Seljuk

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

Inspired by the remarkable carpets woven in thirteenth-century Anatolia under the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, whose capital at Konya became a center of artistic and commercial life where Central Asian Turkic, Persian-Islamic, Byzantine, and Armenian traditions converged. Among the earliest substantial surviving Anatolian knotted-pile carpets, the famous Seljuk examples discovered in Konya’s Alaeddin Mosque are distinguished by repeating geometric fields and monumental borders derived from stylized Kufic script. This rug captures that archaic character in an intricate field of repeating angular interlacing forms and eight-pointed stars.