Explore the vast range of titles available.

Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots. In this book, Dorothy Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great.

The so-called Polish carpets were once believed to be woven on Polish looms, even though—as we now understand—they were (most likely) manufactured in the Persian cities of Kashan and Isfahan. Yet, the misattribution of these objects’ origins is still evident in the phrase by which they are referred to in most English-language art-historical accounts, ‘the so-called Polish carpets’. This essay explores the history of conceptualising these carpets’ artistic geography, from art historians’ belief in their fictional Polish provenience, to their appreciation as some of the most valuable Safavid-era Persian carpets, to recent attempts to move away from defining these objects’ geographic roots in definite terms. With conflicting theories about their artistic geographies vying for attention, ‘the so-called Polish carpets’ are serving here as a springboard for rethinking the spatial dimension of the practice of naming in Art History, particularly the paradox inherent in the idea of artistic origins.

Wall to Wall: Carpets by Artists' studies some of the best contemporary art through the lens of craft: the woven carpet. Featuring 30 artists from across the globe, the exhibition shows this object to be a powerful locus of meaning today, one that cuts across issues of design, art, dâecor, production, and geopolitics. The \"artist carpet\" is a form that bears a long and distinguished historical pedigree, from Raphael and Peter Paul Rubens, to Pablo Picasso, Fernand Lâeger, and Joan Mirلo. Yet, 'Wall to Wall' takes as its point of departure a history of art rather than history of medium, focusing on the ways in which these objects advance relevant ideas and practices today. Unlike exhibitions that examine artist carpets through an ethnographic lens detached from the world of art, 'Wall to Wall' proposes that these carpets function in a continuum of modern art history as a critical form that is accelerating in use and application. The exhibition asks the simple question: Why? Exhibition: Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Cleveland, USA (23.09.2016-08.01.2017).

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) includes over ten thousand herbal medicines, some of which were introduced from outside countries and territories. The Silk Road enabled the exchange of merchandise such as teas, silks, carpets, and medicines between the East and West of the Eurasia continent. During this time, the ‘Compendium of Materia Medica’ (CMM) was composed by a traditional medicine practitioner, Shizhen Li (1,518–1,593) of the Ming Dynasty. This epoch-making masterpiece collected knowledge of traditional medical materials and treatments in China from the 16th century and before in utmost detail, including the origin where a material was obtained. Of 1892 medical materials from the CMM, 46 came from Persia (now Iran). In this study, the basic information of these 46 materials, including the time of introduction, the medicinal value in TCM theory, together with the current status of these medicines in China and Iran, are summarized. It is found that 20 herbs and four stones out of the 46 materials are registered as medicinal materials in the latest China Pharmacopoeia. Now most of these herbs and stones are distributed in China or replacements are available but saffron, ferula, myrrh, and olibanum are still highly dependent on imports. This study may contribute to the further development, exchange, and internationalization of traditional medicine of various backgrounds in the world, given the barriers of transportation and language are largely eased in nowadays.

The rest of the book delves into the history of the jigsaw puzzle itself (she dates it back to 18th-century English \"dissected maps\"), along with examinations of related pastimes such as like board games (starting with the Royal Game of the Goose, invented, perhaps by a Medici, during the Renaissance), card games, children's books and even mosaics.

[...] while \"The Pattern in the Carpet\" does incorporate autobiography, this is only a small part of the overall picture. [...] while memory-as-jigsaw-puzzle is a neat metaphor, life tends not to be so neat: \"Now that I am old I recognize that I may be condemned to live with an unresolved story and an incomplete picture.\"

The aim of this article is to discuss three issues connected with the tradition of decorating the route of the Corpus Christi procession in the parish of Spycimierz. It first presents an outline of the history of the parish and the villages that it comprises today. Next, it highlights the origins of this tradition and reconstructs the six routes that the Corpus Christi procession followed over the past 50 years. It also explains the rules used by the local community in choosing the route.

