Afshar Herati Rugs

[Joel Greifinger]

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."



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:



or this one from the Afshar:



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:



These are the others of which I'm aware:









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

Joel Greifinger