Posted by James Allen on December 14, 1998 at 17:27:21:
Pinner published two of these in TURKOMAN STUDIES 1. I want you to do a visual exercise and look at pic. # 7. I want you to squint and look at the picture. I want you to only see the design as a series of flattened octagonal gulls whose centers are the minor gulls. This bright photo makes this a little difficult but it is easy enough to see. Having seen the design flip into reverse dominant mode and the octagons as primary object, it should be easy to see this design expanded into a main carpet format. When the gulls are vertically elongated ,which a closer to 1:1 knot ratio would do,one can easily imagine that the dominant visual impression would be of a series of octagonal gulls. This is what those timurid artists from Meshad copied. This startling insight has also led me to theorize that the chuval gull was formed out of the evolutionary juxtapositions of the merging of approximated octagonal edges. I am including Shawn Jazzmans' idea of the nominal gull or hidden gull in this torba to aid your visualization. This imaginary main carpet is the missing link in Turkoman studies. The origin of the chuval gull must be a little under 1000 years. It is obvious that the earliest chuval gulls were asymmetic and anthropomorphic. I must interject that another torba has been C-14 dated to before 1700 by Hoffmeister at Munichs; accellerator. It had this same anthropomorphic gull center. Not as well done as this one though. This old torba of mine was copied from an oguz original as was the famous Yomud carper collected by Meyers and now at the TM, fig.# 67 in Turkmen. It should be easy to see its' poorly done chuval gulls are a copy of the same thing this was copied from. I hope nobody melts down reading all this but if you will take the trouble to really LOOK HARD, you'll see what i am talking about. Have fun JIM ALLEN