Regards, Yon

The Tekke ak-juval in the Salon has an intact closure on it. Sort of like a big shoelace arrangement.

I don't think I've seen a Yomud juval with a closure on it, and the Yomuds are the only ones I've seen with the so-called closure markers. Like you, I wonder what they signify or indicate. It's hard to believe the Yomud couldn't figure out where to put the closure ropes without arrows pointing to the spots. On the other hand, we must remember that these items were made by the women and often used by the men.

Regards,

Steve Price

The few Yomud Chuvals with closure marks I have seen incorporate them "approximately" above the first and third rows of 3-gul chuvals. The fact that they are not in EXACTLY the same place, but just approximately, may indicate that they are merely vestigal remains of a design feature. It may be that the upper elem was at one time taller in relation to the entire bag, more equal to the size of the lower chuval, and it, too, was decorated similarly. As the size of the elem decreased, there was less room for the design and what remains by the late 19th century is just a couple of chevron-like tree bases.
There are many chuvals with limited designs in the lower elem, too. They may be younger than those with more "complete" lower elems and the same process that eliminated the upper elem designs may well have been at play by the time of the massive cultural change in the Yomud area at the late 19th century with the coming of the train.

Vestigally yours,

Patrick Weiler

Regards, Yon

I have always been skeptical of the claim that these were "closure marks", since it sounds like one of those facile conjectures that one person made and then it stuck as a label. From what I have read (and heard), most of the odd symbols on bags served some protective function to ward off evil from the contents. These arrows or crows feet may be something of that ilk.

Uwe Jordan, in his Turkoman, book, makes a similar observation about a yomut chuval (p 200, plate 159 caption) and cites Troost and Julian Homer (Hali vol 3,no 4, pp 310 ff), but since I don't have either of those references, I don't know what they wrote. Personally, I usually go for the anti-evil explanation (apotropaic) explanation when nothing else is known, since superstition is very strong throughout the the region.

Best regards, Ken

Although what we are calling "closure marks" here do seem to appear most frequently on Yomut pieces, I think we established in an earlier conversation that at least some Ersari bag faces also have features that appear to be similar. Plate 61 in the Eiland/Pinner Wiedersperg catalog shows one with two such marks.

Interestingly, this piece may also give some credence to Pat Weiler's thought that these marks might be somewhat vestigal traces of a species of upper elem. Plate 61 shows two "closure" marks in an upper decorative row in which there are also ten other devices with a different design.

And although I think Yon's indication is basically correct, there are pieces that show upper areas that do resemble small elems. Saryk bags are famous for this feature. Plate 19 in Reuben''s "Guls and Gols" catalog is a good example of this Saryk usage.

And the Ersaris did it too. Plate 87 in Thompson/Mackie, "Turkmen" volume is an example and Plate 44 in Hans Emby's catalog III is another.

Even the Tekke's have sometimes had these short panels above the upper border. Plate 1 in Elmby's catalog IV, shows a piece with such an upper row that is precisely the sort of decoration we usually encounter on elems.

There is an inconvenient feature of the devices in most of these "upper elems," (incovenient if we are to consider them possible design ancestors of "closure marks"). It is that the devices in them usually have points that point down, while the "closure marks" I have seen all point up.

One last bag (Plate 95 in Loges) shows a top row of elements above the upper border. The row continues down both sides as well and is clearly just another area of design outside both the upper and side borders. This might support an interpretaton that at least some "closure marks" are merely the "remains" of another historic level of design outside the main borders: one that in the past occurred not just at the top but also on both sides of a bag face.

Regards,

R. John Howe

As I was going through a ton of early Turkmen material this past year, at one point I unfolded an Ersari chuval and did a double-take: There was a row of 12 “closure arrows” across the top, executed in precisely the same manner as on typical Yomut bags, but with the center vertical of each upward-pointing arrow extending upward for an inch or so, and then sprouting a pair of hooks! Sorry I don’t have permission to share a photo now, but there it was—a very likely predecessor of the simpler motif. Then another piece turned up with the same triangular, upward pointing form with extended center vertical and pair of hooks, but this time with the triangular base filled in with two smaller colored triangles. On this Ersari example, an elem at the bottom repeated the same motif, but with still further elaboration. In studying the design material, I have found, astonishingly often, that the earliest versions of motifs appear in old Ersari work, with derivative forms standardized elsewhere.

