Patrick Weiler

There are no offset knots in this mafrash, another indicator that would argue against a Kurdish weaving, although not all Kurdish pile weaves have them.
There is a Northwest Persian long rug, in the Marketplace section of Hali 53, with this description:
"The auctioneer's attribution of this long rug to Bakhshaish is open to question, despite certain Heriz-like features of the design. We suggest a more northwesterly origin, with an attribution to the Kurds, Karaja or even possibly the Shahsavan."
Karaja rugs tend to be single wefted, so it almost seems like they are throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it to see what sticks.
Tanavoli suggested an ICOC seminar on Shahsavan pile weaving, but I suspect that one reason it never materialized (as far as I know) is that many ICOC lecturers usually like to be confident in their subject. There is just not enough confirmed information about Shahsavan pile weavings to be certain what is and what is not. Another rug in Hali 53 was advertised as Shahsavan but it has very dark warps, an indicator that it is not Shahsavan, even though the design is similar to Shahsavan flatweaves.
A few years back Zakatala rugs were all the rage, but a specific weaving area and town were shown to be the source of them. The Shahsavan are an amalgamation (Confederacy) of different ethnicities, suggesting that they came into the confederation with historically distinct weaving traditions. Some Kurds were part of the confederation and Kurdish motifs certainly entered the Shahsavan weaving lexicon. The Shahsavan were given land in the Caucasus and range as far south as Farahan.
Attributing pile weavings to the Shahsavan is, at best, challenging.

Patrick Weiler

Steve Price

Hi Patrick

Not only is it difficult to identify Shahsavan pile weavings, there are some well respected experts who don't believe the Shahsavan ever produced pile weavings. Other well respected experts disagree, but the lack of unanimity on the question tells us in advance that there won't be unanimity on any Shahsavan attribution for a pile weaving.

On the other hand, my impression from reading Tanavoli's Shahsavan is that he considers nearly everyplace between Beijing and Bucharest to be part of the territory in which Shahsavan peoples lived and wove. This tells us in advance that if you could prove beyond doubt that it came from some specific spot, the likelihood that you could exclude a Shahsavan origin on that basis is very small.

Regards

Steve Price

Patrick Weiler

Well, I guess we may as well end the salon.
Unless you wish to consider the beliefs and speculations of a non-respected non-expert such as me.

The Shahsavan "territory" stretches in a large arc from Azerbaijan in the north (Caucasian/Russian at times) and Ardabil then in a diagonal southeast from Tabriz to Tehran and Veramin, with some dropping south to Farahan. This is mostly east of Kurdish territory. With components of the Shahsavan being Kurdish, others coming from eastern Anatolia, Afshars from the Tabriz/Ardabil region and still others from Syria and Armenia there is a wealth of tradition to influence their weavings.
Determining which pile weavings are Shahsavan may be a process of elimination. If a NW Persian weaving is not Kurdish or a village product, the construction, design and function may help in assigning an attribution to the Shahsavan. Opie, in Tribal Rugs, notes that their designs "reveal no urban influences". He says rug dealers formerly just called Shahsavan pieces Caucasian.
We know that mafrash are one of the most numerous Shahsavan types of weaving. It would be more reasonable to conclude that this pile mafrash was also Shahsavan rather than another tribe altogether copying not only the design, but the format, too.
There is speculation that many pile rugs currently known as Kazak, Gendje and Moghan are actually Shahsavan.

Patrick Weiler

Steve Price

Hi Patrick

If we restricted Turkotek to topics about which opinions are unanimous, we'd have nothing left.

Regards

Steve Price

Rich Larkin

Hi Patrick,

This is a great topic. There is a lot of sorting out to do in the old "Northwest Persian" rubric.

