The Rug Library

A Met carpet from Kashmir or Lahore, about 1650, shows irises, tulips and other flowering plants drawn with carefully shaded leaves, as naturalistically as the knotted medium allowed.

Britannica notes that Mughal floral carpets often use trailing blossoms such as wisteria, or long bunches of grapes.

Mughal prayer rugs with a central flowering plant can have about 2,000 knots per square inch, and a lattice fragment in the Textile Museum, Washington, D.C., exceeds 2,500.

Indian craftspeople adapted the buta to local flowers such as marigold (genda), lotus (kamal) and rose (gulab), while royal textiles often showed non-native tulips, irises and poppies.

Jahangir's court painter Mansur made precise botanical studies, and flowers of the Jahangir and Shah Jahan era also appear in pietra dura, murals, embroidery and jewellery.

A medallion carpet is one dominated by a single symmetrical centrepiece, such as a star, circle, quatrefoil or octagon, often with quarter-medallions in the corners of the field.

The Herati pattern, named after the city of Herat where it was once thought to have originated, repeats a rosette framed in a rhombus with palmettes and leaves.

The Kevorkian Hyderabad Carpet sets geometric lozenges filled with plant motifs in a mirrored garden layout around a many-lobed centre that represents a fish pond.

Warangal durrie motifs include named designs such as Illam, Dil, Gadya, temple borders, Irak and stars, and prayer rugs (jainamaaz) there show minarets in a geometric format.

Navalgund dhurries from Dharwad, Karnataka, use named geometric motifs such as badi ghari and nanhi ghari (diamonds), laheri (wave), bhell (zigzag) and dhara (horizontal stripes).

Panja dhurries of Salawas near Jodhpur are named after the claw-like panja tool used to beat the weft; their designs combine geometric compositions, flowers and the wave-like leheriya pattern.

Dhurrie designs usually draw on three sources: stripes, geometric forms that are abstract or based on architecture, and naturalistic flora and fauna.

The term 'gul', used for the repeated medallions of Turkmen rugs and bags, comes from the Persian 'gol', meaning flower or rose.

A Milas prayer rug at the Met stylises the niche, shaping its arch into a lozenge with a small notch at the top.

In the Wagner Garden Carpet, two long parallel water channels, joined by a central pool and short tributaries, form an 'H' that divides the garden into six rectangular sections.

In talim-based workshops the coded pattern is traditionally read or chanted aloud so that several weavers on one loom can tie their knots in the same sequence.

The two principal pile knots are the symmetric (Turkish or Ghiordes) knot and the asymmetric (Persian or Senneh) knot; the asymmetric knot is widely used in carpets from Iran, India and Pakistan.

In the symmetric Ghiordes knot the yarn passes over two adjacent warps and both ends are brought up between them to form the pile.

The symmetric knot is the knot found in the Pazyryk carpet, the oldest surviving pile carpet, recovered from a burial mound in the Altai region of Siberia.

The asymmetric knot encircles one warp and passes only behind the next, and because it packs closely it suits fine carpets with detailed, curving designs.

A jufti or 'false' knot is tied around four warps instead of two, halving the knot count and weaving time but producing a coarser, less durable pile.

Handmade Carpet of Bhadohi was registered as a Geographical Indication in 2010, covering hand-knotted and other handmade carpets from the Bhadohi belt of Uttar Pradesh.

In hand-knotting, yarns of wool, silk or cotton are tied around pairs of vertical warps, each row is secured with weft, and the rows are compacted with a comb beater.

In Tibetan-style knotting, yarn is looped around warps and over a metal gauge rod; when a row is complete a knife is drawn along the rod's groove to cut the loops into pile.