Marla

I had not looked at the pieces in the Atlantic Collections volume this morning when I wrote about closure marks above.

This evening I did so and think that plate 128, on page 122, may be a Tekke example with such marks.

Editor's Note: This image has been "enhanced" to bring out the detail. Steve Price

The top of the bag is incomplete but I think there are three possible "closure marks" on this piece. I tried a close up scan of this top section without particulary good results.

This is a chuval with "anina guls" in compartments. It is in the Bogulubov Collection and is estimated to have been woven in the 19th century.

Someone else may be able to provide a more satisfactory close-up scan of one of these marks. I think it is the first Tekke piece on which I have noticed them.

Regards,

R. John Howe

I just came across ‘Yomut Chuval Fastenings’ by Julian Homer in HALI 3/4, p.310 where one can see pictures of closure marks in connection with the closure mechanism.
But I’m still not sure whether this ‘closure marks’ originally were what we call them since some Eagle-gul main carpets show very similar knotted devices reaching from the knotted field into the kilim.
Very important in this thread seems to me Marla’s remark that on old Ersaris can be found early versions of motifs we normally attribute to other tribes - may our concept of tribal motifs is more flawed than we expect?
Best regards,
Christoph

You wrote in part:

"I just came across ‘Yomut Chuval Fastenings’ by Julian Homer in HALI 3/4, p.310 where one can see pictures of closure marks in connection with the closure mechanism."

Does this mean that these photos suggest an answer to the question with which Yon initiated this thread: i.e., what is the character of the closure system on bags that have "closure arrows?"

If so, would you say what this article suggests the closure system for such bags were and perhaps put up one or more of the illustrating photos?

Thanks,

R. John Howe

Turkoman chuvals are containers ... on the walls of the tent. Since apparently only a proportion of chuvals have any means for closing them at the top, it must be assumed that they are left open for easy access. However, chuvals ... laid on their sides, would need a firm closure system and this would also be useful for chuvals strapped to or hung from a pack animal. Fig. 3 shows a Yomut chuval with plaited fastening ropes ... two at the front, and two at the back. Each is sewn on with wool of the same colour as was used to sew down the strip of kilim at the top of the bag, and these ropes were then presumably tied together to close the bag. Although slightly out of alignment, the fixing points are indicated by the woven 'arrowhead' design. The misalignment in this example was probably due to a general lack of attention to detail seen in many weavings of the turn of the century, which is the approximate date of this chuval. ... I would suggest that these 'arrowheads' fulfill a dual role by indicating the point at which an extra technique is to be employed, and ... a decorative feature.

... pointers only seem to occur on Yomut pieces, and then only on chuvals with certain designs; i.e., the method seems to have been used by some Yomut groups and not by others. ...with some exceptions, two 'arrowheads' were ... on the older chuvals."

It seems to me, that the closure mechanism easily could be removed without leaving any traces and so its difficult to say how many of the chuvals originally had such a closure system and how many lost the remains of it in the bazaar where they were prepared for export.

About the relationship of 'closure marks' and closure mechanism, Mr. Homer speculates as we are doing here.

Best regards,

Christoph

Thanks very much for these images and words. They do indeed provide one plausible example relating the "closure marks" with an actual closure system.

If I understand correctly, the cords are on the pile side of the top of this chuval and the slits through which they would be drawn to close the opening of the bag are on the back.

Although we see only a small proportion of bags nowadays with the backs still attached, we do see a fair number of them that are complete in this regard. I have never seen a complete Turkmen bag with cords that were not on the corners and I have not seen a Turkmen bag back that had these slits. While the cords could readily be removed and the slits closed up, there would seem, if the back has not been removed, little reason for doing the latter. Turkmen bag backs are not decorative and so slits near the top would not detract from a "complete" bag's appearance.

Has anyone else ever seen tying cords in the position shown in Homer's article or a Turkmen bag back with these slits?

Thanks, again, Christoph for moving us a bit with this response to Yon's question.

Regards,

R. John Howe

If I interpret the text and the pictures (which are not very clear in the original neither) right then a brown plaited cord was attached to the top of both, the front and the back. On fig. 4 you can see the resulting ‘loops’. So there wouldn’t be any slits to be closed up after removing the cords neither on the front nor on the back.
To close the chuval the four ‘blue and red’ ropes seen on fig. 3 were pulled through the above mentioned loops. According to fig. 1 and 2 we could expect most likely to find traces of these red/blue cords near the closure marks of those chuvals which once had such a closure system.

