6'8" x 9'9" Persian Tabriz Rug | Shiva Galam Medallion Design | Wool and Silk, 480-500 KPSI

This 6'8" x 9'9" Tabriz comes straight from the workshops that built Tabriz's name as Persia's most technically demanding weaving city. It is woven in the Shiva Galam medallion drawing, a round center medallion set into a fine allover vine field, and carries the extra step that separates showpiece Tabriz work from ordinary production: silk laid heavily into the wool pile to pick out the medallion, the pendants, and the floral scrollwork with a sheen the wool alone cannot produce. At 60 Raj and roughly 480 to 500 knots per square inch, this is fine, collector-tier Tabriz weaving, the rug has never been used, and it ships with Rugs.net's certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is carried by a dense, continuous islimi vine, fine curling stems that throw off small florets, serrated leaves, and clusters of blossoms across the entire ivory ground with no bare space left unfilled, the hallmark of a fine Tabriz drawing. Out of that field rises a large round medallion built in tight concentric rings: a deep navy core opens into a white star-shaped rosette, then a ring of soft blush and tan palmettes, then a wider band of sage green scrollwork, before the medallion closes on a ring of rust-red palmette heads. Slim pendant finials extend the medallion north and south, each one a small vase-and-rose motif with a pair of red roses flanking a central blossom, a classic Tabriz medallion finish. The corner spandrels shift the ground to an olive gold and are anchored by dark serrated cartouche forms in navy and maroon, with fine cloud-band scrollwork worked in behind them.

Color

The field reads ivory to soft cream, kept quiet so the medallion and vine work can carry the color. Sage green runs through the medallion rings and the vine leaves throughout the field, paired with dusty rose and mauve in the florets and the pendant roses. Rust and terracotta outline the palmette bands in the medallion and repeat in the border, while small notes of powder blue sit inside the vase motifs and along the border palmettes. The corner spandrels and the outer field ground shift to an olive gold, and deep navy, near black, grounds the medallion core and the spandrel cartouches. The main border runs on a warm taupe-tan ground, carrying alternating turquoise-blue thistle palmettes and navy cartouche medallions strung together with a garland of small pink roses, framed by narrow cream guard bands on both sides.

Origin

Tabriz, in Iran's East Azerbaijan province, has been a center of fine Persian weaving for centuries and is where the Raj knot-density system originated, counting knots across a 2.75 inch gereh to grade a weaver's skill. A 60 Raj piece like this one sits at the collector end of that scale, well above commercial grade Tabriz production. Weaving silk into the wool pile for highlighting, rather than using silk only in the foundation, is a technique reserved for a workshop's better pieces, since it takes far more time at the loom and a steadier hand to keep the silk lines clean against the wool ground. This rug, hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with that level of silk highlighting throughout, represents Tabriz weaving at its more ambitious, showpiece level.