The Rug Library

The V&A holds a 'jail carpet' with wool pile on a cotton foundation, woven to a historic design at Agra Central Prison around 1880.

Incredible India’s account of Agra weaving says Akbar revived carpet weaving in the 16th century by inviting Persian weavers to work alongside local artisans in Agra.

The first Mughal carpet workshops at Agra, Lahore and Delhi initially employed Persian artists, according to Berlin’s Museum für Islamische Kunst.

Hand carving is done after weaving, when an artisan shaves and trims the pile along the design to give patterns a three-dimensional, sculpted look.

Cotton is a seed-hair fibre: each fibre is a single cell that grows from the seed coat inside the boll and, once dry, collapses into a flattened, twisted ribbon.

The Met's 1997–98 exhibition 'Flowers Underfoot' surveyed Mughal-era carpets and treated the 'classical' period of Indian carpet weaving as ending around 1800.

One Indian rug maker lists 18 finishing steps after a rug leaves the loom, which can take up to a month when done by hand.

A soumak's weft-wrapped structure is generally considered more hard-wearing than a slit-tapestry kilim.

The floral style of the Met's lattice-and-blossom carpet fragments is typical of Shah Jahan's taste, also seen in the architectural ornament and manuscript illumination of his reign.

Millefleur patterns were combined with other layouts; museum titles include a pashmina carpet with a gateway-and-millefleur design and a millefleur carpet with a flower-and-trellis design.

A Met fragment of a Kashmir or Lahore carpet, about 1650, has a claret-red field divided by a leafy trellis into lozenges, each centred on a large composite palmette.

A tufting gun feeds yarn through a needle and punches it rapidly through a backing fabric, forming either loops or, with a cutting action, cut pile.

As the latex in a tufted rug ages it can break down into a fine, sand-like powder that collects on the floor beneath the rug.

Hand-tufted rugs are often sculpted after tufting with carving scissors, including electric carvers, to trim edges and add relief to the design.

Qaleen (also qalin, kaleen or kalin) is a Persian-derived term for a hand-knotted pile carpet, used across Iran, Central Asia and the northern Indian subcontinent.

Until the 19th century, 'carpet' could mean any covering, such as a table cover or wall hanging; it came to mean mainly a floor covering after machine-made carpets appeared.

A PIB backgrounder notes that jute cultivation supports the income of about 40 lakh farming families, with more than 2.5 lakh families working in the jute industry.

Higher knot density generally allows finer design detail but also means longer weaving time and higher cost.

Early Mughal carpets closely resemble Persian carpets of the same time, particularly those associated with Herat, reflecting the Persian craftsmen and designs that shaped the first imperial workshops.

The Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin staged an exhibition of about 22 Mughal-era paintings showing how carpets were used at court.

The Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad was founded in 1949 by Gautam Sarabhai and his sister Gira Sarabhai and was inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru.

Panipat in Haryana is known as the 'City of Weavers' and is described by its district administration as India’s biggest centre for quality blankets and carpets, with a strong handloom sector.

Indo-Persian carpets typically have symmetrical vine scrolls and large palmettes in the field, with palmettes and 'strap arabesques' in the main border.

The Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute suggests neutral-pH, unbuffered acid-free tissue for general textile storage and interleaving.