It is reasonable to deduce that in the successive phases of prehistory, humans, in their effort to create a warmer environment, used animal skins to cover the floors of the caves and huts they inhabited. These were the precursors to what would later be purposefully woven with advancing technology and is known today as the carpet. When exactly did this happen? The archaeological record tells us that the oldest carpet in the world is more than 2,000 years old.
Of course, it is impossible to know if there were earlier examples, which is almost certain; only that the material reality is this. It corresponds to a piece found in 1947 in Siberia, where the temperatures were so cold that it froze, and thanks to this, its preservation for two and a half millennia was guaranteed, as it never thawed. It is known as the Pazyryk carpet or the Gorno-Altai carpet, in reference to the place where it was found: a series of burials located in the Pazyryk Valley, in present-day Russia.
This is a mountainous area, a plateau called Ukok near the Russian border with China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, where archaeologist Mikhail Gryaznov excavated a tomb in 1929, thus attracting scientific interest in the site. Eighteen years later, it was his collaborator, Sergei Ivanovich Rudenko, a prestigious anthropologist from the Soviet Anthropological Institute, who carried out larger-scale excavations, discovering that his predecessor’s find was not an isolated case but part of an entire necropolis.
Most of the tombs had already been looted in earlier times, but thieves always take jewelry and precious metals, leaving behind what is often of more interest to researchers. Thus, furniture appeared, a cart with the skeletons of the horses that pulled it, everyday items, textiles, and, of course, human remains. Subsequent cranial analysis of these revealed they were Caucasian, although some showed slightly different, Mongoloid features.
Two well-preserved mummies due to the cold had special significance. One was a robust man about fifty years old, whose skin bore visible tattoos. Later, infrared analysis revealed that, like the other recovered bodies, he was extensively tattooed; in his case, with a bestiary that included animals such as donkeys, deer, or rams, but also with fantastic zoomorphic figures similar to griffins and other monstrous creatures. There were also aligned circles that likely had a therapeutic function, considering that current Siberian tribes still practice this healing method for the back.
The other prominent mummy was found decades later, in 1993, by archaeologist Natalia Polosmak: she was dubbed the Ice Maiden (or Lady of Altai, in reference to the mountains where Pazyryk is located), a young, unmarried woman of high social status buried in a wooden chamber tomb surrounded by grave goods that included crockery and a cart pulled by six sacrificed horses. The body rested in a coffin made from a hollowed-out Siberian larch trunk lined with leather decorated with zoomorphic figures. The preservation was excellent because rain had flooded the tomb and frozen, merging with the permafrost.
The Ice Maiden was 1.67 meters tall, lying on her side, and had no hair—she had been shaved—but wore a wig and a felt headdress with golden embroidery. Like the chief, she had tattoos on her skin, with both animal and plant motifs. The blouse she wore was made of wild silk, which is believed to have come from India. This, along with other items found in her burial goods (such as Iranian coriander seeds), sparked great interest in imagining the trade routes that might have existed between those regions and the Siberian culture.
Which culture was this? The maiden and the chief were dated to the 5th century BC, although some of the studied mounds are one or two centuries more recent. In any case, it was between the Bronze and Iron Ages, which in those latitudes corresponds to the Pazyryk culture, part of the Kurgan group. The Kurgans comprised a set of peoples who extended from that region to Europe (Romania, Bulgaria), passing through the Caucasus.
The Pazyryk people lived in the steppes and were culturally related to the Scythians, who had similar artistic iconography and also practiced similar burial customs, as archaeology has shown. Dedicated to herding, their nomadic lifestyle did not prevent them from maintaining intense trade relations with distant areas such as India, Persia, or China, as we saw earlier, with their main trade product being horses. The discovery of masks of Greek origin demonstrates that they also had contact with the Hellenistic colonies of the Cimmerian Bosporus.
The Pazyryk mounds, part of the UNESCO World Heritage, continue to offer surprises from time to time. In 2007, the tomb of a blonde, tattooed warrior wrapped in a sable fur coat and accompanied by burial goods came to light. Five years later, several more burials were found, although working on-site has become somewhat problematic due to the opposition of local residents, who are aware that the recovered artifacts will not stay there but will be taken to the Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg).
Now it’s time to return to the beginning of this article to talk about the oldest carpet in the world, understood as one that was woven. It was Sergey Rudenko himself who found it in 1949, at the end of that excavation campaign, in the tomb of a noble figure. Dated to around 40 BC, it measures 2 meters in length by 1.83 meters in width and 2.4 millimeters thick. It is made of sheep’s wool and woven with approximately 1,125,000 knots (3,600 knots per square decimeter, a higher density than modern carpets, indicating such efficient mastery of the technique that it would date back a millennium earlier).
Thanks to its freezing in the permafrost, due to the previously mentioned flooding, it is well-preserved enough to appreciate the red and gold colors of the fabric, as well as the details of its decoration. The central part is a square subdivided into chess-like grids (in fact, it has been suggested that it might have been a large board for a dice game), each adorned with floral motifs. This center is framed by borders that move outward, displaying, in this order, griffins, elk, horses (some with mounted riders, others dismounted), and griffins again.
However, these figures do not clarify the exact authorship, so there is controversy on this point; some, like Talbot Rises, see the hand of the Scythians; others, like S. Tolstov, suggest the Massagetae. However, the majority, led by Rudenko, leaned more toward an Iranian craftsman, whether Persian, Median, or Parthian. Supporters of this hypothesis point out that the place of origin must have been the area around Armenia and Turkestan, as some carpets made with similar techniques (the so-called torkībāf knot) have been found in that region, which has a great tradition of carpet making.
This would imply that the carpet was exported to the Altai Mountains area and perhaps made to order, as the equipment on the horses is typical of that region. There remains the bold theory of F. Balonov, who, based on the asymmetry of the decorative motifs, the distribution of colors in certain sections, and other peculiarities, suggests that the carpet contains a coded message. It’s incredible how much a carpet can offer.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on November 5, 2018: La alfombra más antigua del mundo, encontrada en una tumba de la Edad del Hierro
SOURCES
Serguéi Ivanovich Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen
F. R. Balonov, Alfombra de pazyryk: composición semántica y lugar en el ritual
Michael Hann, Symbol, Pattern and Symmetry: The Cultural Significance of Structure
Elena Efimovna Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road
Ron Knapp, Mummy Secrets Uncovered
Elena Efimovna Kuzʹmina, The Origin of the Indo-Iranians
E.J.W. Barber, Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages
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