To start out, it is interesting on at least two levels. One, did the Shahsavan produce pile weavings (and, if so, what were they like)? Two (if so), is your mafrash panel one of them? I have no confidence in attributing any of this stuff confidently to the Shahsavan, so take it all on faith. When I started out in rugs in the 60's, one seldom heard of them; and your slit tapestry panel, for example, would probably have been called Caucasian, in a mumbling tone. I mention this because your two opening images are admirably matched for the discussion, and the underlying premise has to be that the slit tapestry piece is definitely Shahsavan. If we accept that much, the issue is on the table for the pile piece. So my rhetorical question is, how sure are you of the provenance of the slit tapestry example?

A perusal of the internet sales venues and other media indicates that the label "Shahsavan" is being applied to a great variety (structurally and stylistically) of pile weavings these days. I would say they tend to fall into two broad groupings: Caucasian-looking rugs, but not exactly; and other design/structure/palette types that do not fall readily under familiar rubrics. Are you aware of any published material in the last twenty years or so that purports to sort these matters out? I am dimly aware of some work by Parviz Tanavoli that I haven't seen. I think I have HALI 45, and intend to try to find it in the attic. I suspect that people in the field have simply become emboldened to hang the label on a particular rug, and the practice spreads.

In any case, getting back to your first image (which I love), I don't recall having seen a panel of this type in pile. In addition, weaving details, such as the pile colored tan wefts, are not familiar in this type of piece. Have you seen others? From the colors, one would be inclined to say it has very decent age, unless it's a revival kind of thing in which old standards were purposefully followed.

As we know, there is a great variety of pile weaving styles that can be called "Kurdish" at some level, e. g., Bijar, Senna, Jaff, Sanjabi, those "two panel" mafrashes you mentioned (which get called "Sanjabi," but I think they're guessing), etc. Perhaps the same is true of Shahsavan.

Thanks for this very interesting salon. Do you have any intention of trying to scan and post any of the images you mentioned in the essay? Maybe someone else with the books can do it.

Rich Larkin

Patrick Weiler

Rich,

I expect we will have the whole Shahsavan pile weaving issue completely sorted out in a day or two.

"Are you aware of any published material in the last twenty years or so that purports to sort these matters out?"
The Tanavoli article in Hali 45 was exactly 20 years ago. Tanavoli is usually the one Respected Expert many folks turn to for expertise in Iranian tribal weavings, especially Shahsavan. If even he is asking for help to answer these questions, I suspect anyone else would be fearful of taking up the challenge.
I do not have a copy of Hali 45. I visited a local library that has a fairly complete set of Hali magazines to find the article. If you find your copy (Be careful going up into the attic and especially coming down - if you slip, fall and expire the obituary will say "He died doing what he loved most") perhaps you could post a photo or two of some of the pile rugs from the article.
My assumption is that both the pile and the flatwoven pieces are at least 100 years old. The dyes, especially in the flatwoven piece, are exceptional. The pile piece, with the oxidized maroon color characteristic of older weavings, is most likely to have been woven prior to that early 20th century cutoff point postulated by Tanavoli.
As was the case with a number of Persian tribal weavings, this one also may have been sold by the family when the Shah cracked down on nomads in the 2nd quarter of the 20th century.
The book From the Bosporus to Samarkand in 1969 ascribed all of what we now call Shahsavan pieces as "Caucasian".
A decade later, Jenny Housego in her 1978 book Tribal Rugs provides one of the earliest written documentation of the Shahsavan and their weavings. She shows a single Shahsavan pile rug, but the photo is rather small. She notes "Pile-weaving has largely ceased among them, and never seems to have featured to any large extent. Certain pieces can be tentatively attributed to them on the basis of quality of wool, structure, design and colour."
It would be another ten years until Tanavoli wrote the Hali article in 1989. Since then, not much has been done to advance the state of the Shahsavan as far as their pile weavings. Most attributions to Shahsavan pile weavings are still tentative.

Patrick Weiler

Rich Larkin

Hi Patrick,

I’m working on the images from HALI 45, which are very interesting, but for the moment, my scanner is strangling me. While I fight that, I thought I would post the following image of a khorjin I have. I kid you not, about two days before your salon popped onto T’Tek, I sent this image to a friend, and as a joke, I called it “Shahsavan.” It must have been the last element in the incantation, because almost immediately, your salon showed up. I take it as karma, and offer the image, though the piece doesn’t seem seem to hit the requisite Shahsavan notes. Maybe it falls in the larger Northwest Persian mystery rug range.




