The Pazyryk Rug

 
I've been reading about rugs. I'm ignorant, but fortunately, there are dozens of eaily-available and learned books, and I'm happy to say that our local university library is going to keep me busy until my enthusiasm flags.

Everyone interested in rugs knows that the Pazyryk carpet (which I didn't know about until a month ago) is the oldest known rug and about three thousand years older than the next contender. It was discovered in 1949 near the Mongolia-China border, in a Scythian tomb that had been flooded and frozen since about 2500 BCE. It's magnificent and it's mind-expanding. It's been a long time since something has created in me such a reverent sense of gaga-hood and wowage. 

Although older than old, it's anything but primitive. Centuries, perhaps millenia, of experimentation, learning, intelligence, craft, and effort preceded its making. First our ancestors had to domesticate sheep, which, I've learned, had to be selectively bred to become wooly rather than merely hairy. Then came the invention of spinning and weaving. And dyeing, which is a sophisticated and complicated art all of itself. Moreover, it's obvious that the Pazyryk rug did not spring whole out of someone's brain --it's the climax of a long artistic tradition. While some scholars detect Persian influences, others think it wholly a creation of the steppes. The red dye, it's recently been discovered, is Polish cochineal. How did the dye get to Mongolia?  I've not read anything about the blue, but it looks like indigo, and if it is, the process of getting wool to take indigo is extremely complicated.  

   

The detail, though faded (fifty-five hundred years of refrigeration take its toll) is worthy of the closest study: mounted horsemen, saddle blankets and trappings, even the decorated manes of the horses, are rendered, knot by knot, with great power. 

And then there are the happy moose (or possibly elk, or some ungulate that I don't know).

 

The rug now resides at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  I intend to visit it some day, but if the museum should want to put it out on permanent loan to my living room, I would promise to treat it with the utmost respect and appreciation.     

Comments

[charmaine campbell]

that the source of the dyes is around 3,000 kilometres from Altai and the home of the Altai Pazyryk civilization.This area can be Eastern Mediterranean - the only habitat of Kermes vermilio Planchon, a tiny insect, which is a source of nape acid, used in Pazyryk textiles colouring, and a neighbouring territory of the Armenian uplands - a source of Carminic acid. The third colourant - a source of alizarin and purpurin - was made from madder' (a Eurasian plant).

Dr Polosmak explains that there are two types this third dyeing ingredient - 'Rubia Tinctoria L from Iran and the Mediterranean countries. And another, coming from China and India.'

The second was closer to Altai, yet the Pazyryk textile was coloured with Rubia Tinctoria L madder - so pointing to the region of the Eastern Mediterranean.http://siberiantimes.com/culture/others/features/fashion-and-beauty-secrets-of-a-2500-year-old-siberian-princess-from-her-permafrost-burial-chamber/

[Jim Hermanson]

Very impressive. Deep with history and generations of human accomplishment and creativity.

Your "gaga-hood and wowage" has infected me.

This makes me think of the amazing movie, still, I hope, in local theaters, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," where Werner Herzog shows us the oldest human art yet found. . .and it cannot be called "primitive." Deeply impressive movie. Sometimes frighteningly so.

Shameless plug: read about it at my blog:

http://redhermwheelbarrow.blogspot.com/2011/05/birth-of-human-soul.html