Patrick Weiler

OK 'Tekkers, while I have been basking (baking) outside in the sun for the last few days at temperatures up to 103 degrees, I have been waiting for you to present the Other Opinion. No one has ventured forward to deny that Shahsavan wove pile. To me, it seems that such a position is based on unsubstantiated, misinterpreted or merely incomplete information.
An article in Hali issue 104 from 1999, written by Jeff Spurr, documents a visit to the New England Rug Society by Richard Tapper, professor emeritus from the London University School of Oriental and African Studies. His Ph.D. thesis was The Shahsavan of Azarbaijan: a study of political and economic change in a Middle Eastern tribal society. In 1977 he wrote Frontier nomads of Iran: a political and social history of the Shahsevan.
Tapper considers only nomadic tribe members to be true Shahsavan because "once nomads become peasant villagers, they quickly lose their tribal identity even if they remember that their forebears were pastoralists. To illustrate this phenomenon, he cited a common saying that "villages are the graveyards of the nomads".
This position may accurately describe pastoral nomads, but discounts the considerable influence settled villagers play universally in the lifestyle of all pastoral nomads, from the acquisition of tent materials, foodstuffs, dyestuffs, utensils, markets for their products and the basic symbiotic necessities of the culture of both societies.
Tapper spent time with the Moghan Shahsavan from 1963 to 1966 and his talk to NERS concerned how their lifestyle influenced their weavings "during that time".
Tapper returned during 1993 and 1995. Spurr recounts the modern history of the Shahsavan and notes "Around 1900 the Shahsavan remained a powerful presence and pretty much had things their own way, sustaining a running war with Russian Cossacks and presenting a major threat to the Qajar state. They were finally induced to lay down their arms in 1923 by the vigorous and ruthless Reza Khan".
The 1900 date conforms to Tanavoli's assessment that pile weaving by the Shahsavan had declined by that time.
The article states that "The transit to summer quarters (approximately 150 miles, taking 4 weeks in the spring but 8 weeks back in the fall) would follow Nou Rouz (around March 21st) and would be speedy in order to avoid conflict with the peasantry over the condition of the fields, pasturage being found on the lower slopes of Savalan until the upper pastures were free of snow. The return to winter quarters in October would be a leisurely affair, encouraged by the villagers, the flocks grazing on the stubble in newly-harvested fields".
This interaction with settled people, hurried on the way up to avoid conflicting agrarian schedules and leisurely on the way down because the nomads provided a benefit in the fall, supports my contention that the interaction between nomad and villager was integral to the culture of both societies and influenced their woven output. Spurr notes that each family had at least three camels, supporting Wendel Swan's contention that camel hair played a significant role in their weavings.
The nomad economy "was largely based on income from spring lambs, born in November and December, which were sold in town for meat. Extra milk would be bought by traders, which was otherwise turned into butter, ghee and cheese by the Shahsavan. Winter wool was taken in March or April before transit to summer camp. Most of it was sold to merchants who would then resell it to village weavers, augmenting supplies from their own sheep, which were made into pile rugs for the market. The product of a July shearing was only for the making of felts for home consumption".
The Shahsavan yurt struts were bought from carpenters in Ardabil.
The felts were made with help from village specialists traveling from camp to camp until the 1990's when the wool would be brought to town for felting.
This change from camp to town for felting may have been preceded by the nomads at one time making their own felt without the assistance of village specialists, just as at one time they probably also made pile weavings when required prior to the early 20th century.
"Until the 1940s and 1950s when commercial dyes replaced natural ones, they also did much of their own dyeing, although they might also go to town dyers for their services, particularly in the case of imported dyestuffs. Remarkably, with the widespread advent of commercial dyes, village specialists took over the process completely, touring the camps in the summer to dye the newly-spun winter wool."
It is not so remarkable to me, as it seems to follow the same transition as the felting practice moving from self-sufficiency to outsourcing. And I assume that imported dyes or specialist dyes such as indigo were always purchased from towns, even hundreds of years ago.
Here is the part of the article pronouncing with certitude the lack of tribal pile weaving:
"True nomadic Shahsavan do not weave pile articles. Their woven repertoire is, to all intents and purposes, entirely devoted to flat-weaves in a variety of techniques. Where they possess pile rugs-as they occasionally do-they have bought or traded them from villagers (hence the confusion on this score). An uncommon exception is the rare pile or partially-piled mafrash face. Also, the small number of Shahsavan wives who have village origins (fewer than one in ten), might be expected to sustain skills they had developed in a non-nomadic context, but these products would not be considered properly Shahsavan."
Whoa. That paragraph contains so many inconsistencies, conflicts and baseless assumptions that the conclusions are entirely unjustifiable. The statement that they do not weave pile articles is countered by the contention that, in fact, there are Shahsavan woven pile or partially-piled mafrash faces. The assumption that the pile weaving of a village wife would not be considered Shahsavan, yet her flatweave output would, contradicts itself.
If non-nomadic skills were used to produce items that are not considered Shahsavan, then we must discount their felts and their weavings made with commercially acquired dyes.
A comparison with Turkmen weavings seems relevant here. Turkmen raided their neighbors for animals, goods and wives. Therefore their weavings made by these village wives really aren't Turkmen. It seems that, with these conclusions, inferences and pronouncements and their similarity with other tribal groups Jon Thompson will have to re-write most of his publications.
To me, it seems that an anthropologist interested in the culture of a tribe in the 1960's has come to conclusions about that tribe which predate the period of his research. That they don't weave pile now (and even that statement was tempered by the mafrash statement) does not mean that they did not weave pile earlier.
Tapper is certainly an eminent anthropologist. His contributions to our understanding of Iranian tribal culture are incalculable. The unfortunate conclusions that Shahsavan did not weave in pile, based on the conditions 60 years after Tanavoli shows that their pile weaving had ceased, is unsupportable. imho.

