confined to living rooms of local families and escaped the attention of scholars and museums. Decorative hand embroidered fabrics called Suzani reflect the style and social status of homeowners, yet relatively little scholarship is dedicated to their history. Every region and city have their own decorative style and colour scheme: wealthy city of Bukhara embroidered textiles are easy to recognise for their ample use of gold thread on black velvet background. In Samarkand, the preference is for lighter colours, usually using a light cream atlas silk background. Today we associate central Asian textiles with silk production, but as John Gillow suggests, “silk-rearing in Central Asia is comparatively recent phenomenon as an important industry. Indeed the territory covered by the modern republic of Uzbekistan was and is ideal cotton-growing country”.4 The embroidered Suzani was often matched by beautifully weaved carpets, with patterns representing local flora and fauna in bright colours. Similarly, carpets and rugs aimed for domestic use have received relatively limited attention from scholars interested in Central Asian crafts. Yet these are the decorative elements that defined and shaped the Central Asian home through their practical functionality and individual design. Rather than relying on expert craftmanship, the rugs and textiles of the Samarkandi home were shaped according to the preferences, skills and knowledge of the family’s women, who adorned their abode with their hand-made creations.
The exemplar conserved at the Pitt Rivers suggests an artistic origin in Samarkand, where traditionally rugs were designed with a light-coloured background. It is weaved in simple cotton yarn, suggesting that it was supposed to be used daily in a setting that demanded robustness. The pattern reflects the use of the rug: small tea pots for a tea stove cover. The carpet-weaving craft flourished in Early Modern Samarkand. Alongside the famed ikat silk textiles and embroideries, carpets were one of the most important local traditional crafts exported on the sill roads to Europe and East Asia. Rugs were weaved using cotton yarns, as this one, as well as silk threads. The colourful dyes were achieved thanks to the expertise of local dye masters, many of whom were Jewish, in the ancient cities of Samarkand and Bokhara. The ability to extract stunning hues of indigo blue, red from oak gall and madder root, yellow from fried pomegranate rinds, brown from walnut husks was a closely kept secret passed from father to son. If the difficult and physically demanding art of dyeing was mainly masculine, the weaving was a feminine art. In each house, there was a small manual wooden loom, used to weave carpets and textiles for domestic use. The Samarkandi women would use locally dyed yarns to create original designs, often inspired by local flora and fauna or by domestic items, which they would weave carefully at home, alongside their ‘usual’ domestic chores of cooking, cleaning and child-rearing.
4
Gillow, Textiles of the Islamic world p. 184.
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