So-called ‘war rugs’ started being produced in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979. These textiles have sparked debate as symbols of resilience and political commentary but also as controversial commodification of human suffering. However, their manufacture and materiality have not been studied so far. In the framework of the British Museum exhibition “War rugs: Afghanistan’s knotted history”, a scientific investigation was conducted on nine rugs from the collection. Approximately 65 samples were analysed by optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy coupled to energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX) and high-pressure liquid chromatography coupled to diode array detector and tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-DAD-MS/MS) to study the fibres, mordants and dyes used in the production of the rugs. Scanning X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF) and multiband imaging (MBI) were also used directly on the rugs to map the distribution of specific mordants and dyes, respectively. The results revealed the intentional use of white or dark wool as the substrate for dyeing, to obtain specific colour shades. A wide range of synthetic dyes was detected, including Acid Orange 7, Acid Red 88, Basic Green 4, Acid Blue 92, Acid Black 1 and Direct Black 38 in the earlier rugs, whereas Direct Yellow 1, Direct Brown 1, Direct Yellow 12, Acid Green 25, Acid Blue 113 and Direct Blue 15 were identified in the later rugs. Some synthetic dyes remained unidentified. Additionally, natural dyes were used in three rugs. An emodin-based colourant, possibly obtained from dock or sorrel (Rumex spp.), was detected in two light brown areas. A berberine-based colourant consistent with barberry (Berberis spp.) was detected in a yellow area. These results represent the first scientific study of these objects and enable preliminary insights into the details of this complex craft that has evolved from centuries of carpet making in this area.

Carpet production in the late Ottoman Empire developed during the second half of the nineteenth century in a context of growing trade with Western markets, until, by the turn of the century, carpets had become the empire's leading manufacturing export. This article examines the expansion of oriental carpet production in Armenian communities affected by violence in the mid-1890s and in 1909, and its role in their recovery. It shows that output of oriental carpets rose and production was moved into regions with limited or no “pre-violence” experience of carpet production. We shall see that the increases in production were firmly linked to market-based efforts to reconstruct those communities. Different actors, including local and regional merchant-entrepreneurs and multinational companies as well as individual transnational actors such as missionaries, all began to involve themselves in Armenian communities, both to promote trade in carpets and to offer the production of them as a solution to the post-violence ills. As a result, Armenian women and children in post-violence communities became an integral part of the global market in oriental carpets as a vulnerable, organizationally weak but cost-efficient workforce. The whole process was justified in the name of assistance to the needy and was closely associated with changing definitions of the work ethic and morality in the late Ottoman Empire.

The so-called Baluch carpets include pile and flat weaving carpets, saddle bags, saddle covers, decorative bands for camels, horses and donkeys, bags, pillows and eating mats.1 Nineteenth century specimens are believed to have been created by Baluch tribes or nomads and their neighbours in areas that today correspond to eastern Iran, south Turkmenistan, east Afghanistan, and Baluchistan in southeast Pakistan.2 As previous studies have argued, there is no reliable attribution of these weavings to specific tribes or sometimes to Baluch themselves.3 Furthermore, early nineteenth century literature does not contain detailed reference to their designs so as to enable a solid basis for dating.4 Even if they are taxonomised among nomadic carpets with geometric designs influenced by Turcoman motifs they are also considered to be influenced by floral Persian designs 'filtered down to nomadic level' such as the 'Mina Khani' design that emerged in the Qajar court.5 Research indicates that the Baluch carpets came to be known in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century among others through the acquisition and display of such weavings at cultural institutions, for example the South Kensington Museum (renamed to Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899) in 1876 or the Austrian Trade Museum in 1891, and through publications such as the one by Andreyevich Bobolyubov (1841-1909) in 1908 that enhanced the importance of tribal carpets.6 Nevertheless, the circumstances under which museums acquired, exhibited, and labelled the Baluch weavings during the nineteenth and early twentieth century have not been delineated in detail. Having in mind the above definition, it could be said that by retracing how museum objects were musealised it might be possible to decipher how a specific symbolic value was attributed to them.15 In this context, the present study revisits the travel memoirs by Henry Pottinger (1789-1856) and Charles Masson (1800-1853), the South Kensington Museum register and the catalogue exhibition of its Persian collection in 1876 written by Smith, the catalogue of the carpets exhibition of 1891 at the Austrian Trade Museum and Alois Riegl's (1858-1905) presentation of these carpets, the registers and catalogues of The George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, The Allen Memorial Art Museum, The Textile Museum in Washington, DC (now The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The scope is to compile a microstudy that refines these carpets as museum objects; also to delineate how art historiography linked tribal carpets and ethno-cultural prejudices in Persian art within museums of 'applied' arts as to those of 'fine' arts.