There is very little here on Caucasian pile carpets. New material revolves primarily around Richard Wright's Kustar theory. John Wertime and his ideas, on the other hand, are nearly invisible in this book. Wertime is one of this country's more knowledgeable experts on textile structure. I expected him to have offered us definitive material on the structure of the textiles discussed in the book, but that expectation was disappointed.
Hali published the book and it has that Hali look and feel. It is a large format book with a luxurious red cover reminiscent of great rug books such as McMullan's Oriental Carpets. The paper has weight and the quality of printing is excellent. The layout is extravagant with wide margins and an uncluttered look.
The authors, for no apparent reason, chose to start their discussion in the eighth century with the Khazars. This seems odd because they only mention the Khazars in passing without telling us that they were a Central Asian confederation with a significant Turkic component that converted to Judaism. I assumed that they started there to show us why there were Jewish weavers in the region but no attempt was made to follow that thread.
The pre-1870 history offered in this book is badly flawed and should not be used as a source in any sort of serious research. The authors note that the Jelayirid are "Mongol-like". The Jelayirid were the first tribe (Oboq) to confederate with the Mongols and were fully incorporated into the Mongol confederation (ulus Irghun) generations before the rise of Genghis Khan. In the Mongol confederation the core group was the Mongol speaking Mongols and the Jelayirid would have been counted among them. To term the Jelayirid as "Mongol-like" rather than Mongol is misleading. This would be like calling the Qashquli of the Qashqai confederation "Qashqai-like". The authors further confuse things in their reference to the Il-Khanids as "Mongols with armies that included Turkic tribes". Those who have read of the disposition of the horde at the Quriltai of 1229 AD following the death of Genghis Khan know that the Il-Khanid horde was overwhelmingly Turkic since Hulagu was only granted 4000 Mongol troops. The armies were Mongol even if they spoke a Turkic language.
In light of current scholarship on this subject the authors are less than exact by using the term tribe. They make repeated references to the Oghuz Turks but ignore the Kazak Turks, not surprisingly since most rug authors get this wrong. The Il-Khanids were politically Mongols but the rank and file were overwhelmingly linguistically Turkic. Wright and Wertime bandy about these terms without bothering to draw the distinction between linguistic and political entities. When the Il-Khanids were supplanted, the Mongol Jelayirid who still controlled a primarily Turkic horde replaced them. When someone left the horde the Mongol word for them was Qasak. The Turkic speaking Mongols who drifted out of the control of the horde were Qasak or Kazak. An interesting point is that the dialect of Turkic they spoke was Adheris which is, of course, Azeri. Perhaps the authors need to review the role of Oghuz and non-Oghuz Turks in the Caucasus. Why did the authors bother to start at the eighth century if they weren't going to follow through. The promise made went unfulfilled. I would have much preferred to see them start their narrative in 1870, the period which, I am safe in saying, Richard Wright academically owns.
The authors attribute Caucasian dragon carpets to Tabriz. Do they offer a source that indicates that dragon carpets were woven there? No they don't. Do they cite any source that indicates there has ever even been a dragon rug in Tabriz? No. Do they have any record, commercial or otherwise, that can place a dragon carpet in Tabriz. Again, no. How, then one may ask, do they come to such a startling conclusion without any evidence at all? To put it simply, they have decided that big carpets must come from big cities. Since no Caucasian city, in their view, qualified, their eye and attention was drawn south to the nearest city big enough to support the dragon carpet production and they stopped when they came to Tabriz..
It occurs to me in writing this that their lack of proof for attributing the rugs to Tabriz is equaled by my lack of proof that they are wrong. But, we are not entirely without evidence. Structurally a case can be made for Tabriz but the evidence is not strong enough to be conclusive either way. Working against the big city attribution are the designs of these carpets. The lack of symmetry in the minor design elements and the many implementation errors one sees in this production reminds one of Dr. Jon Thompson's "village rug from the Caucasus" theory, or Dr. Murray Eiland, Jr. 's Karabagh theory rather then the Wright/Wertime city workshops in Tabriz theory. As I pondered the many implementation errors in the dragon carpets I was struck by how coarse and crude they really are. In fact, I believe if it were not for their incredible color palette, they would not be all that noteworthy. Then it dawned on me I was staring at the evidence to disprove the Wright/Wertime Tabriz theory.
What makes the dragon carpets special is their brilliant colors. These colors have a markedly different tonality than the colors we see in most other rug groups. Caucasian dragon carpets are certainly much brighter than the rather muted and subdued Tabriz color range. My immediate hunch was that this difference was attributable to a difference in the mordanting in the dyeing process. I had a recollection that someone had published an article on the use of tin in the mordanting process in the Caucasus that would greatly intensify the brilliance of the dyes. Now, I am certainly no dye expert so I called someone who is.
