Topkapi Carpets: "TOPKAPI CARPETS
Review by Charles Grant Ellis
From Oriental Rug Review, Vol. 8/4, April/May,1988
Scholars In the field of Oriental carpets have been aware for many years of the existence of a highly interesting group of approximately 40 prayer rugs in the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. Only a few of them have ever been published, and those in a variety of places. The new edition of the Topkapi Carpets volume of the series of five on the assorted riches of the Topkapi Saray Museum illustrates practically the entire series in full color and many other carpets as well. It is a New York Graphic Society book, from Little, Brown and Co., Boston, priced at $150. Basic descriptions are by Hülye Tezcan, the museum's curator of textiles, translated from the Turkish, but the text is principally the work of Dr. J. Rogers of the Oriental Department of the British Museum, a very well-known Islamic art scholar.
The book contains 98 plates, all of them in color, all of rugs which belong to the Topkapi Museum. It is really two books in one, but not clearly demarcated. The first part of it deals with rugs which have all been in the Museum for many years. After the remarkable Ottoman "prayer rug of Sultan Ahmed I" come 34 plates of prayer rugs with inscriptions, then six of other pile rugs and one kilim. The balance of the volume catalogs a carpet collection which came as a legacy from a past owner of the Pera Palace Hotel, where many of them had been in use. These rugs reached the Museum in 1980. They fill five plates of kilims and 51 of pile rugs and carpets, all of them semi-antique and varying widely in their quality and attractiveness. Mostly Persian, a few Caucasian piece and one Turkoman are included. One must hope that the color plates are somewhat unkind in some instances. Embedded among these collector-type carpets is Plate 58, a ruinous inscribed medallion rug of the "Salting class," which had been illustrated in Pope's Survey of Persian Art and mentioned repeatedly by Kurt Erdmann.
Plate 27
The series of inscribed prayer rugs, the meat of the book, is represented by good plates with a reasonable approximation of the gay coloring which many of these rugs retain -- probably closer to the true colors than the plates of most rug books. Rugs such as these were readily accepted, early in this century, as 16th century Persian original products suitable for royal use. Now they, with the related series of inscribed medallion rugs, are believed more likely to have been made in the sultan's workshops near Istanbul during the second half of the 19th. The text strives to ventilate this question. Nearly all of these rugs appear in the plates; unfortunately, we are not told which ones do not. For instance, there is a rug in the coloring and design of Plate 23, with the broad border cartouches seen in Plates 24 and 25. In the 1986 exhibition it was placed side by side with Plate 23 and it was interesting to compare the design proportions in both field and border. Then again, I believe that Plate 9 is No. 13/2030 not 13/2009, and there may be other slips of the sort. In the descriptive notes the reader should be warned that in most cases the warps are of silk, if not cotton, rather than wool as indicated. (In two visits to Istanbul I have been able to examine technically 18 of these rugs when not on display.) It was my impression, incidentally, that Plate 36 was a fragment from an Indian carpet and that Plate 40 was a copy of a 17th century piece made during the same period as the inscribed rugs. Michael Rogers has provided introductory chapters on the Ottoman Court workshop, on the inscriptions and the carpets which bear them, on Turkish carpets at home and abroad and on historic Persian carpets in the Topkapi Saray collections. His metier is history rather than the study of the carpets themselves, as is clear from his approach, which leans heavily upon inventories, lists of exports and imports, and the past literature of rugdom. Much of the material which he has brought together from many sources, admittedly highly fragmentary, is bound to prove very useful for future studies. The theories which he is developing from historical bases, with Julian Raby's observations regarding the drafting, may well need further evolution with a closer eye to the carpets themselves and their exact patterns. His discussion of the inscriptions is particularly valuable. Jere Bacharach and Irene Bierman made preliminary reports on such matters to the International Conference on Oriental Carpets held in Washington. It is difficult to imagine how such sloppy calligraphy, with the characters frequently straying across the bounds of the compartments which they occupy, could have been tolerated in a top level 16th century Persian weaving establishment. He raises again the question of cimiscasachi carpets, mentioned by the Venetian, Sanuto, connecting them with Çemisgesek on the Upper Euphrates, totally unheard-of as a carpet town, as he had suggested at the London I.C.O.C. in 1983. One would have thought that May Beattie had settled that identification long before (Leeds, 1964) more logically with Damascus, from a sister reference by the same Sanuto with slightly different spelling.
