The Rug Library

For European buyers who used carpets on tables, Egyptian workshops made unusual shapes, including square, round and cross-shaped carpets.

The Met's Mughal carpet with irises and tulips, from Kashmir or Lahore about 1650, measures about 432 × 208 cm (roughly 14 × 7 ft), a long, narrow format.

The Met's lattice-and-blossom fragments make up about a quarter of a Mughal carpet once over 23 feet long, which the museum calls enormous for a carpet of such fine quality.

A Met millefleur carpet from Kashmir measures about 3.9 × 3.8 metres, an almost square format.

The Girdlers' Carpet, woven in Lahore and in London by 1634, measures about 27 × 8 feet, a long, narrow shape suited to its use as a table covering.

Anatolian prayer rugs were made small enough for one person; a Milas example at the Met measures about 165 × 112 cm.

A Mughal single-plant 'prayer rug' in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection measures about 125 × 90 cm, showing how small some finely knotted court pieces were.

Because of its monumental size, over 4 × 5 metres, and restrictions set by its collector, the Wagner Garden Carpet has rarely been displayed, only three times in about 20 years before its North American tour.

Prayer rugs are commonly about 3 × 5 feet and nearly always show a mihrab, a pointed arch at one end that the worshipper orients towards Mecca.

The Kevorkian Hyderabad Carpet, nearly 16 metres long, shows that some Deccan court carpets were made at palace-hall scale.