Patrick Weiler

Steve Price

Hi Patrick

I've received several e-mail messages from a proponent of the position that the Shahsavan didn't weave pile. He/she prefers anonymity. The most compelling evidence presented to me is the names of some prominent anthropologists who share his/her view. I haven't communicated with those people directly, and I haven't seen published versions of those opinions under their names(except for the source you cite, and I have the same problems with it that you do), and I can't very well present what I'm told are their positions when I can't name my source. Parvis Tanavoli, who is a credible source on Shahsavan weaving and ethnohistory, includes pile in his book, Shahsavan. My anonymous friend (I hope we're still friends!) also holds the view that only pastoral nomads were real Shahsavan. As soon as one left the nomadic lifestyle, he or she was no longer a Shahsavan.

That offers two propositions to sort out. The first is that Shahsavan cease to be Shahsavan when they adopt a sedentary lifestyle. I don't know what the "official" definition of the word is or who decides it, but not having a more or less universally accepted definition is a serious impediment to discussion. The second proposition, that only sedentary Shahsavan wove pile, is probably difficult to subject to critical analysis at this late date, although the answer may be in the historical record.

Regards,

Steve Price

Patrick Weiler

Steve,

The rug "world" is like small town politics. Some folks disagree with other folks, but we are all in this together. One aim is to add to the sum of knowledge or at least to discuss issues of contention, (rather than "sweeping them under the rug"), thereby possibly leading to advanced conclusions.
The problem I have with using the fieldwork of Richard Tapper to dismiss the proposition that Shahsavan wove pile articles is that his studies were done more than 60 years after the period when Tanavoli says the Shahsavan stopped weaving in pile.
Others have said that when weaving is disrupted for more than a generation, it is "lost" to subsequent generations. My Great Grandmother was raised on a farm, twisted the heads off chickens, milked cows and made her own lace tablecloth. My Grandmother could do none of those things.
Even the Hali 104 article admits that Tapper's field work among the Shahsavan was done between 1963 to 1966 and his "dense and informative talk to members of the New England Rug Society concentrated on the ways in which the Shahsavan lifestyle governed the type of weavings they produced during that time." The article also noted that the Shahsavan tribal felting process, which was earlier done among the tribes with the assistance of village specialists, subsequently moved entirely to the towns. I suspect that it was originally done entirely by the nomads. They were smart enough to realize that it was economically prudent to adjust their tradition when it made more sense. If you asked a Shahsavan nomad to make their own felts today, they would probably just laugh at you. And I expect that this same process occurred with pile weaving, too. The Hali article mentions that nomadic Shahsavan would trade with villagers for pile weavings. I contend that the same process of outsourcing felting for economic advantage also pertains to pile weaving.
You may want to take a look at Vol. XVI, No. 4 the April 2009 newsletter of the New England Rug Society.
http://www.ne-rugsociety.org/
Among the articles are one by Mike Tschebull entitled A Contemporary View of Old Caucasian Village Rugs and one by Jim Adelson on the presentation of John Collins on Persian Bags from the collection of Leslie Orgel. I wish I could have attended both presentations.
