Multicolour Khorjin

100% hand-spun wool, hand-knotted, finished with multicoloured wrapped fringes at both ends rather than plain warp ends — a detail carried over from bag weaving, where the ends had to be bound to take the strain of a load.

A banded rug of this kind is unusually practical. With six colour families spread across sixty-three narrow courses, there is no large expanse of any single tone for a mark to sit in — anything that lands on it has pattern and colour change within a few centimetres in every direction. The cream and pale gold bands are the vulnerable ones, but they are narrow and interleaved rather than pooled together, so they do not present the sort of open pale ground that shows soiling on a plain rug.

Nearly every rug in this tradition is a composition. Something sits at the centre, a frame encloses it, and the drawing arranges itself in relation to both. This one has none of that apparatus. Measured, it is sixty-three horizontal bands running selvedge to selvedge, from 1.5cm to 18.6cm deep with a median of 3.1cm, each carrying its own small repeat, and each differing measurably from the band above it. There is no medallion to find, no border to enclose anything, and no distinction between field and frame because there is no field.

That is not an omission; it is what the design descends from. Khorjin is the Persian word for a saddlebag — a single woven strip folded into two pouches and slung over a horse or a donkey. The decorated faces at either end were read one after another as the strip was unrolled, and the section joining them was a run of narrow stripes. Weavers eventually kept the arrangement and dropped the bag, so the rug has inherited the logic of something read in sequence rather than viewed all at once. It also explains the palette. Six separate colour families each take more than three per cent of the surface here, which is unusual in a knotted rug and entirely normal in a saddlebag, where every band was an opportunity to use up whatever wool was to hand.