Rugs: More than a Carpet

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Today when furnishing your new home, you will probably go and buy a rug from a High Street shop and place it on your floor. However, it has not always been this way. Rug making has been traced back to ancient times and it is thought they were first made and used by nomadic tribes in Asia. The oldest rug that has been discovered was found in 1949 in Southern Russia. It dates back to 500 B.C. and is known as the Pazyrk carpet.

However, when rugs were first made, they were not just used as a floor covering. The tradition was to use rugs to decorate walls, ceilings and tables. This type of usage was particularly prevalent in Asia. The rugs would be made by hand on a loom, which was a laborious and time-consuming process. To begin making a rug a loom must be set up with warps, which are thick and strong pieces of (usually) cotton of wool that run the length of the rug. Wefts run the width of the rugs and are normally weaved in and out of the warps to form the foundation. Knots of the material the rug is being made from are then tied around the warps to form the pile of the rug.

Luckily, in the present day, machines have been invented that can do this job much more easily and quickly. Modern rugs are normally made in factories on mechanical looms, which means the process is much less laborious. One of the first mechanical looms invented was the Jacquard loom, so called because Joseph Marie Jacquard invented it. The loom works by creating designs from a pattern that has been placed onto a card in the form of punched holes. This is then placed into the loom and the hooks that create the design are either raised up or down depending on what is punched on the card. This began the process of revolutionising the way rugs were made, by cutting out the hours of labour.

Despite this, there is still a niche in the market for handmade rugs and it is still a profitable trade for some people. One of the reasons for the interest in handmade rugs today can be traced back to an event in Vienna in 1891. The Austrian Trade Museum held an exhibition of handmade Oriental rugs that came from major traders and Austrian royalty. The exhibition also displayed the famous Ardabil carpet, just after it had been restored. This carpet was purported to have one of the most famous Persian carpets. It can be seen today on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

This, and other public displays of carpets resulted in an increased interest in handmade carpets and Persian rugs in particular. Books were produced which contained pictures of particularly beautiful carpets. In addition to this, information was given about the designs and weaving and production techniques. This made handmade rugs into something of an art form and wealthy people all over the world began to purchase them to decorate their homes. Today, people are still buying handmade rugs to enhance the décor in their homes and handmade rugs are still being made all over the world.



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