13'0" x 15'9" Persian Tabriz Rug | Mahi Fish Design, Silk Highlights | 50 Raj

This is a fine 50 Raj Persian Tabriz in a full palace size, 13'0" x 15'9", knotted in wool with silk highlights on a cotton foundation at roughly 320 to 340 knots per square inch. The whole rug is worked in the classic Tabriz Mahi, or fish, design: a dense herati lattice covering a deep rust-red field, drawn tight around a stepped ivory medallion at the center and matching ivory quarter-medallions in each corner. It has never been used, the pile is deep and even, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, the Tabriz name for the herati pattern: a small rosette framed by 4 curved leaves that read like fish circling a pond, repeated in a fine diamond grid from edge to edge. Here that grid runs unbroken across the entire field and even fills the medallion itself, so the eye reads one continuous, shimmering texture rather than separate zones. A stepped, scalloped diamond medallion sits dead center on an ivory ground, echoed by ivory spandrels in the corners that turn the red field into a soft octagon. The framing is pure Tabriz: a broad red main border of turtle palmettes and rosettes, wrapped by a whole series of narrow barber-pole guard stripes that step the pattern cleanly out to the edge.

Rust Red Lit With Silk

The field is a warm rust red, deep enough to anchor a large room, and the herati fills it with fine tracery in navy, ivory, salmon pink, olive and sage green, gold, and touches of light blue. The central medallion and corner spandrels shift to a pale ivory, which lifts the whole composition and keeps the density from feeling heavy. The silk highlights are threaded through the finer flowerheads and vines, so the pattern quietly changes brightness as you walk around it and the light shifts. The main border carries the same palette on red, while the ivory and navy stripe borders give the eye clean resting lines. It reads rich and formal by lamplight, warmer and more open by day.

Tabriz and the 50 Raj Weave

Tabriz, in the northwest of Persia, is one of the country's great weaving cities, and its fineness is measured on the Raj system, the count of knots across a set width. At 50 Raj this rug sits firmly in the fine range, dense enough at 320 to 340 knots to hold the tight Mahi lattice and the silk highlights with real precision, which is exactly why the fish pattern stays crisp across nearly 16 feet. The allover Mahi layout means there is no single focal flower to date or place it, so it works as one of the more versatile allover designs a large formal room can take.