The warps and wefts are off-white, possibly consisting of wool plied with cotton. I’m working on that issue. The plies are quite fine. Symmetrical knots and two shots of weft in alternate sheds between rows. It seems to have the corrosive purple mentioned by Tanavoli.

On another tack, when Steve mentioned the reported range of the Shahsavan as from “Beijing to Bucharest,” I initially took it as an homage to Emmylou Harris. Of course, I realized the error immediately, Emmylou having focused on “Boulder to Birmingham,” a region with only scattered Shahsavan populations. Apparently, the little weaving produced by these groups is limited to the more southerly elements of the tribe, and then almost exclusively one pattern.



Back soon.

Rich Larkin

Patrick Weiler

Rich,

Curious Coincidence.
First glance at that border and dark blue field seems to put your piece in the Varamin area, just like the bag face Steve Price posted on Show and Tell.
From the Tanavoli book Rustic & Tribal Weaves From Varamin:
"The ethnically diverse Turkish tribes of Varamin are second only to the Varamin Kurds in number. One finds individuals and families from Turkish-speaking groups such as the Shahsavan, Qashwa'i, Nafar, Afshar."
Later, Tanavoli says:
"Varamin one-sided mafrashes, where the only (sic) "front" panel is patterned in extra-weft wrapping, the remainder being in plain gelim weave, are reminiscent of Khamseh and Bijar one-sided mafrashes. Perhaps this style of mafrash was adopted from the Osanlu, who came from the same area, with the difference that Varamin weavers, mainly Shahsavan, Kurds and Arabs prefer pilewoven mafrashes to sumakh ones."
The take-away reference from this paragraph may be the indication of Khamseh and Varamin Shahsavan area mafrashes, which possibly is a lead for me to follow in the search for the real guilty weaver of my pile mafrash.
(Apologies to OJ)

Patrick Weiler

Rich Larkin

Hi Patrick,

It's been clear for a while, and you're making it clearer now, that the tribal mixture in these weaving venues of the past is extremely complex. The Shahsavan themselves are a conglomeration of many tribal and ethnic strains; they are distributed everywhere (Beijing to Bucharest according to some scholars); and their weavings appear to be very varied in style, technique, etc. Even if we could pin a weaving to a tribe, it is far from clear whether the design and style would likely be a reflection of the weaver's ethnicity, or her geographic location, or something else (market demand? other?). In that difficult light, I repeat my earlier question: Are you very confident of the provenance of the flatwoven mafrash side panel (your second image)? If so, it advances the inquiry about the pile item quite a bit, I think. If not, we're back where we started (nowhere). It's fun to think about it, though.

Rich Larkin

Patrick Weiler

Rich,

The convoluted reasoning which is made by skeptics says that if the Shahsavan did not weave pile, then how can you say that any particular pile item was made by them?

The second piece, which is a close analog to the pile piece, is "probably" Shashsavan. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and looks like a duck, it probably is a Shahsavan duck.
The Tanavoli book shows plates 109 through 120 with slit-weave design mafrash. Plates 112-3-4 also have similar half-minor-gul designs as mine and 114 has the three-armed device in the major guls. It also has the identical minor crab borders. It is labeled Moghan, late 19th century.
Mafrash by Azadi and Andrews has plates on pages 228 to 238 with slit-weave mafrash using related motifs and some with the same extra-weft crab minor borders.
Both books were published 25 years ago.
The nomadic Shahsavan may have been less likely to weave for market demand than some SW Persian tribes, but this has not been speculated as far as I know. They probably wove for their family and clan and their pile weavings may have been made for important potentates within the clan.
Most of these weavings made their way to market during times of duress, such as when the Shah settled most nomads in the early 20th century and, as Tanavoli indicates, in the late 3rd and early 4th quarters of the 20th century when collectors "discovered" them and swept up anything not nailed down.
My collection did not get started until after both of these books were published and I did not even own a copy of either book until fairly recently, although I have read the Shahsavan book and had perused the Mafrash book.
I have no doubt that the flatweave piece is Shahsavan, but that does not mean the pile piece, as similar as it is, would have to be Shahsavan also. It is just that there seems to be no reason for any other tribe, village or city weaver to have made a pile weaving in a mafrash format to mimic a Shahsavan flatweave.
Patrick Weiler

