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Persian rugs: The Complete Guide to Persian Rugs

Guide to Timuri Rugs

Rippon-Boswell Timuri Yakub Khani main Carpet mid 19th C. lot 4

A History of the Timuri as a People

Barulatai son of Qaci'u was the founder of the Mongol Clan Barulas. There were several men of Clan Barulas who were instrumental in the selection of Temujin as Qan. As Qan we know Temujin as Cinggis Qahan (Ghengis Khan) the single greatest conqueror in the history of warfare. As clan leaders in the Mongol Horde that predate Cinggis Qahan as Qan the Barulas leaders were among the elite of the most elite group that conquered most of the known world.

After the death of Cinggis Qahan clan Barulas went with the second son of the Qan, Ca'adai (Chagatai). For some odd reason the Horde of Ca'adai is not usually counted as Mongols and are instead called Chagatai Turks. They were as much Mongols as any other Mongol but I will use the familiar usage. The Chagatai Turks ruled Transoxiana present day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. The control of the Chagatai Horde staid in the hands of cingissid khans that is direct descendents of Cinggis Qan through his son Ca'adai until the reign (1346-63) of Tughlug Timur the last independent Chagatai Khan in Transoxiana.

Timur Barulas a Barulas prince was born in Kesh (Shahr-i-Sabz, Uzbekistan). Tughlug Timur came under increasing pressure from the Moghols of Mogholistan and by 1363 he was weakened enough that Timur Barulas expelled Khan Tughlug Timur and set up a puppet Cingissid Khan. This marked the conversion of the Chagatai Turks to the Timurid or Timuri.

The next major milestone for the Timuri was the collapse of the Timurid Dynasty. The Shaybanid Uzbeks were able to drive the Timurid Ruler Badi'Uzman Mirza out of Herat, bringing to an end the Timurid dynasty. Grousset, Empire. Page 465. The end of the Timurid dynasty certainly did not mean the end of the Timuri people. Over the next few years the situation stabilized with the Shaybanid Uzbeks taking Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, a minor Timurid prince Babur turned ignoble defeat into first the Kingdom of Kabul and then the beginnings of the Mughal Empire in India. The Herat region was divided along the Firoz Kohe (ridge) with every thing north and east controlled by the Uzbeks and everything from Herat through what is now known as Khorasan falling under the sway of the Safavid Turkmen.

The people we now know as the Timuri are the descendents of the people who went with the Safavi. In the very beginning of the 17th century Shah Abbas the Great created two of the final Kizilbash tribal federations both in the eastern end of his Empire. The first group were the Popalzai tribe the founding tribe of Durrani Pashtuns, who I will deal with elsewhere. They were given land between Herat and Kandahar. The Turkic tribes of the Herat area were organized as the Chahar Aimaq. Since the Chahar Aimaq confederation ceased to exist years ago it is easiest to see them as a language group. The descendents of the people who belonged to the Confederation are the ones who are the native Chahar Aimaq speakers today. www.Sil.org lists the dialects as "TAIMURI (TEIMURI, TIMURI, TAIMOURI), TAIMANI, ZOHRI (ZURI), JAMSHIDI (JAMSHEDI, DJAMCHIDI, YEMCHIDI, DZHEMSHID), FIROZKOHI, MALIKI, MIZMAST, CHINGHIZI, QEDAI NAO HAZARA AIMAQ, ZAINAL, KHAZARA".

Antique Afghan Timuri Carpet

Chahar Aimaq Confederation

A note on the Chahar Aimaq confederation: Controlling settled people tends to be an easier administrative task then governing tribal people. The Persians settled on a system called Kizil Bash. Shah Abbas the Great created a Kizil Bash confederation in the Herat area by grouping 4 indigenous groups under one leadership. This confederation is also called an IL as we see with tribal confederation such as the Qashqai. An IL is a grouping of tribes or Aimaqs in a political fashion rather than strictly on a ethnic or linguistic basis. Linguistic bodies such as Sil.org and its Ethnologue. from which the Joshua project is drawn categorize Chahar Aimaq as an offshoot of Persian making it an Indo-European language. I disagree. I will propose the Ethnologue that Chahar Aimaq is actually a heavily personalized offshoot of Chagatai Turk which would place it in the Altaic language family rather than the Indo-European. (I hope this is not too terribly boring for readers but Linguistic Theory is a hobby of mine.)

Chahar means 4 and Aimaq means tribe so the confederation was four tribes, the Timuri, the Taimani, the Jamshidi, and the Firozkohi. I am unclear exactly who was the leader for the Chahar Aimaq but if the deal held to the normal pattern it would best be described a tax farming. One man would be named leader and he would be responsible to control the whole confederation for the Shah. The Chahar Aimaq would then owe the leader sheep or other items as payment of taxes on a negotiated basis.We can rest assured that there was a military component as well. this would allow the Shah through his Governors to draw upon Chahar Aimaq horseman for his cavalry.