In the Collins article, Adelson says:
"John finished up with 16 weavings attributed to Northwest Persia, including Shahsevan work. One example [8] was a Northwest Persian mafrash panel, with distinctive two-headed animals. In contrast to the wide-spread soumak examples, Shahsevan pile mafrash are much less common."
The Shahsavan pile mafrash face is shown on page 4. There was no description of the structure of this piece, though.
Even though the Hali issue 104 article states "True nomadic Shahsavan do not weave pile articles.", it also mentions Shahsavan pile mafrash:
"An uncommon exception is the rare pile or partially piled mafrash face."
Even the "non-believers" acknowledge the actual existence of some Shahsavan pile weavings. I believe this weakens the case of those disinclined to consider other pile weavings as also possibly Shahsavan.
Wendel Swan presented a pretty good argument for common technical construction features being used to discern them from other NW Persian pile weavings. If the issue is to be decided by declaration rather than rigorous research and investigation, advancement of our understanding will not be possible. If you do not believe Shahsavan wove in pile, allow others to at least attempt to prove that they did.
This issue of pile weaving among the Shahsavan appears to have adherents as certain of their position as those who think the earth is flat, man never walked on the moon and Oswald did not act alone.
As was recently heard regarding a President Obama meeting, "we agreed to disagree".

Patrick Weiler

Steve Price

Hi Patrick

You appear to have misunderstood my post; it must have been unclear.

First, I agree with your take on Tapper's field work. It was done after they stopped weaving pile, according to those who believe that they wove it in the 19th century. As evidence about what the Shahsavan were doing several generations earlier, I think it's weak. It's the best evidence I know about, but that doesn't mean that it's compelling or even that it's strong.

Second, the fact that Tanavoli presents examples of older pile weavings as Shahsavan carries considerable weight for me. He's not infallible, but is an extremely credible source on Shahsavan weaving and ethnohistory.

Third, the notion that the only real Shahsavan are those who were still nomadic strikes me as arbitrary and, even more important, is almost certainly an untestable hypothesis. By the rules of the game of science, an untestable hypothesis is unacceptable. That, by the way, is why "It was a miracle" is never an acceptable scientific explanation. I hasten to add that this is among the reasons that the scientific method, although powerful, is fallible (it defaults to rejecting the untestable), but this probably isn't the place to pursue that issue.

I raised the question of whether the Shahsavan wove pile right at the opening of the discussion, not because I adopt that position, but because I know that its strongest supporters are unlikely to join the discussion here. I wanted to be sure that the readership was made aware of the fact that not everyone is as convinced about that fundamental issue as you and I are.

Regards

Steve Price

Patrick Weiler

Steve,

You are correct that my post did not address this issue:
"That offers two propositions to sort out. The first is that Shahsavan cease to be Shahsavan when they adopt a sedentary lifestyle. I don't know what the "official" definition of the word is or who decides it, but not having a more or less universally accepted definition is a serious impediment to discussion." And your most recent post: "the notion that the only real Shahsavan are those who were still nomadic strikes me as arbitrary".

