ORNAMENTATION OF RUGS AND CARPETS.1

[With 6 plates.]

By ALAN S. COLE, C. B.

In preparing this course of lectures, which the Royal Society of Arts has kindly invited me to give on textile ornament, I find the range of subjects covered by the title much wider than I expected.2

Of textiles alone there are several distinct sorts: (1) Shuttle weavings, with ornament special to brocades, velvets, damasks, and figured silk stuffs, to say nothing of kindred ornament in woolen, linen, and cotton fabrics; (2) tapestries, with their decorative pictures of religious, mythological, historical, and domestic subjects; (3) carpets, with a number of simple and highly complex patterns; (4) embroidery, which is suitable to render almost any sort of ornamental and pictorial designs; (5) lace, with its textures and ornament distinctly different from those of the foregoing; and (6) stamped, dyed, and printed textiles with a still further variety of pattern and design.

The ornament of these different classes of textiles is but a chapter-an important one, certainly, but still only one chapter-in the story of all ornament, and as textile ornament during, say, 5,000 years has derived almost as many of its phases from ornament in other materials as it in turn has contributed to them, I find it necessary to take these latter also into some account. In order, then, to keep within the appointed limits, the choice of one or two central or rallying points becomes desirable, and in view of my previous Cantor lectures upon lace, tapestry, and embroidery, I have fixed upon ornament in carpets and in stamped, dyed, and printed textiles for my present course. This ornamentation has successive styles. Style is a convenient word to apply to the results of reviewing ornament designed by historic peoples, of determining various peculiarities or salient features in it, then of grouping them together and naming each group after some nation, locality, or period. In this way rough and

'Reprinted, by permission, from Journal of the Society of Arts, London, No. 3008, Vol. 58, July 15, 1910.

Lecture 1 (delivered Jan. 17, 1910) of series of three lectures on textile ornamentation. Lectures 2 and 3 are on stamped, dyed, and printed textiles.

ready classifications can be made and spoken of as Egyptian, Chinese, Mesopotamian, Greek, and other styles. Underlying all these styles are certain common factors of design. For instance, the arrangement of their particular ornamental details or devices is subject chiefly to balance, to repetition, and to symmetry. Again, ornamental details or devices in all historic national styles are either representative of actual things, such as plants, human and animal beings, etc., or are merely abstract shapes presenting no likeness to any of these things; although some apparently abstract forms are symbols to convey some idea just as others are found to have descended, through many changes or distortions of drawing, from an original which represented an actual thing. These changes or distortions occur to a marked extent in the ornament of people whose ethnography is more readily studied than their history. Take, for instance, Papuans, who produce plentiful ornament that is of the distorted character. They seem to have no regulated methods of design; at least, none so evident as those of historic nations like the Chinese, the Egyptians, the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and the Greeks, all of whom had culture, organization, manufactures, and commerce in a high degree. These great nations possessed neither aeroplanes nor telephones, but they appear to have paid better regard than many of us do nowadays to the suitable ornamentation of ordinary and ceremonial objects of use, including costumes and floor and furniture coverings.

Leaving this digression, I come now to carpets and their ornamentation. I use the word carpet in the sense of an ornamental textile to be used under foot. Broadly speaking, there are two sorts of carpet-one with a flat texture and the other with a definitely raised texture. It appears that in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Greece flat-textured materials were manufactured long before those with raised texture. Ornament in the ancient flat-surface stuffs was produced by inweaving, needlework, painting, and stamping. In previous lectures I have touched upon the antiquity of methods of inweaving and embroidery as practiced by famous historic nations. hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of years before the Christian era. The inweaving corresponded precisely with tapestry weaving by hand of the present day. Its texture was therefore the same as that of a huge Gobelins tapestry and of a Kurdish rug.

Here is an ordinary specimen of such a rug, which illustrates the flat texture we are considering. The style of its ornament has probably endured for some centuries. The scheme or plan of its design is a field of small repeated devices inclosed within a border. This scheme or plan in connection with rugs and carpets is an old one; older indeed than most of the devices in the field which are weavers' renderings of sprays of blossom and leaves; the ornament of the border is effective by reason of the repetition of its details.

These

are almost unintelligible, though the original of them probably was a dragon's head; the dragon was invented by the Chinese almost as early as the Sphinx was invented by the Egyptians, and apparently some centuries before Perseus encountered any similar creature.

