Multicolor Pazyryk-Pattern Handwoven Wool Rug, Şahzade Series

Twenty-eight horsemen ride round one border of the Pazyryk rug and twenty-four deer walk round another, and it is that arrangement — an ordered grid held inside processions — that this rug repeats.

01Knot by knot, by hand

Multicolor Pazyryk-Pattern Handwoven Wool Rug, Şahzade Series, 201 × 305 cm (6'7" × 10'0"), tied by hand in Afghanistan, wool above a cotton foundation. One piece. The original is a small object, roughly 183 by 200 centimeters, lifted out of the Altai permafrost in 1949 by the Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko, who found it intact because water had frozen inside the tomb and stayed frozen. Two and a half thousand years separate that object from this one, and the interval is the interesting part — the composition has been redrawn by weavers who never saw it, so what arrives here is a working rug pattern rather than a facsimile.

02From ground to pile

Color runs across the whole range instead of settling on one ground, which leaves the borders to do the organizing. Wool makes the pile; cotton and a trace of synthetic yarn make the structure beneath it.

03Coming off the loom

Afghan workshops still tie the double knot by hand, and six square meters of that is months of continuous work by one pair of hands. Because the pattern was held in memory rather than read off a cartoon, the grid does not land identically in every row — count across it and the count changes. Professional washing only. Afghan workshop weaving, knot by knot, with wool over a mostly cotton structure. The Pazyryk arrangement: an ordered central grid enclosed by processional borders. 201 × 305 cm (6'7" × 10'0"), a little over six square meters. Multicolor throughout, with the borders carrying the structure. Double-knotted, and months of work behind it. The grid shifts from row to row; nothing here was traced. Cleaning by a professional and by nobody else. One piece. Where does the Pazyryk pattern come from? From a rug lifted out of the Altai permafrost in 1949, in a tomb of the Scythian nomads.

04From the hand of the weaver

Its date is around the fifth century BC, it measures about 183 by 200 centimeters, and it is the earliest knotted pile weaving found anywhere in one piece. The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg holds it. Is this rug a facsimile of that one? No.

05The Wool on the surface

It takes the arrangement — an ordered central grid enclosed by processional borders — and works it in wool at modern proportions and modern colors. The original sits in a display case and is a good deal smaller. This one was made for a floor. Nothing else on the floor of an ordinary house has a documented birthday in the fifth century BC.