This situation is not easy to sort out and probably can never be definitively determined. If we agree with Tapper that only nomadic Shahsavan production is true Shahsavan work, there is no way to disentangle the real from the fake. And there is no way to know if the woman weaving the pile mafrash was sitting in a village home or on summer migration.
The Hali article (It is a great article and I have no quarrel with Jeff Spurr, thanks to him for bringing the results of the NERS meeting to us all,) says:
"During the 20th century approximately 300,000 people have claimed this identity, which Richard Tapper considers to be intimately bound up with the nomadic way of life; once nomads become peasant villagers, they quickly lose their tribal identity even if they remember that their forebears were pastoralists."
From an anthropological perspective, and from a dictionary description, settled villagers are not nomadic tribesmen. However, just as "intimately bound up with the nomadic life" the nomadic Shahsavan may be, they are also incontrovertibly "intimately bound up" with settled villagers in their everyday pastoral nomadism. For instance, they sell their lamb meat to villagers, they sell their wool to villagers, they buy foodstuffs, kitchen articles, tent structures and dyed wool from villagers, they leave a loom in a village home while they are on migration. To disassociate them from settled villagers, we may even need to deny authenticity to their weavings done in their winter quarters. Too close to villagers. Tainted. Fake. What if a piece was woven for commercial sale by a nomad? No good? There is no way to differentiate these pieces from the rest of their output.
Some tribal nomads were known to have reverted to nomadism a decade after being forcibly settled in the 1920's. Is their subsequent output ineligible as being truly tribal, or only that woven when settled?
This issue follows the discussion from the early 1990's of "Tribal" versus "Ethnographic". The issue was brought to the general public by the ACOR 2 publication of Mideast Meets Midwest, Ethnographic Rugs From Midwest Collections. My conclusion is that we cannot know for certain whether any certain piece was produced by a "nomadic" nomad or a "settled" (if only temporarily due to being infirm, aged or forcibly settled or for some other reason) nomad who grew up migrating but spent one summer in a village and wove something while there.
It has been suggested that some larger "Shahsavan" pile rugs were woven for an important person. The Hali article describes the transition during the 19th century when the El-Bey's or leaders of the Shahsavan became progressively more settled, one being Nazar Ali Khan who was appointed governor of Ardabil province. You would not want to curry favor with the governor by giving him a donkey bag in sumak. You would put all your energy into weaving a pile rug incorporating tribal designs. And you certainly would not let any old villager weave the rug.

Patrick Weiler

Steve Price

Hi Pat

There's more wrinkles to the notion that the only real Shahsavan were those that were nomadic. One is that nomadic Shahsavan only spent about three months a year in their migrations. Nobody thinks that they were real Shahsavan only during those months.

A second is that in many groups that we think of as being pastoral nomads, the migrations didn't always involve the entire families. There's a term for this that's escaping me right this minute, and I don't know whether any Shahsavan (it's not a homogeneous population, but a collection of tribal peoples moved into a geographic region by the Shah) belong in this category.

Regards

Steve Price

Patrick Weiler

Steve,

There is the word Transhumance, meaning:
"seasonal and alternating movement of livestock, together with the persons who tend the herds, between two regions, as lowlands and highlands"
from yourdictionary.com.
This would indicate that the entire family did not necessarily migrate.
The 1925 Bakhtiari migration took the whole family, as shown in the movie Grass, which can be viewed on the internet. If I can find a link I will post it, unless someone else knows it already.

Patrick Weiler

Rich Larkin

Hi Patrick,

A large factor in Tapper's view seems to be his premise that once someone has settled in a village situation, and dropped the nomadic pastoral economy and way of life, that person has ceased to be Shahsavan, or whatever the (former) tribe is. That's a pretty arbitrary approach to attribution of woven products. On the other hand, it seems evident that the very mixed bag of weavings, pile and flat, that emanate from the greater Northwest Persian area, involves people of many complex ethnic connections.

I don't want to push the analogy too hard, but up here around Boston, we have a strongly ethnic community of people of Italian extraction or birth settled in the North End. They are viewed as "Italian" locally, and much of their custom and culture is "Italian," though they aren't living in Italy. The trillion restaurants there are telling us very emphatically that the cuisine is Italian. It probably differs from cuisine in Italy, but we'll take it. Of course, if one were cataloguing ethnically Italian works of one kind or another, one would have to account for the geographical shift.

Referring to the Shahsavan weavers, I am pretty sure that some of the pile pieces cited in your salon were woven by persons with some level of Shahsavan credentials. Your opening example is a good candidate for me. How the weaver got around to doing that, whether she was settled somewhere, on the trek, married out, married in, or whatever, I don't know. But I don't think it is appropriate to limit the attribution of weavings to people with tribal affiliations based on the fact of whether the people are actually nomadic when the weaving is taking place. If we have to do that, we have to do a wholesale revision of many other tribal attributions, including the Qashqai, Khamseh, Afshar, and others.