The next slide shows a simple but adequate frame of the sort which has been in use from old times by wandering families or groups of carpet makers in Turkestan, farther east, and south. In such a frame flat or raised surface rugs could be made. These wandering weavers have inherited, as it were, the designs they work in their rugs; and, unless they come into the service of some merchant or patron who furnishes them with other designs, they continue to produce with scarcely any intended, but with a good deal of accidental, variation of their own traditional patterns and designs. And this condition has lasted amongst such peoples for many centuries.

This slide is from the carving of a floor covering which was probably of tapestry weaving, as indeed was the greater number of ornamented textiles made by Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks before the Christian era. This carving was discovered in the ruins. of Kouyunjik and is of Assyrian workmanship, eighth century B. C. The plan of its design, as fully displayed in the whole of the floor covering, originally corresponded with that of the Kurdish rug, having its field of pattern inclosed within a border. In this case the ornamental features of the border are well shaped, and are based upon plant forms. The outer ones are alternately buds and expanded flowers, those in the next series are full daisy blossoms, and then come repeated palm or radiating palmette forms. The pattern of the field is formed with intersecting circles, and is a truly abstract pattern, being unrepresentative of any actual things and not symbolical in any way. The texture of such a carpet was, as I have said, probably that of tapestry weaving and not of raised or cut pile. Indeed, the manufacture of this latter and more complicated material does not seem to have been known by the old Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, and Greek weavers. The nearest approach to raised surface textiles made by them were linen cloths faced with loose loops. These give a shaggy-faced material resembling modern bath towels. Several pieces of it have been found in disused Egyptian cemeteries, dating probably from the first century B. C. or A. D., and it is considered by various authorities that they are identical with a fabric. called by Aristophanes "Persis," and reputed as a manufacture of barbarians. The Greeks, however, also manufactured similar textures, and called them "kaunakes" and "phlocata." Pliny, writing 500 years later, mentions corresponding stuff as "amphimalla " when the shagginess was on both of its sides, and "gausapa " when woven on one side only. This shaggy material was apparently as common in use as tapestry weavings, but it does not seem to have lent itself

well to ornamental expression. And this I gather from specimens of it made probably by Copts, who decorated it with close loops of wool. Here is an exceptionally good example of a shaggy-faced floor or couch cover treated in this manner. The style of the design may be called Egypto-Roman. The center is surrounded by a bordering of rectangular corner shapes linked together with intervening star forms. It is interesting to note the interlocked device within the left-hand star-a device which I think is of Chinese origin. We find it in Turkestan and Asiatic rugs, as well, of course, as the swastika or crooked cross-another constantly occurring emblem in Chinese ornament.

Of more distinctly Roman character is the design in this next example of looped worsted weaving or embroidery produced possibly by Copts in the second or third century. Here we have but a corner of a floor covering of the period, enough, however, to indicate that the whole of the field was covered with groups, like the single one here, of cupids in a boat. The border was narrow and of overlapping leaves, and a medallion, containing a face, in each corner of the whole rug.

Such a textile may represent the "Sardian pile carpets" mentioned by the Egypto-Roman writer, Athenæus, of Naukratis, a place now identified with Tell-el-Bareet, near the Rosetta branch of the Nile. Sir George Birdwood, in his treatise on the "Antiquity of Oriental Carpets," gives several interesting quotations from the "Banquets of the Learned," by Athenæus, to prove the considerable use in the third century A. D. of floor coverings--but judged by the light of fabrics discovered in the disused Egyptian cemeteries, already referred to, none seems to indicate in a convincing way that cut-pile carpets or any carpets of distinctly Eastern design were amongst the usual household goods of either Greeks or Romans. We have, I think, to look elsewhere for the earliest of such things.

Cut-pile fabrics were, I think, first produced by the Chinese. For more than 2,000 years before Buddhism reached them, they had preserved to themselves a monopoly in the cultivation, spinning, and employment of silk. It is the most delicate of all fibers or filaments for textile purposes. In the possession of this monopoly, and of a prolonged skill in the ornamental arts, the Chinese seem to have developed every sort of known process of ornamental and complicated weaving-so, at least, one must infer from their traditions and records. The evil of seclusion which had hidden these things from the rest of the world was gradually lifted by the trade started by Asiatic peoples living outside the Great Wall, who were the means of communicating to the northern districts of the old Persian Empire, two centuries or so B. C., some knowledge of Chinese manufactures and ornamental design. The trade in its course affected Asiatic crafts