The component Aimaqs come from different origins. I place the Timuri as descendants of the Chagatai horde. The Taimani are descended from a Taiman of the Golden Horde separated from the main body during a squabble during the IL-Khanid period. The origins of the Firozkohi and the Jamshidi elude me. Firoz means blue and kohi mean ridge or mountain. The Firozkoh is the dividing line between the Herat area and the northern part of Afghanistan. The Firozkohi were most likely the tribes people of that area north east of Herat. I know even less of the Jamshidi who were a tribe of the Herat area that was combined into the Chahar Aimaq.

I have dealt with the origin of the Hazara in an article that I wrote called The Hazara A Historical Examination Of The Probable Origins Of An Improbable People. Some Hazara are counted as Chahar Aimaq today. I doubt that this dates to any earlier than the 1880s and the brutal Pashtun occupation of the greater Hazarajat. The Pashtun split the Sunni Hazara from the Shia and Ismaili Hazara. It is the Sunni Hazara who are counted as Chahar Aimaq. But I will deal more with that at a later point. I am getting tired.

The Marcuson & Hall Baluch Timuri main carpet 19th C.

Some Timuri Examples:

Typical Structure

Structure: Asymmetrical knot open to the left. 8 knots per horizontal inch and 9 knots per vertical inch. 72 per square inch (1116 per square decimeter).

Yarn Spin: Z.

Warp: 2 ply tan wool.

Weft: 2 shots olive green wool.

Pile: 2 wool singles.

Ends: Post-hitch wharf binding with 1 inch warp fringe.

Selvages: 2 cord double-looped black goat. (Original)

Handle: Soft wool, light, durable.

Similar Rugs: Timuri rugs are very much in the Baluch Group. Among the Baluch the old Timuri rugs tend to be thin rugs with a flat back. Timuri rugs frequently use a 2 cord double-looped selvage in goat hair. For an example of a similar selvage see Marla Mallett's Woven Structures 15:66 and 15:67. Many Baluch type rugs use a 2 cord double-looped selvage but with the Timuri rugs the selvages tend to be precisely and neatly braided.

The Hort Baluch Timuri main carpet C. 1870

Herat Ltd. Baluch Timuri prayer rug, Mid to late 19th C.

Afghan versus Persian Timuri.

We tend to think of Herat as Afghanistan because that is where it has been counted the last 150 years. However for most of the last 2500 years Herat has been an integral part of Persia. Even to the extent of being the capitol of Persia at times. In the 1850s the Persian Shah Nasr Ed-Deen Shah laid siege to Herat to regain this historically Persian city from Pashtun control.

Persia besiged Herat in three times in the ninetheenth century first in 1838, then in 1852, and again in 1856. It was the last seige ion 1856 that the British saw this as a danger in that Russia might posibly be able to threaten India through a weakened Afghanistan. To stop the Persians Great Britain invaded Persia taking Bushire on the Persian Gulf. The British then pressured the Persians to give up Herat and return it to the Pashtuns. In the Treaty of Paris in 1857 the Persian agreed to withdraw and set what is the border that is still espected today. This was a bad move for the Timuri who had fought as mercenary cavalry for the Persians in exchange for pay and plunder.

Rather than risk fate by appealing to the mercies of the Pashtuns who they had bested the year before the Timuri withdrew with the Persians and moved as a tribe to the Mashhad area of Khorasan. This was a wide move since the siege of Herat was a long and brutal one. George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston gives and interesting insight into the status of the Timuri in his book Persia and the Persian Question. Curzon recorded that the Timuri were mercenaries to the Persian Army and paid at a much higher rate then the average conscript. If I recall Curzon correctly the Timuri were paid three times what a normal Persian conscript was paid.

In 1873 Yacub Khan the former Governor of Herat raised a mercenary army in Khorasan with the backing of the Persian Shah. The Persian were seeking to subvert the term of the treaty of Paris by using Yacub Khan as their proxey. Yacub Khan planed to invaded Herat and then oust his father Sher Ali as Amir of Afghanistan. The Timuri who returned with Yacub Khan became known as the Yacub Khani. This leaves us a dichotomy in the Timuri Tribe. A significant portion stayed in Khorasan and are the Persian Timuri. The other major block returned to Afghanistan but not as Timuri but as Yacub Khani. So from Persia we have the Persian Timuri and from Afghanistan we have the Yacub Khani. It is incorrect to attribute a Persian rug to the Yacub Khani or call the Timuri in Persia Yacub Khani.

Can we then separate the Persian from the Afghan Timuri?

