Pierre Galafassi

Hi Turkotekers,

At least one 19th century traveler, G. Capus, mentioned carpets of the Ata Turkmen, a tribe which at the time (1881) were mainly living on both banks of the lower Amu-darya (see essay, map J), mixed with Karakalpak clans:
Capus indicated that Ata rugs were well done, sturdy and of rather dark shade.
« ...a deux ou rois verstes du rivage se trouve un aoul d’ Ata ....ces Turkmènes fabriquent de très bon tapis... Leur tribu, éparpillée dans le Khiva, se distingue par ses moeurs douces et son caractère inoffensif....» p.354
« ..les tapis solides, de couleur sombre que fabriquent les femmes Ata Turkmène..» p.365

He was apparently quite interested in rugs since he mentioned (p. 381) Merv Tekke- and Chodor ones too. The former he deemed excellent, perfectly woven, beautiful but expensive, the latter rather loosely woven with coarse wool and too colorful (sic).

I can’t remember having seen any mention of Ata rugs in carpet literature. Which is a trifle puzzling since these Ata Turkmen (a reasonably large tribe) came quite early under Russian rule (after the fall of Khiva, the right bank of the lower Amu darya even came under direct Russian administration). It is therefore likely that merchants swarmed the area, as they did in Akhal and later in Merv.
I would be interested in your opinion. Has anybody met Ata rugs? Or any mention of them in one of your rug books?

Source: G. Capus. A travers le royaume de Tamerlan. 1892 ed.
G. Capus was a French scientist who travelled on a mission through most of Turkestan, including Bokhara, the middle- and lower Amu-darya, Khiva, the Üst -Yurt plateau and the Caspian shore in 1881-1882 .

Regards
Pierre

Steve Price

Hi Pierre

I don't recall seeing anything attributed to a Turkmen group called Ata, but a Google search for "Ata Turkmen" turned up a spindle bag sold on eBay about 4 years ago with that attribution. Here is a link to the description. What seems to me to be the most relevant part of it includes:
... Ata, an Arab tribe Turkomanised in the early 19th century, who lived in close proximity to the Yomud Turkmen as an "avliad", or "under the protection of". Unlike the majority of ... Yomud-group weavings, ... asymmetrical knot structure on goat hair warps and red-dyed wool or camel-hair wefting. The color palette, too, is unusual ... teal blue/greens, salmon reds, and old gold mimics ... the 18th/19th century Ata chuval ... Siawosch Azadi ... "Turkoman Carpets and the Ethnographic Significance of their Ornaments", translated by Robert Pinner, 1975, The Crosby Press, plate # 33.

The information in that excerpt that's most likely to be reliable (in my opinion) is the first sentence, which says who the Ata were. I take most of it with my usual grain of salt, although Azadi's 1975 book might contain more evidence. I like the verb "Turkomanise", and will tuck it away in my mind in the hope that I'll be able to use it some day.

Regards

Steve Price

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Steve,
Your usual grain of salt might be well justified again:
- Apparently Capus and this source do not agree on color palette, at all.
- The hypothesis that Ata were recent recruits in the Turkmen familly clashes with W. Wood’s opinion who claims that «.. the term owlad refers to six tribes which occupy an honored position in Turkmen society as sacred or holy tribes: the Khoja, Shikh, Sayyid, Magtim, Ata, and Mujevur...»... «...not all owlad were equally honored.... the Ata, (though the single largest owlad tribe) and Mujevur were viewed as occupying the least honored position...» (1) and also that «...the Ata trace their origin to the Caliph Osman...»(2).

The Ata do claim an Arab origin, the third Caliph no less, but this can hardly be considered as being a «recent» Arab integration. Then the wrong definition of owlad (or avliad) justifies the suspicion that the description was a trifle superficial.
Regards
Pierre
(1) W. Wood. Turkmen ethnohistory. In Vanishing jewels. p. 36
(2) ibid. p. 42

Rich Larkin

Hi Pierre, and all,

Following is the alleged Ata juval in Azadi, mentioned by Steve.




