Bijar

An all-over Afghan Bijar rug, knotted by hand by master weavers in northern Afghanistan with hand-carded, hand-spun, vegetable-dyed wool.

Inspired by the celebrated Garrus carpets of Persian Kurdistan, where predominantly Kurdish town and village weavers around Bijar developed one of the most distinctive all-over designs of nineteenth-century Persian weaving. The pattern has roots in seventeenth-century Kerman carpets of interlocking arabesques and floral sprays, evolving into a split-palmette lattice in northwestern Persia during the eighteenth century and becoming closely associated with Garrus by the nineteenth, with a dated 1794 example now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The sweeping split-palmettes and flowering vines create a powerful rhythmic field whose alternating forms can suggest birds in flight.