Posted by Steve Price on 06-07-2002 09:59 AM:

Closing Remarks

Dear People,

This Salon has continued a little beyond what we think of as the normal 2 week run, and although a new subject has just been introduced by Glenn Manser, I'm getting ready to leave town for a few days and I think it's best to close discussion. Perhaps Glenn's rug can reappear later on, in another context.

I presented this topic because I think the striped-field Belouch group rugs are a small, attractive and interesting group, about which little has been written. The embellishing curve to the stripes on the main piece of the Salon essay seems to be unique to this specimen. The discussion included references to what is very likely every one of the few published examples of striped field Belouch rugs, and this ought to make it a useful source for anyone interested in researching the group in depth in the future.

We briefly revisited the subject of the internal elem, but this is likely to remain intractable until the phenomenon is much more crisply defined than it is now.

I had hoped that the discussion would go further into the vagaries of the remarkably specific attributions given to many Belouch group rugs, but we didn't get very far in that direction. The striped field Belouch do seem to be part to a larger group, the white field Belouch rugs, with which they share a number of structural and design elements. The origin (tribal or geographic) of that group of rugs doesn't seem to be within the range of current information.

Regards to all,

Steve Price