I certainly would have called it Yomud, and kept on truckin’. The same is true for the spindle bag, judging from the picture. The following salon discusses various aspects of the issue, and includes some skepticism too, well founded in my opinion. An asmalyk is shown, said by Michael Craycraft to be Ata. In another part of that discussion, Moshkova is cited for the statement that the Ata were inclined to imitate the weavings of their near neighbors, such as the Tekke. Why does one get the sense people are making up these attributions on scant evidence?

www.turkotek.com/salon_00073/s73t10.htm

One might think Capus, evidently an interested observer on site who took special notice of the carpets, would be the most reliable describer of their rugs. Interestingly, or inexplicably, his broad description doesn't seem to fall in with any of the others.

Marvelous work on this salon, Pierre.

Rich Larkin

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Rich,
Thanks for the flowers, although my wife having seen me blush has, as usual, checked the level of Schnapps in the bottle.
And many thanks for the link to the 2001 thread. A most interesting discussion indeed.

It is quite obvious that carpetology has quite some way to go before it deserves to be called a science. Would it not have been great, Rich, if all these brave hearts who visited the Turkmen in the 19th century would have had a passion for rugs and described them in detail? (Of course some people would be jobless now).

Speaking of Capus, I am also deeply puzzled by his description of the Chodors rugs as being too colorful.
Best regards
Pierre

Steve Price

Hi Pierre

To a large extent, the rug literature is hardly more than lore. There are lots of reasons for this.

One is that there is so little documentation on anything woven in western and central Asia before, say, 1875, and so much bazaar storytelling that fed western fantasies. A lot of these became embedded and are now conventional wisdom.

Traveler's reports can have lots of errors. Some are fabrications or delusions (think, Marco Polo). The traveler's memory can be imperfect, he can be retelling tales that he heard in country. Those tales can be local folklore or intentional fabrications meant to impress or otherwise please the traveler or simply to amuse the teller of the tale.

Finally, the traveler encounters only a very small sample of the weavings. What he saw was probably heavily weighted with pieces that were new or recently woven and with pieces woven in the vicinity of where he was. That is, the changes that occurred with time and the geographic variability were under-reported.

Just as a point in passing: most of rug wisdom is suspect because it lacks rigor or evidence. Information doesn't have to be science-based to be good, and much of the science in the rug literature is awful. I serve as a judge for the Virginia Academy of Sciences annual high school science fair; my role is to read 20 or so student reports and make recommendations of which to include in the public presentations. Much of the published science in Rugdom wouldn't make the cut.

Regards

Steve Price

PS - It's odd that Azadi considers the Ata to be related to the Yomut, rather than to the Yomud. According to the on-line expert on such matters, the Yomud were a tribe in Turkmenistan, the Yomut were Persian.

Rich Larkin

Hi Steve,

You are so right about all of the little factors that may lie behind historical reports, the facts of which we'll never know. Surely, there were many others we haven't mentioned, or thought of. As for the literature of the last century plus, even the reformers, try as they might, haven't been able to avoid the untenable assumptions. Murray Eiland, Jr., one of my heros, comes to mind. His books undertook to survey the literature that preceded them and point out the unsupported and unwarranted assumptions. But if you read today some of the editions of his Comprehensive Guides from the '70s and '80s, you find many statements that are now dubious. (I don't have the current versions.) It is very hard to avoid the myths for the reasons you mentioned.

As for the Yomut and the Yomud, I know next to nothing about the history of those peoples. I do know that the tribal name has as many spellings in the west as Sujbulagh, or Tschaudor. I also know that a number of languages in the region are prone to minimize (in pronunciation) the distinction between the terminal "d" and "t" of words. That factor alone could account for the two apparently different names, and perhaps all we are speaking of is two particular branches of a nation. Of course, that's all you need to play a bracing game of upmanship.

Rich Larkin

Steve Price

Hi Rich

I was just being facetious about the Yomud/Yomut thing. I'm sure Azadi used Yomut because his native language is German, and nearly all German authors end the word with the t (Yomut, Yamout, etc.). It's just a phonetic transliteration from what someone heard into his own alphabet, and no more significant than the fact that London and Londres are the same city.

