
• Underfloor heating: suitable
• Label STEP Fair Trade: fair wages, no child labour, monitored working conditions
• Documentation: written assessment of origin, material and knot count with every rug

Care

Vacuum in the direction of the pile with the rotating brush bar switched off, and take particular care at the ends of antique pieces with wool foundations. Turn the rug end for end once a year. Blot spills rather than rubbing. Older tribal rugs with plant dyes should not be soaked at home; a controlled hand wash every few years is the right treatment and keeps the colours clear. Customers in Germany can use our hand washing and restoration service, with collection and return in the Würzburg region; elsewhere we are glad to help you find a specialist nearby.

Related collections

Persian rugs overview · Qashqai · Abadeh · Bakhtiari · Kilims and flatweaves · Small rugs