Dr. Paul Mushak, formerly on the faculty of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, now heads a professional practice in toxicology in Durham and is also Visiting Professor of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
When I laid out my thoughts and suspicions on the Tabriz question Dr. Mushak took it much further than I had hoped for. He informed me of the article in the first issue (1978) of HALI by Mark Whiting, dealing with dyes in classical Persian carpets. The insect dye lac was the principal red dye used in classical Persian carpets. Lac would have also been the principal red dye used in Northwest Persian classical carpets, including those of Tabriz. Use of lac yields a "cool" rather than a vivid or "bright" insect red in the blue tones that we associate with cochineal from diverse sources, including the historical "Armenian cochineal" discussed at length by Dr. Mushak in his article on insect dyes in ORR. (The Use of Insect Dyes in Oriental Rugs and Textiles: Some Unresolved Issues, VIII/5/30-39). Urban Persian carpets, certainly including those of the classical period, also used as mordanting for reds the element aluminum, in the form of alum. Mordants fix the dye to wool or other fiber. Dr. Mushak has often found alum in old Persian carpets to be variably contaminated with other mordanting elements that would soften or "sadden" the color, taking the edge off pure aluminum's relatively clear, but not bright, red effect.
Dr. Mushak also made reference to a 1983 article of his in Volume 3 of ORR reporting the use of dyes and mordants in Karabagh/Shusha long rugs (A Technical Dimension to Color Esthetics in Old Armenian Weavings: Chemical Analysis of an Antique Karabagh Shusha Long Rug: III/4/3-5). That study found that bright reds in a Shusha long rug were derived from madder mordanted with tin. The insect dye in Shusha rugs appeared to be Armenian cochineal, with no evidence of lac found. Dr. Mushak has visually observed bright reds in many dragon carpet examples that would be consistent with reds mordanted with tin rather than alum, In our conversation Mushak discounted Wertime/Wright's assertion that Shusha rugs don't look like dragon rugs. He maintained that one looks for similarities in some of the specific indicator colors such as the madder and insect reds, not at differences in the overall palettes. A number of questions of dye use in dragon carpets can be definitively answered by laboratory analysis which Dr. Mushak hopes to get under way in the not-too-distant future, pending availability of samples from museum and collector holdings.
In summary, Mushak notes that dragon carpets visually show no use of lac, the principal red dye of classical carpets through the 18th century, while Tabriz classical carpets show no bright reds from madder plus tin or insect dyes based on Armenian or other forms of cochineal. Dragon rug testing would confirm distinctions.
He also noted that many Shusha/Karabagh carpets from the 18th and early 19th century are known and many of these, in turn, are quite large and relatively long even when compared to dragon carpets. Clearly, urban areas in the Caucasus had the capability to produce rugs as large as the dragon group. His Shusha rug article discusses an example that is 7x18.
Mushak's views, based on comparative dye and color palette assessment, are in accord with those of Dr. Murray Eiland, and others, who hold to a Caucasian/Karabagh origin for most of the dragon carpets known.
Another great disappointment in Caucasian Carpets and Covers is reliance on the "Anchor Rug" theory. The foundation of this concept is the use of Kustar era data to secure an attribution of origin. The book that the authors use to underpin so much of this theory is Isaev's Kovrovoe Proizvodstvoe Zakavkaz'ya a 1932 source. A simple chronology of political events in the Caucasus might help. In 1813 the treaty of Gulistan gave the Czarist Russians control of much of the Caucasus. In 1828 the treaty of Turkumanchay and then the treaty of Adrianopole solidified Russian political control. Shortly afterwards rebellion broke out and the Caucasus was not brought under total military and political control until the 1860's. In 1870 the Kustar movement was started to revitalize the ailing rug industry. In 1932 Isaev wrote his book based on Kustar data. As I believe should be obvious, Kustar data deals with the Caucasus long after the Russian occupation and the resulting commercialization disrupted the original rug weaving environment. The authors have chosen to ignore this rather inconvenient time shift. Unless the authors can find earlier anchor sources, say from 1820 to 1830, the anchor rug theory is no more than of passing interest.
To say I was disappointed in this book is an understatement. I would rather have seen Richard Wright write the definitive history of the Kustar movement as it relates to the Caucasian commercial carpet boom. I would rather have seen John Wertime go with his strengths and have given us the definitive Persian and Caucasian flatweaves book. These would have been promises fulfilled.