But there is a self-styled expert who announced to his readership that Yomut is a small tribal group in Iran, while Yomud is a much larger group in Turkmenistan. He responded to being criticized by posting a link to a page that says that this is how scholars use the two words. The linked page was written by him, and makes no reference to any relevant source.

Regards

Steve Price

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Steve, Rich and all,

Steve I agree that the travelers too were prone to errors for the reasons you have mentioned. Vambery is a good example of a fully unreliable traveler, who, strangely enough, keeps being quoted despite his macroscopic errors.

As for the ratatouille of truth (two tea spoons) and nonsense (two pounds) which we get too often fed with in rug literature, it could be due to a large extend to the incompetence of the first generation of "experts" and "scientists" who, in the period between 1890 and 1920, failed to do a proper job, when still genuine, old stamp weavers were living in each tribe and could have been interviewed. Your recent information, Steve, about former Russian-, especially Soviet academic careers probably explains a whole lot. It was not easy for other nationals to do field work in Turkestan, for decades after the conquest.
Best regards
Pierre

Wayne Anderson

Pierre et al



This is a photo by Jon Thompson in "Timbuktu To Tibet" of an Ata women spinning, It was taken in 1989 in the Amu Darya Valley and shows felt and flatwoven carpets and a pile bag.

Wayne Anderson

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Wayne,
Very interesting picture.
The dark colored bag even fits with Caput's description of Ata rugs!
I knew that a Frenchman can't be wrong.

Steve, perhaps you could inform your Yomud/Yomut-slicing friend that the frontier of Persia has moved back and forth quite often over the years, but that the Turkmen nomads hardly ever bothered about such a useless notion.

None of the 19th century visitors ever hinted at a tribal difference. O'Donovan for example who spent months north of the Atrek ("Russian" territory between Krasnavorsk and Tschikislar) and south of the Atrek ("Persian" Gumush tepe & Hasan Kuli) spoke of them as one tribe, always spelling their name "Yamud". While he did mention by name three other Turkoman tribes (The Göklan and two very minor tribes) roaming the area.
Regards
Pierre

Richard Larkin

Hi all,

Wayne, excellent find as regards the picture. Are we to think that such juvals were being woven in 1989, or shortly before that time? I would say most observers would give the label "Yomud" to it, whatever its age.

Pierre, I believe the expression goes, "Fifty thousand Frenchmen can't be wrong." But we are attaching "value added" to your vote!

When you think about it, Capus' brief description of Ata rugs applies equally well to most of the ones we call Yomud. Wayne's picture suggests that at least some Ata work closely resembled Yomud work. Maybe the Ata grew in time to imitate the Yomud oeuvre, though one would think that he would have mentioned the similarity, given his apparent interest in the subject. Maybe the very broad rubric, "Yomud," takes in a few other tribes whose bodies of extant work are conspicuous by their absence.

Rich Larkin

Chuck Wagner

Hi all,

I have a suspicion that the link to the Yomut is more direct and that the folks associated with the name Ata are likely the same folk associated with the name Atabai, -bai being the regional dialectical relating a sense of wealth in the context of pastoral nomads, e.g. lotsa sheep, etc.

My two cents worth.

Also waiting for opinions on the quite long torba in the other thread. Hint.



Regards,
Chuck Wagner

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Chuck,
Good point, Capus could indeed have confused aouls of the Ata owlad tribe with those of Ata-bey Yomud and could, as you suspect, have seen in fact Yomud rugs. However, if I do not err, the Ata-bey were part of the Qara-Choka Yomud and lived prevalently on the southeastern Caspian shore and between the Gorgan-and Atrek rivers, were O’Donovan met their aouls mixed with those of the «maritime» Jaffar-bey Yomud (Vol. I, pages 157 &162), while at the time of Capus’ visit the Ata owlad lived mostly on the lower Amu-darya and in particular on its right bank, where Capus met them. This leaves open the possibility that he saw true Ata production. I would put my two cents rather on Rich ‘s second hypothesis: « Maybe the very broad rubric, "Yomud," takes in a few other tribes whose bodies of extant work are conspicuous by their absence...»
Best regards
Pierre