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Joel Greifinger
April 9th, 2021, 10:51 PM
Hi all,

By the eighteenth century, Persian weavers had been producing rugs with curvilinear 'herati' patterns, like this one from Khorasan, for a long time. Peter Stone describes the design as "consisting of a flower centered in a diamond with curving lanceolate leaves located outside the diamond and parallel to each side."

https://i.postimg.cc/sDvqgT9Q/Khorasan-herati-Burns.jpg

But, some time in the nineteenth century, Persian tribal weavers, particularly the Kurds and Afshar, began creating their own geometrical variations of the design. They usually blew up a single 'cell' of the field design for the face of a bag, like this Kurdish one:

http://www.turkotek.com/salon_00136/joel_8.jpg

or this one from the Afshar:

http://www.turkotek.com/salon_00136/joel_42.jpg

Much more unusual, perhaps rare, are rugs from these tribal groups with allover repeat field designs of the geometric herati pattern. In terms of Afshar examples, I only know of four.

The first was part of the Corwin collection of Afshar rugs that was exhibited at the 1990 ICOC in San Francisco:

https://i.postimg.cc/26GMVJKv/Afshar-herati-Corwin.jpg

These are the others of which I'm aware:

https://i.postimg.cc/gjB7Khd2/Afshar-herati-rug-Piotr-copy.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/DfCRh9s3/Afshar-Herati-Rug-copy.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/cCJjYmpz/Afshar-herati-rug-R-B-11-07-copy.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/rpvKr7SB/Mosby-Afshar.jpg

Have you seen any others? If you have an image of one, please post it.

Joel Greifinger