Uzbek Long Pile Rugs and the Nomadic Rug Weaving Tradition of Asia

Natalia Nekrassova

Long pile rugs, julkhirs, of Central Asia of the late 19th - mid 20th century are a unique example of ancient nomadic rug art, which represent the earliest stages of rug art produced by Central Asian nomads. The rugs were woven on the narrow-beam horizontal loom, the most archaic rug loom known from this area. Composed of individual strips, these rugs demonstrate an ancient weaving practice and an imagery system comparable with the earliest known Anatolian rugs dating to the 14th - 16th centuries.

Detailed analyses of material, weaving method, colour and imagery of the rugs from the Textile Museum's collection identify them as belonging to a group of rugs described by Valentina Moshkova in Carpets of People of Central Asia, published by George O'Bannon (1996). Her ethnographic field research discovered that these rugs were produced by the semi-nomadic Uzbek and Arab groups of the Samarkand region of Uzbekistan. Based on Moshkova's work, a technical and stylistic comparison of the ornamented and unpatterned examples of the long pile rugs from the collections of the Textile Museum of Canada was undertaken. This paper will present the results of an attempt to separate rugs produced by the semi-nomadic Uzbek groups from the rugs woven by neighboring Arab population.

These types of rugs are extremely rare in museum collections. Bringing this rich collection of the julkhirs from the Textile Museum of Canada to the attention of textile scholars will attract more interest in the research of these distinctive rugs which will contribute to our understanding of not only the origin and the early stages of the development of rug weaving in Uzbekistan but the history of pile rugs in general.

 

 

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