KAZAK REGION, SOUTH CAUCASUS, MID 19TH CENTURY

Rugs of this type were woven in the Moghan region, on the borders of Iran in present-day Azerbaijan. The field is covered in an overall repeat pattern of ‘Memling’ guls, so called because they often appeared on Anatolian carpets depicted by the Flemish artist Hans Memling in the sixteenth century. Though these guls are believed to find their origins in the Central Asian steppes before the age of Turkish migrations, by the nineteenth century much of their original significance had been forgotten and they had become more of a design motif than a symbol of tribal identity. For an earlier example in the present sale see lot 301.