Rich Larkin

Rich Larkin

Hi Patrick,

For the record, I drafted my last post off your first one in this thread. Duh.

Rich Larkin

Patrick Weiler

Rich,

One idiosyncrasy of this forum structure is that subsequent posts are always in chronological order rather than in any order of relevance to a specific post within the thread.
It keeps things neat, (and keeps Steve and Filiberto sane - at least as sane as they were to begin with) and eliminates one needing to review the entire thread to see if someone has commented on an earlier post.
So I will respond to your 9:44 post as though it were a general comment about Italian food and then try to get back to the original intent of the thread somehow.

You said: "I am pretty sure that some of the pile pieces cited in your salon were woven by persons with some level of Shahsavan credentials. Your opening example is a good candidate for me."
I believe you are commenting on the pile mafrash which looks similar to many Shahsavan flatweave mafrash faces. Structurally, it does not appear to be Kurdish, which would be a likely possibility for many NW Persian pieces. The Birds Heads on the arms of the main motif have a somewhat SW Persian look, but the rest of the designs and the construction argue against it. And most of the features Wendel pointed out in his article are contained in this piece, loose construction, low knot count, lack of weft ease/sinuous wefts, camel wool in the pile, symmetric knots and so on. So, if you kick it out of other "mainstream" categories and it fits nearly exactly in the Shahsavan pile weave category, it would by default have to be....... Baluch...

Tapper was most likely speaking strictly anthropologically when asserting that settled Shahsavan could no longer be considered to produce "Shahsavan" tribal, nomadic weavings. They were technically producing village weavings. The problem with this is that we have no way to determine which Shahsavan piece was woven by whom. Therefore, one cannot say that Shahsavan pile pieces were only woven by settled Shahsavan.
You are correct that we collectors must deal with a huge grey area when it comes to "tribal" weavings and their "authenticity". That was one reason the term "ethnographic" was introduced. Some collectors feel that the word ethnographic is too vague, but others feel that the word tribal is too encompassing.
Declaring that Shahsavan produced no pile weaving flies in the face of the pieces themselves. Granted, to my knowledge there is no pile piece inscribed with the date and tribe confirming that it is Shahsavan, but I am also unaware of any flatweave thusly inscribed. However, the basis for considering any given pile piece a Shahsavan artifact is at least as secure as that for many other tribal weavings as well. Considering that Shahsavan weavings of any kind were considered Caucasian until the last few decades, it is not unreasonable that additional groupings based on the similarity of their colors, construction, design, materials and handle should be documented as well as possible. This is how other tribal weavings became more readily identifiable. And this process is still continuing. There may be a handful of rug enthusiasts who can definitively identify almost any tribal woven item, but I have heard many say they could not be sure about a specific piece - even if they were experts in that area. Even James Opie changed his mind about some of the pieces in his first book.
Now I am going to eat some ravioli.
Patrick Weiler

Steve Price

Hi Pat

You wrote,
There may be a handful of rug enthusiasts who can definitively identify almost any tribal woven item ...

I doubt that anyone can definitively identify almost any tribal item, although there are a few who consider themselves to be expert enough to know the unknown and even the unknowable. One mark of an expert is that he knows the limits to what's known about his subject, and the foundation on which his beliefs are based.

Regards

Steve Price

.

Patrick Weiler

Steve,

I knew that......


Here is a link to the movie Grass, which shows one of the 1925 Bakhtiari migrations. There were other Bakhtiari migrations, but this was known as the most difficult of their migrations.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5237243314188407757&ei=rg52SuL5NYSwrAPTpKGOCg&q=grass
If that link does not take you there, you can go to:
http://video.google.com/
Enter Grass in the search window. You may want to take in a few videos about marijuana while you are there, but Grass is the 4th video from the top. When you click on that link, it begins playing in a small window, but a click on the rectangular box at the bottom of that screen will allow you to view it full screen.