Best regards,
Christoph

Thanks for this further clarification. Perhaps I'm the only one not to see that the slits are in fact gaps in cords sewn on the the top edge of the bag.

There would I think be a tendency for dealers to remove such cords to "clean up" the edge of the bag, so to speak.

I've done something similar to a Turkish bag that had bands sewn to it. (Although in my case I was "liberating" three bands that seemed to me older and more attractive than the newer bag. Not the usual situation, I think.)

But as you say, we should sometimes find traces of these cords that are placed well off the corners of bags with this closure system. One reason we have not have seen them so far is that we have likely not been looking for them in that place. I'm certainly going to begin doing so in the future.

Regards,

R. John Howe

Stephen Louw and I have been having a side conversation which led me to look at a pile faced Yomut chuval I have with 16 major guls. It also has two "closure marks" and so I looked at it in this respect more closely than I have before. (There is a bad photo of this bag face in Salon 5, the fifth image in.)

The first thing I saw is so obvious that I'm embarrassed to report it. This bag is "complete" in that it still has its back. But there is an obvious feature of it that I never noticed before. There are extensions formed by 2 inch strips of a much coarser and browner flat weave sewn onto the sides of this bag back. The ivory flatweave back itself is original because the warps from the pile side continue into it.

And although there are these extra strips sewn on both sides of the back of this bag only one of them is currently functional (that is exposed to view). The back on one side is sewn to the front so that this extra strip is entirely inside.

So why were these strips added and why is one now sewn inside the bag? It appears that this bag was used for some purpose that required that the opening be larger than the doubled original width of the piece and that these extensions were added so that it would serve that purpose (perhaps to fit a specific item). Because one should be able to estimate closely the size of the opening required for a specific object, it would seem that at the time these strips were added, both were needed (else why go the considerable work of sewing them on to both side?). Perhaps subsequently things changed and the size this bag opening needed to accommodate reduced slightly and so one side of the back was resewn with the extra strip now inside the bag.

I did look at the top edge of this bag's back and front and while that are no traces I can see of closure "ropes" in the area near the closure marks (or on the corner either for that matter), there are traced of navy blue along the edge of the back that suggest that something could have been lashed to it.

Someone said (perhaps Marla once) that if we want to see some "new" antique Turkmen material, we need only to look a little more closely at what we already own.

I invite thought about the addition of these two strips to the back of this bag that move in directions different from my speculations above.

Regards,

R. John Howe

Several times I have seen the kind of feature you’re describing—extra strips attached at the sides of a bag’s back—and the reason has always been the same. The plain-weave back section had “drawn in” on the loom, becoming narrower than the front. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but without the rows of knotted pile to keep the warp spread, only a slight miscalculation of how much “weft ease” is needed can cause a natural narrowing of the fabric.

So what is a weaver to do when she removes her carefully woven bag from the loom and folds it over to sew up the sides if the back is narrower? Do you like the appearance of bags in which part of the front side curves under, distorting the border area? I’m sure you’ve seen examples of that, though such pieces are among the most likely to have had their backs removed. Splicing in narrow pieces as you’ve described is an easy solution. Sometimes not a lot is needed, but it seems smart to add something at both sides, just in case, rather than to fold the thing so that it’s crooked.

Best,
Marla

Thanks for this suggestion. It is clearly what happened.

Armed with your experience, and noticing that the pile points down on this piece, strongly indicating that the narrower back that lacked weft ease was woven before the pile face, I was particularly interested in what problem the weaver faced as she moved from the narrowed flatweave to pile. That is, does the piece jump rather abruptly to the greater width of the pile face?

It does not seem to, but rather tapers out to the wider pile width in a length of perhaps six inches. The weaver also hid the most dramatic section of this taper (visible only on the back) by sewing the back to the front so that about 3/4 inch of pile continues on the back.

And when she started piecing, the weaver did for a little while use some of the width of the added strips on both sides. It is only as she went along sewing the back to the front that she found that she needed only the strip on one side.

So the reason for sewing strips on both sides is that she can't predict how much of either of them she'll really need as she sews up the bag. It's an intensely empirical matter as she goes along. She needs to be able to move flexibly on either side as needed.

There is indeed a kind of weaving "archeology" (not the right word, of course) in the pieces we already own.

Regards,

R. John Howe