Any organisation which had supplied work such as the Carpet of Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque would wish to sign the work. The company which created the mosque’s principal carpet managed to do just that and wove into the carpet their details.
The high density of thread in the Grand Mosque Carpet , over 250 knots per sq inch, and extraordinary craftswomanship together with the size (at its creation the carpet was several times larger than any other Persian carpet) and cohesive design make this carpet probably the most important Persian Carpet created in modern times.
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Part of the carpet’s central design is a reference to the interior design of the dome of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan. This reference encloses and is surrounded by floral designs of Acanthus, Carnation and Vine that are comparable to those used on the Ardabil Carpet at the V&A. The Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque’s carpet covers a finished area of 4343 sqmeters and was created with a number of individual pieces in Iran and invisibly joined inside the mosque with some extra work to adjust the carpet around the columns.
It’s not unusual for the creator of an important carpet to ‘sign’ their work, most famously the creator of the Ardabil Carpet.
The V&A Ardabil carpet was one of a pair made for the enlarged shrine of Safi al-Din Ardabili around 1540AD. It has a silk backing and wool pile at 330knots per inch, the twin is even higher at up to 420 knots per inch . Both carpets were damaged and then sold by the shrine after it suffered an earthquake after 1873, in order to pay for its restoration. The buyer was Ziegler & Co of Manchester who used one carpet to repair the other. This repaired carpet was then purchased by the V&A while the other, eventually, was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and repaired with modern work.
The Persian signature on the Ardabil Carpet gives the creator as Maqsud Kashani and the date 946 in the Islamic calendar, which is equivalent to AD 1539 – 1540.
In the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, the carpet’s script is Arabic giving the date of creation both in Islamic date 1417-1420 and Gregorian 1997-2000, the location as Mashad and the creator the Iran Carpet Company.
My book is available as an eBook here and Paperback on Amazon worldwide here.
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