Patrick Weiler

Richard Larkin

Hi Patrick,

For me, the point isn't so much which "tribe" wove an item, but rather, what it means (if much of anything) to attach a particular "tribal" label to a given piece. (I agree that the term "tribal" here is a shorthand one of convenience, encompassing complex elements relating to the production of woven items within the context of a nomadic/pastoral economy).

In my own collection, I have several khorjins (or faces thereof) that seem to have been produced in a rural or village context, but probably not by true nomadic pastoralists. (Indeed, it can be the definition of a collecting focus.) The one in post #7 of the "Counter Kurdish " thread is a likely example. I have others that reflect patterns also familiar in village rugs that are generally considered commercial products, Hamadan or Kolyai types, for example. Many of these, by the way, pass through the trade as "Northwest Persian." No doubt, the weavers were persons who had a close connection with one or more ethnic groups that we tend to think of as tribal rug producers. Kurds, for instance, and others. I am quite sure, as a working rule of thumb, that many of the rugs to which we attach "tribal" labels, Afshar, Qashqai, Bakhtiari, Baluch, etc., were produced by settled persons having connections with those groups, and many of them were probably produced with the hope of selling them for a few riyals. Included among such products are items that seem to have a utilitarian function, just as they can be found among true nomadic pastoralists. Of those, many were probably used in the intended utilitarian fashion, and others were made for sale.

It doesn't seem that we willl ever be able to parse out antique rugs accurately in these terms. I think the state of knowledge will continue to be what it is today: our own will be the authentic ones, and the other guy's will be the crass commercial items. Be that as it may, I think it is the desire to find and identify items that were produced and used in something of a pure nomadic tradition that moves us. It is an elusive goal, and possibly an illusory one.

Ravioli sounds good, and order me a nice Chianti.

Rich Larkin

Steve Price

Hi People

I've come across another source that endorses the notion of pile weaving by Shahsavan. Siawasch Azadi and Peter Andrews' book, Mafrash (1985) includes the following on p. 43, referring specifically to the Shahsavan:
Most mafrash are woven in various flat weaves; pile weaves are rarer. This qualification certainly applies to earlier periods as well.

Azadi is a German dealer who has done some field studies among the Shahsavan and Turkmen. He tends to be rather aggressive in date attributions and in the precision of his tribal attributions. Andrews is a German academic anthropologist who may be the foremost expert on tribal ethnohistory and material culture in central and western Asia. Although best known to ruggies for his field work with Turkmen, he has also lived among the Shahsavan.

Regards

Steve Price

Added after seeing Rich Larkin's post:
It is said that many sedentary descendents of pastoral nomads continued to weave and use traditional utilitarian items, including bags of various traditional formats. And, of course, they continued to modify older formats to newer applications, a subject that was the focus of the previous mini-salon (http://www.turkotek.com/mini_salon_00020/salon.html)

Filiberto Boncompagni

Hi Pat,

I’m an expert on ravioli. Find below a brief treatise on the “History of Italian Ravioli (a.k.a. Tortelli, Tortellini, Cappelletti, Agnolotti, Ravaiuoli, Pansotti, Pansarotti). Are they really originated from the Chinese Jiaozi and transmitted through the Central Asian Manti? Who cares, ravioli are better anyway!”.

Mmmmh…

On a second thought, better not. Slightly out of topic.

I’m NOT an expert on Shahsavan weavings, but I doubt that they didn’t wove pile.
Consider this: we know that they did weave for the market, as testified by a Frenchman in 1805: (from http://www.richardewright.com/9011_yazd.html )

Another instructive travel observation is made one by Pierre Jaubert in 1805. Drawn to the Kajar court in Teheran, as were many other Frenchmen during the Napoleonic Wars, while en route for Tabriz on his return trip, slightly past "Zenghian" and somewhat before Mianeh ("half-way") he stopped for lunch in a Shahsavan tent, which he observed was like the tents of the Kurds, and commented on the people. "Their principal industry consists of the manufacture of rugs and all sorts of little woolen items, such as stockings, slippers, gloves, etc., which are of a great perfection as much for the weaving as for the design."