I suggest that we can. First of all after the Timuri moved from they hereditary lands near Herat to the Mashhad area there was a major shift from simple herder economic model to well paid garrison troops. What this meant was that the woman settled down in villages and there was steady income moving the average family from a precarious economic situation to one of increased comfort. The woman began to weaver better rugs on better looms with better materials. Please note the sides of Herat Ltd. Baluch Timuri prayer rug, Mid to late 19th C. directly above and compare it to the two main carpets directly below. Weaving in their new villages on larger rigid looms and materials bought in the marketplace they wove a much better rug technically. We saw the same thing in the Shiraz area when the Kashqai began to settle in villages. As Dr. Lois Beck explained to me once when a Kashqai woman settled down in a village she could weave two rugs a year instead of one and each would be larger and better made.

Compare the two carpets below. The Persian at about 8 feet and the Afghan at 9 feet were woven on a large loom and the straight sides attest to good quality of the loom. The one I label Persian has a much broader range of color. This is typical of the Persian Timuri. A wide range of dyes were available in the Mashhad market. In Afghanistan this was not the case. In 1879 the British and the Afghans sign the Treaty of Gandamak which ended the Second Afghan War. This served to further isolate Afghanistan commercially and politically. Commercial isolation meant that the Yacub Khani did not have access to the dyes they had in Persia nor the market to justify he expenditure. So when we see the color as in the Persian example below it is Persian Timuri. When the rug has madder red with more limited blues and extensive brown as we see in the Yacub Khani example below then attribution to the Afghan Yacub Khani is justified.

A Persian Timuri Main Carpet

Rippon-Boswell Timuri Yaqub Khani main Carpet mid 19th C. lot 4

An Afghan Yacub Khani Main Carpet

JBOC345p.jpg (34827 bytes)

Antique Afghan Timuri Yacub Khani Carpet

Here in this detail we can get a good look at the limited range of color typical of Afghan Yacub Khani rugs. The primary color is brown which is most likely undyed brown wool. The reds and orange typically is madder red which was grown and harvested in Afghanistan. The white is white wool, the blue is dyed with Indigo, and the black is likely oak gall black judging by the corrosion. 6 colors and extensive use of brown marks this rug as Yacub Khani.

A few attribution hints:

Persia

Deeply saturated madder reds.
Color fast yellow.
Wider range of color.

The Boucher Collection

Plate 54 Persian Timuri. and Plate 60 Persian Timuri?

A number of years ago I had the chance to look at the Boucher Collection and hear R. Dewitt Mallary III a New York Collector speak on them. On several of the rugs Boucher had attributed then to Persia and I to Afghanistan. Mallary seemed to take a middle ground. I reject the idea that origin is unknowable.

Detail - Antique Afghan Timuri Yacub Khani Carpet

Why Aren't Sheep Green? (from New Scientist)

Taimani

Taimani A dialect of Chahar Aimaq. In former times a component tribe of the Chahar Aimaq.
In the war of succession after the death of Mongke a Tamma of the Golden Horde became separated in the war against the Il-Khanids and was stranded on the Indian border. Most likely the Zamindawar of Afghanistan. That Tamma was joined by the remnants of a Golden Horde Tamma under the General Neguder or as the Persians called him Nicuder. The Tamma basically went independent or Qazaq. We know the Nicudari figured prominently in the Baburnama so from that source we can link the Taimani of today with the lost Tamma of the thirteenth century. As a side note, French historian Jean Aubin postulates that this group was the Qaraunus of whom Marco Polo wrote.
Members of a Tamma of Golden Horde warriors ended up in Afghanistan about 1261 and are known to us as Qaraunus or Nicudari. (They were unable to return to the Horde because of war with the Il-Khanids) Morgan, The Mongols. Page 95
September 6th 1260 a Mamluk army under Baibars smashed a smaller Mongol army at Ain Jalut in Galilee. Hulegu rushed to revenge his men but became embroiled in war with the Golden Horde. This stopped the Mongol western advance. Rossabi, Khubilai Khan. Page 55.

Baluch type rugs. My intent here is to start to rough out my recollection of the group and then fill in as I move along.

Farsiwan of Ghor These are the coarsest of the group with knot counts in the 25 to 40 kpsi range. Selvages are wool wrapped in the Persian manner. I will have to look that up in Mallett and see the proper term for that. Wefts are made of what ever wool was handy and rarely have I seen a Farsiwan rug with the same color and type wefts from beginging to end. I will try to find a picture. I sold one to Nathan Koets years ago. I wonder if he still has it.

Taimani rugs are the next coarsest. It seems to me the kpsi would group in the 40 - 60 range. selvages are tipically braided goat hair.

balouch

Timuri

Guide to Rugs & Books

La Miniature En Orient

JBOC's Notes on the Bible

Southwest Asia Time Line

Thanks and best wishes,

J. Barry O'Connell Jr.