Brick Red and Cream All-Over Shah Abbasi, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted at a fine gauge, with a natural fringe at both ends. The gauge is what allows the saz leaves to keep their curve and serration; at a coarser knot count they would break into steps.

A brick red ground is reasonably forgiving of everyday marks. The cream is the vulnerable colour here — it carries the palmettes and the leaf outlines throughout, so as it greys the drawing loses definition before the ground shows any change at all.

The design has a name and a history. This is Shah Abbasi, the floral system developed in the Safavid court workshops of seventeenth-century Persia and named after Shah Abbas I. Its signature is the pairing of two elements: the large fan-shaped palmette, and the long curved leaf with a serrated edge — the saz leaf — that sweeps past it in an arc. Both are strung on a fine scrolling vine, the islimi, which threads between them and fills the ground with small blossoms.

It is worth distinguishing from the design it is most often confused with. A Herati field is built on a diamond lattice, with a rosette at each diamond's centre and four small curved leaves flanking it — a strict, repeating grid. There is no lattice here at all. The palmettes and leaves are arranged freely along a vine that wanders, and the symmetry runs down the length of the rug rather than across a grid: fold it along its centre line and the two halves answer each other, but no two horizontal rows are the same. That freedom is what the Shah Abbasi system was for — it lets a drawing this dense keep moving instead of locking into a repeat.