Monsieur Jobert did not elaborate on the kind of rugs, but … Weavers that worked for the market in a geographic area were pile weaving was very well developed... I find hard to believe that they didn't weave pile items AT ALL.
Perhaps it wasn't their specialty, but they should have given a try, no?

Perhaps the sloppy results (some of the examples presented by Rich are definitely too sloppy for the taste of city dwellers of the time, either local or westerners) weren’t as successful as their flat weaves, especially soumak, in which they were masters. As a consequence, perhaps the pile weavings were reserved only for “internal” use.

IF the structural characteristic of Shahsavan pile effectively correspond to the one illustrated by Wendel, I don’t see why you should not consider your mafrash panel as possibly Shahsavan.

Then there is the design.

You say “There are many Shahsavan flat weaves with a similar design, though”. Since it seems you have done your homework, how many examples of this design you know, and are ALL of them attributed to Shahsavan? If so, and if there is a decent number of them, you can upgrade your mafrash panel from “possibly Shahsavan” to “most probably Shasavan”, IMHO.

(About published examples of this design, I know only one example, plate 343 in Hull and Luczyc-Wyhowska “Kilim”. I also have a small kilim, already presented here:

http://www.turkotek.com/mini_salon_00003/ms3t5.htm

Not useful, because I only know for sure that it came to me on a bus from Daghestan…).

Ciao,

Filiberto

Steve Price

Hi People

One difficulty with using published attributions is that it's hard to know whether they're correct. This problem is especially acute for Shahsavan weavings, which were generally given Caucasian attributions until about 25 years ago.

There is one source in which there is a large number of pieces illustrated, all of which are said by the author to have been acquired directly from Shahsavan families. That source is Tanavoli's Shahsavan. He includes sedentary Shahsavan as being bona fide members of that rather diverse group.

Regards

Steve Price

Lloyd Kannenberg

Hello All,

I found the following thread:

http://www.events.ir/no002/002d.htm

It doesn't settle the question of whether the Shahsavan produced pile weavings, but it does indicate, with some authority I think, that "Shahsavan" refers to both nomadic and sedentary peoples.

Lloyd Kannenberg

Patrick Weiler

Lloyd,
Thanks for that link. The transitional phase between a nomadic lifestyle and a sedentary one was described quite graphically by Lois Beck in her seminal treatise Nomad: A Year In the Life of a Qashqa'i Tribesman in Iran.
At the end of the 19th century, even a sedentary Shahsavan or other former nomad still required saddle bags, mafrash and jajim. The change from horse-riding nomad to truck-driving factory worker took a little while. Can one incontrovertibly declare that every single pile weaving attributed to Shahsavan weavers was woven by settled former nomads? No more than the declaration that every flatweave described as Shahsavan was woven by a nomad.
Here is another link to a page describing a visit to, a film of and 52 photographs from a Shahsavan migration in 1978:
http://www.iranian.com/Travelers/2003/January/Migrate/index.html
One paragraph describes the activities of the women of the tribe:
"A Shahsavan woman's day often starts well before dawn and continued late into the night. Women and girls fetch water, bake bread, churn milk into butter, yogurt and cheese, spin wool, weave storage bags and rugs, and prepare the daily meals."
One must be careful to treat the pronouncements of anthropologists regarding the details of daily life as a snapshot of life at that time and not encompassing an era long since past.
Filiberto, the second Shahsavan piece you show is from my collection and quite well illustrates the design features which relate to the pile piece in the salon. The piece from your collection also shows quite a similarity in design of the main motif to the pile mafrash. I doubt your piece originated in Daghestan, but if it did, then all these Shahsavan-looking pieces are definitely Daghestan-Baluch in origin. That certainly solves the riddle of "If the Shahsavan-like pile weavings were not woven by Shahsavan nomads, but were traded for with village weavers, what village were they woven in?"
I would have expected that at least one of the few eminent rug-world visitors to the Shahsavan region would have discovered that particular village which wove all of the pile Shahsavan weavings if such a village actually existed.
I guess none of them travelled to Daghestan looking for it.

Patrick Weiler

Filiberto Boncompagni

Pat,
Forget the Daghestan: those guys use to sell wares acquired all over the former USSR. That includes Central Asian stuff - and Baluch as well, by the way.

