The earliest appearance of the loom in history was about 3000 B.C. when it was
already known and widely used in Egypt. Its root, therefore, are lost in
antiquity.
Obviously, none of the Oriental carpets from a date as early as the ancient
pharaohs exists today. The oldest knows rugs, in face, were discovered in 1949
by the Russian archeologists Rudenko and Grjansov in the Siberian valley of
Pazyrck high in the Altari mountains. They found the toumb of some Scythian
chiefs. The frozen graves were around 2,500 years old. Two carpets were among
the items in the grave, and they are now in Lenin grad museum. One carpet is
about 4×6 meters (abut 13×20 feet) and made of felt. The other is knotted and
about 1.5×1.8 meters (about 5×6 feet).
Museum Rugs:
Other than a few very rare exceptions, like these frozen carpets, there are no
carpets in the existence from before 1300 A.D. There are some fragments of
carpets in museums daring from the period 1300 to 1500. Starting around 1500, we
begin to find existing carpets. The average person, however, would be fortunate
to run across anything from as early as 1800.
Tribal motifs:
Since villages and tribes, in the centuries past, were isolated with little
communication, compare to today, it is expected that patterns varied greatly
from one area to another. Tribes, towns and areas could be easily and clearly
identified by their distinctive colors and motifs.
Synthetic Dyes:
As time moved to the present, some major changes occurred. Synthetic dyes were
introduced in the mid of 1800′s and, in recent times, machine instead of
hand-made carpets have shown dramatic increase. The advent of machine-made
carpets, along with the higher standard of living brought on by the oil
industry, has resulted in dramatic change in the production of hand-made
carpets.
Traditional:
Even today, however, in countless village throughout the East, families continue
to make carpets just as their forefathers did in centuries gone past.