It comes as a surprise that "it has recently come to be agreed...for the Hereke factory was originally established not for carpet-weaving at all.... The first evidence for carpet manufacture at Hereke, moreover, seems to occur in 1891...." One must wonder how solid this change of information may be and how long it will hold up!
If no one ever appeared to have inquired how many inscribed prayers rugs might still be in the collections of the Türk ve Islam Eserleri Museum (Kurt Erdmann should have seen if he had the look through these collections, group by group, as he described), there likewise seems now to have been no inquiry as to what carpets may have gone there from the Topkapi Saray. From my own inadequate and partial notes, these included a vase carpet and two other Kermans, a Northwest Persian medallion rug, a Caucasian dragon rug, a fine rug from the Caucasian/Persian borderland, and a small fragment of fine Ottoman carpet on silk foundation. From the Cinili Kosk, within the Topkapi walls, came a vase rug, a Northwest Persian medallion rug with houris in its border a copy of a Portuguese, several Indian rugs, two other Kermans, three large jufti harshang carpets, and another large jufti piece. These carpets are for the most part so battered, tattered and worn that it would have been too much of a challenge to have illustrated them, but it is a bit sad that they have not been mentioned.
To sort out a few of the problems in the Provenance section, the second prayer rug mentioned, with the sausage-like bladders, was in the Textile Gallery, London in 1986, on sale; Martin's Fig. 147 was not from Lyon but is in the Mevlana Museum in Konya. The "Yerkes medallion carpet" mentioned was Baron Nathaniel Rothschild's when illustrated as Pl. XCVII of the old Vienna folios (Clarke) and has for many years been in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, together with a "Salting" and an inscribed prayer rug, both ex-Yerkes. The Ali Ibrahim Pasha carpet was supposedly from Palencia Cathedral (Erdmann). In comparing the Fletcher prayer rug in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with its Topkapi counterpart, 13/2042, Dr. Rogers speaks of it having a cotton rather than a wool warp. Here he is misled by Dimand's inaccuracy as well. In fact both rugs have warp of pale yellow Z2S silk, which in the Fletcher rug has been dyed red across the center, the yellow appearing for some inches at both sides. The reverse is true of the Topkapi piece, whose warp is dyed red for merely 3 1/2 inches on each side, the entire center being yellow. Then, the "triple prayer rug from the Rabenou collection" is an Indian fragment fitted out with new borders. It is now in the Kuwait Museum. Michael Franses identifies it as part, together with the three-level fragment in West Berlin, of the great Indian mosque carpet in the storage of the Türk ve Islam Eserleri Museum.
When mention is made elsewhere in the book to "carpets associated with Kashan or North-West Iran in the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries," it seems likely that the reference brings us right back to the "Salting class" of inscribed medallion rugs, contemporary with or slightly earlier than these prayer rugs. It now seems probable that practically every one of these inscribed rugs belongs to this class. And while these rugs were being so carefully considered, one must regret the omission of the three inscribed prayer rugs formerly in the Chihil Sutun at Isfahan published by Erdmann so obscurely (in Dacca) and the utterly ruinous example in the Yale University Art Gallery, with field related to Plate 24, touted by Pope in the Survey as the "finest example of the type." There are others, too.
Despite these assorted grurnblings, and an inability to guess what Dr. Rogers has in mind by "l8th century Usak or Bergama designs" for prayer rugs, I must conclude that his text raises many questions which must be considered soberly by those who presume to write about the Turkish rugs of past centuries. And surely we must welcome the color plates of those Topkapi rugs!
Editor's Note: To date three additional volumes in the Topkapi Palace Museum series have been published. In addition to Carpets, there are Textiles, The Treasury, and Manuscripts. The final volume will be Architecture, expected later this year.
We have noted recently that the first two volumes, published in 1986, Textiles and Manuscripts, are appearing in some discount book sales labled as "possibly damaged" we have not seen a damaged one yet and suspect that Little, Brown has quietly disposed of an overstock. If you haven't bought these yet, you may be able to pick up a copy for between $45 and $70, prices which we have seen. Who knows, in a few months, Carpets and The Treasury may be available at a similar savings instead of at the $150 retail price."
