HAMADAN
Rugs from the Ancient
City of Ecbatana
Part II
by Taher Sabahi

This is the second part in the editor's study dedicated to textiles from the villages surrounding the city of Hamadan, where textile weaving is widely practiced throughout the region both inside households and within workshops.
Weaving is very widely practised over the entire region, both in households and in small workshops, where production is organised by trading companies. Since the 1920s, larger workshops have been active in the main centre, and production here was targeted for the ever-changing export market. In the nineteenth century, the spread of the market and the advent of trade networks caused considerable changes to production...

James Allen is a rug collector from Chattanooga Tennessee, and is one of the USA's more dynamic 'Turkomaniacs'. He lectured at the 1996 ICOC, and was a panelist for ACOR II in Chicago. Mr Allen has also contributed articles to specialist publications. James Allen's main interest lies in the perceptual differences experienced by these nomadic groups, and its effect on their woven art. Mr Allen has changed our perception of these art forms by pointing out the deep intentionality that lies behind the seemingly quaint pastoral pursuit of weaving.
Over the ages, the ancient Turkoman tribes of Central Asia developed a rich and varied weaving tradition. At the basis of this tradition was the linguistic transmission of iconographic information by way of simple mnemonic chants and fixed-action patterns learnt in childhood through repetition...

The splendid textiles and carpet fragments found in the ruins of the ancient Egyptian city of Antinoe, are currently on show in Florence. Archaeologists had expressed a clear interest in the history of Antinoe/Antinoupolis well before excavations got underway three hundred kilometres to the south of Cairo on the right bank of the River Nile. The city was founded by Emperor Hadrian to commemorate the premature death of Antinoo, who had mysteriously drowned in the Nile to save, according to an oracle, the life of the Emperor himself. The privilege of being a city of 'special status', and the opening of a caravan route which stretched from the Red Sea to Antinoe itself, had a determining effect on its flourishing economy...