Bakhtiari signed "commissioned by Mr. Soltan Morad Khan Bakhtiyari 1312"
237 x 152 cm (7' 9" x 5')
Persia, dated 1312 (1894)
Condition: good, good pile, both upper corners slightly damaged, scattered small repairs, scattered small moth damages, selvages rebound
Warp: cotton, weft: cotton, pile: wool

A considerable number of imposing late 19th and early 20th century Bakhtiari carpets bear ornate inscriptions either in a strip at one end or in cartouches. These inscribed carpets represent an extremely interesting, perhaps unique, social, and artistic record of one of the most remarkable series of events of Iranian history during the past century and a half - the rise and fall of the Great Khans of the Bakhtiari - having been made village workshops owned or patronised by the tribal aristocracy set up within the tribal heartland of the Chahar Mahal Valley, near Esfahan.
Almost all the inscriptions, consisting of the names, titles and honorifics of particular khans, and typically also including a date sometime between the 1880s and 1920s, indicate that they were commissioned for or by the individually named Bakhtiari tribal khans. The sign of patronage, contained in the Farsi term farmayesh ('by order of') followed by the name of a khan, does not necessarily mean that the rug was woven for that khan's exclusive use, and some examples may have been commissioned in posthumous tribute.
For a comprehensive account of Bakhtiari Khan carpets see the late Ian Bennett's two-part 1989 article, 'Carpets of the Khans', in HALI 43 and HALI 44. Stylistically, this medallion rug, made by order of Soltan Morad Khan Bakhtiari in 1894, has certain elements in common with an uninscribed and slightly younger rug illustrated by the late Peter Willborg in his 2022 book Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari. Village, Workshop and Nomadic Rugs of Western Persia, no.148, assigned to the Chahar Mahal village of Farah Donbeh.