CARPET. - The fragments discovered in Turkestan (5th–6th centuries) and at al-Fustāt near Cairo (8th–9th centuries), whether knotted and geometrically decorated or featuring confronted animals—though already of such refined technique as to suggest a long prior tradition—have shed some light on the history of the carpet, which is otherwise poorly documented by sources and lacking in ancient specimens.
According to current opinion, the origin of the carpet is Oriental; in the 11th century, nomadic populations from Central Asia spread its use and manufacture into Asia Minor, Persia, and elsewhere. The oldest surviving production center is the Turkish one: it developed after the Seljuk dynasty and throughout the 17th century absorbed Persian elements, which it reworked with freshness of style and inventive spirit. The so-called prayer rug was widely produced, including at Ghirordes and Ladik; in Anatolia, Bergama rugs flourished in the 18th century, and those known as Smyrna rugs until the mid-19th century. Indian models draw directly from Persian carpets. The type commonly called Armenian, featuring dragons (Berlin Museum), long and narrow, stylized and archaic, is generally attributed by scholars to the Caucasus.
The origin of the Chinese carpet is rather recent (18th century) and influenced the Kašgar carpet of eastern Turkestan at the beginning of the 19th century, while in Spain carpet production is thought to date back to the 13th–14th centuries, to which period the so-called synagogue carpet in the Berlin Museum is attributed, decorated with the symbolic candelabrum. The oldest Spanish carpet types (Alcaraz and Cuenca) are linked to Anatolian ones, especially the so-called Holbein carpets (Viale). Imitations of Turkish and Persian carpets flourished in Paris from the 17th century onward in the workshops of the Louvre and the “Savonnerie,” though with ornamental motifs drawn from the West; among the most famous are the carpet with the allegory of the death of Louis XIII in the Musée des Gobelins, the remarkable series in the Louvre, and the carpet for the chapel of Versailles, now in the church of S. Eustachio in Paris. — See pl. CXXIII.