The Background of Rugs
Area rugs were formerly woven to protect the body from cold, to be spread on a dais or before a seat of honor, to cover a table, couch, or wall, or to form the curtains of a tent. There is evidence of the existence of hand woven Cheap Rugs in antiquity. On the rock tombs of Beni Hassan, Egypt, c.2500 BC, men are depicted with the implements of rug weaving. Other evidence of the early use ofrugs is seen in the drawings on the ancient palace walls of Nineveh.
In the mountainous regions of the East stretching from Turkey through Persia and Central Asia into China, where the fleece of the sheep and the hair of the camel and goat grow long and fine, the art of area rugs-weaving reached its height early in the 16th cent. The artisan worked on a handloom consisting essentially of two horizontal beams on which the warp (the vertical threads) was stretched; on the lower one the finished area Rugs was rolled while the warp unrolled from the upper one. The yarn for the pile, spun and dyed by hand, was cut in lengths of about 2 in. (5.1 cm) and knotted about the warp threads, one tuft at a time, after one of the two established ways of tying—the Ghiordes, or Turkish, knot and the Senna, or Persian, knot.
After a row of knots had been placed across the width of the loom, two or more weft, or horizontal, threads of cotton or flax were woven in and beaten into place with a heavy beater, or comb. The tufts, or pile, thus appeared only on the face of the fabric, which when completed was sheared to perfect smoothness. Although the hair of the camel and the goat was used in the weaving of Oriental rugs, the wool of the sheep was the essential component. Beautiful silk Area Rugs interwoven with gold thread were also made in the 16th and 17th cent. To some degree, the quality of a area rugs depends on the materials used and the number of knots per square inch of surface, which may vary from 40 to 1,000.