A MASTERPIECE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
Tablet weaving.
Nancy Spies

THE RUGS OF JAIPUR
The collection of Mirza Raja Jai Singh and his son, Ram Singh.
Yadruenda Sahai with a commentary by Franz Sindermann

Woven in royal workshops and worn by the nobility of both church and state, tabletwoven bands worked with silk and brocaded with precious metallic threads were one of the most popular forms of narrow textile for a thousand years in Europe. This segment of an ecclesiastical stole, or possibly an orphrey for a chasuble or cope, was acquired by Leopold IklŽ probably around 1900, and will form part of the IklŽ collection that is in the the Textile museum in St Gallen, in Switzerland. The origins of tablet weaving can be traced back to the early Celtic Iron Age in Europe and only lost its popularity when lace making appeared in the sixteenth century.
Someone, somewhere in northern Europe late in the fifth century or early in the sixth century, successfully translated a technique known from woven fabrics to thesimple methodology of tablet weaving and started adding supplemental brocading wefts of precious metallic threads to bands woven with fine wool and imported silk warp threads....

Mirza Raja Jaya Singh I (1621-1667) was born into a Hindu Royal Family who claim to be descendants from Brahma, Surya, Shri Ram Chandra (Hero of the Epic Ramayan) and his second son Kush; a family, whose tradition for centuries had been to use individual asans, or skins of certain animals and who never favoured the use of large floor coverings like carpets, dhurries, and jajims. In such a family, it was indeed a unique occurrence that this ruler developed a passion for acquiring carpets from Persia, Herat or Lahore for his residence at Amber Castle1 in the State of Amber (later Jaipur in Rajputana and now part of the State of Rajasthan in India). The Hindu always encouraged even family members to use individual asans. There was a very strict rule that should an individual asan be soiled by the touch of another person, it had to be discarded. ...

The al-Din Jami hunting carpet is one of the great beauties of carpet art (fig. 2). Furthermore, it is a masterpiece of creative design, establishing the foundations of a new Safavid carpet style. The prevailing Turkmen Timurid style of around 1500 was slowly transferred into one that was more detailed, refined and meticulously drawn 1 . It was innovative in carpet art to use two different design layers, so that an abstract linear design was overlaid with a figural hunting scene, arranged above it in a curvilinear layout. This carpet is, together with its possible corresponding pair, the original starting point of a long Safavid carpet tradition, later coming to peaks in the pair of 'Ardabil' carpets in 1539/40, and in the Vienna and Boston hunting carpets.....