Rich Larkin

Hi Patrick and all,

Sorry to be such a slacker with the Tanavoli pix from HALI 45. The images I’m scanning are coming out in enormous files that I haven’t been able to manage. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong. Pathetic. I will persevere, however, because the pictures are interesting and show a broad variety of designs and styles. If you didn’t read the captions, you wouldn’t think the portfolio represented the work of one tribal group. He allocates the 15 pieces illustrated among a few weaving areas, including Hashtrud, Mianeh, Moghan, Saveh, and Khamseh, with a couple simply called “Northwest Persia.”

I have wondered in the past how the Shahsavan became so well known among rug aficionados since the 70’s, when one seldom heard of them before that time. Your point about the policies of the shah towards them in the early-mid 20th century, forcing them to get their weavings out into the market, is interesting in that regard.

Rich Larkin

Patrick Weiler

Here is a piece recently sold on e-bay which mimics the appearance of a Shahsavan mafrash face. The picture of the back indicates multiple cotton wefts and possibly the lack of weft ease/sinuous wefts, although with warp and weft the same color it is difficult to tell. Some weft rows are very thin and others quite thick. This may indicate a relatively inexperienced pile weaver using a design she was quite familiar with. It was described as NW Persian. Go figure.





It, too, is not Kurdish, but a source has not been determined.
Pieces like this sometimes surface in the market, but with no clear attribution and the limited numbers of them they are not something one can make a large collection of.

Patrick Weiler

James Blanchard

Hi Rich,

Just a quick suggestion for managing very large picture files that result from scanning....

You can open them with "Paint" (if you have Microsoft), and then just reduce the size using the "Image --> Stretch/Skew" option from the menu. You can then easily reduce file size by reducing the horizontal and vertical size by the same percentage (in the "Stretch" section) and save the resulting image as a file. Quick and easy.

James

Rich Larkin

Hi James,

Thanks for the tip. In fact, I was (stumblingly) familiar with those techniques. My problem turned out to be I was unintentionally scanning them so large, I couldn't even mail them to myself at another computer for editing, where I had a better grade of Photoshop installed. I got over it with the assistance of our esteemed webmaster. I'm sure there's more to it, too. I wander this territory in the dark.

Rich

Patrick Weiler

James,

I suspect that your file-resizing directions were utilized by tribal weavers to allow the use of large-format designs on smaller weavings.


Rich, you had mentioned the appearance (or at least the recognition) of Shahsavan weavings in the 1970's. Utilitarian tribal weavings had not been collected assiduously until documentation of them was available in the form of publications such as Bosporus to Samarkand, Tribal Rugs by Housego and Opie, the Black and Loveless publications and more. Shahsavan weavings in particular became more popular after the Shahsavan and Mafrash publications differentiated them from the greater Caucasian realm, and their availability began increasing after the Tehran Rug Society folks started searching them out and creating a demand for what remained in-situ.
From the cover of Shahsavan:
"It was not until the mid-1970's, with the first exhibition of the Tehran Rug Society, that Shahsavan textiles were given rightful credit.
All the pieces illustrated in this volume come from the Shahsavan community in Iran; some were in use until purchased, others were retrieved from the trunks of families who had relocated to villages and towns."
Tanavoli went on to explain that this burst of weavings onto the market was unsustainable, similar to the rush of Armenian rugs into the market after the great earthquake in 1988.
Also from the cover of Shahsavan:
"Owing to the astonishing rate at which Iranian tribes are undergoing changes, a monumental work of this kind will probably be impossible to produce in the future."


Patrick Weiler