I re-formulate my question about the “fork” design on flat-weaves: besides Shahsavan, did you find any other attribution for it?
Curiously,

Filiberto

Steve Price

Hi Filiberto

Shahsavan attributions entered the published literature relatively recently. While there may be a few exceptions, every Shahsavan piece was attributed to the Caucasus or NW Persia until about 1975. The word "Shahsavan" doesn't even appear in From the Bosporus to Samarkand, published in 1969. In addition to an inertia that tends to keep old attributions in place, Caucasian textiles were extremely expensive until the collapse of the USSR around 1990, so there was also a tendency to give Caucasian attributions to what might actually be Shahsavan stuff. For these reasons, I think it's dangerous to place very much weight on published attributions to the Caucasus when Shahsavan is a plausible alternative.

There is one excellent database of pieces that are almost certainly all Shahsavan, Tanavoli's Shahsavan. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I think it bears repeating*. The book includes 285 pieces, most illustrated in pretty good color reproduction, all with technical details. Every one of them is said to have been acquired directly from Shahsavan sources. This also implies that Tanavoli probably saw thousands of Shahsavan pieces in the course of acquiring these.

Bottom line: Criteria for identifying Shahsavan flatweaves down to the level of geographic subgroups are probably emmbedded in Tanavoli's book. The question of how to identify the origins of similar looking things is difficult, but published attributions to Caucasus or NW Persia are of limited use, especially if they were made more than 15 years ago.

Regards

Steve Price

*There's a tradition in my tribe: Anything worth saying, is worth repeating many times.

Filiberto Boncompagni

Steve,

I have a problem with Tanavoli’s book: I don’t owe it nor I have access to it.

I do have Nooter’s book on Caucasian flat weaves and, of course, Wright& Wertime’s one. Plus I have Wertime’s “Sumak Bags”. No trace of this kind of design.
The only published example I knew was plate 343 in Luczyc-Wyhowska “Kilim” and I just discovered another one on Marla’s website, also attributed to Shahsavan.

The point is, if there is around a certain number of pieces with the “fork” design and there is a general and undisputed attribution of those pieces to Shahsavan… one should be allowed to think that others pieces with the same design could be Shahsavan as well.

Speaking about forks, I think I’ll have some nice spaghetti for dinner.

Filiberto

Steve Price

Hi Filiberto

The point is, if there is around a certain number of pieces with the “fork” design and there is a general and undisputed attribution of those pieces to Shahsavan… one should be allowed to think that others pieces with the same design could be Shahsavan as well.

I agree. Until about 1975, every published Shahsavan piece had a general and undisputed Caucasian or NW Persian attribution. My caution was about going in that direction: thinking that something with a Caucasian attribution is very unlikely to be Shahsavan even if it looks like it might be.

I think every piece illustrated in Tanavoli's book really is Shahsavan (maybe could be exceptions in which a Shahsavan family owned a non-Shahsavan piece that they thought was from their own group, but I doubt that there's many like that), and I don't know of any other sources in which a Shahsavan attribution would be so nearly unambiguous.

Regards

Steve Price

Richard Larkin

Hi Filiberto,

Thanks for that link to Richard Wright's site. Outstanding. I peruse that site, but I had skipped over the Yasd item because I think of Yasd (Yezd) as producing half-baked Kerman wannabe rugs. I should have known better, considering the author.

We are strictly prohibited from getting into ad hominem references here, so I'm not going to say much about the people who insist that the Shahsavan never wove pile rugs, but choose not to make themselves known on this site. However, I would like to know how they can be highly confident in their knowledge of what didn't happen before 1900. If their point is that it can't be demonstrated affirmatively the Shahsavan did weave pile, that's another thing. Anyway, I agree with Steve, if I'm going to go along with someone on this for the time being, I think Tanavoli is about as good as anybody.

Now, Filiberto, I want to know whether you have sampled the cuisine of Italians who have resettled elsewhere, say, the USA? If so, is it Italian? I love it myself, whatever it is.

Rich Larkin

Filiberto Boncompagni

Hi Rich,

A couple of times, in New Jersey, Italian Restaurant. It didn' convince me, but the ''sample'" is - well - too small to judge.

Filiberto