MATERIALS

Materials

Textiles, Carpets, and Leather

Textiles, Carpets, and Leather

Woven textiles have always played an important role in Islamic society and in many cases were among the most prestigious and costly luxury goods.

Technically, textiles ranged from fairly simple tabby and tapestry weaves, through ikat, lampas, and samitum fabrics, to highly complex metal-brocaded velvets. In addition, there were embroidered, printed, and other types of fabrics.

Different materials were also used: plant fibers such as linen and cotton, wool from sheep and goats, silk, and finally various kinds of “metal thread.”

Pile carpets of wool, cotton, or silk – commonly called Oriental carpets – are justifiably associated almost exclusively with the Middle East, from which they were exported to the entire world.

Tanned animal skins were used to make parchment and leather of different types.

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ISLAMIC ART: TEXTILES, CARPETS, AND LEATHER

Islamic Art: Textiles, carpets, and leather

Item no. 6 of 37
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Fragment of a samitum-woven textile, silk

Eastern Iran or Central Asia; 8th-9th century
32.5 × 38.5 cm

A textile like this one, with two confronted bulls in a beaded medallion, is clearly indebted to earlier Sasanian and Sogdian design traditions (see 4/2005). The bulls stood on a winged palmette, now almost worn away, with a stylized plant between them. The roundel over the animals’ forelegs – which looks rather like a Royal Air Force emblem – is a non-naturalistic element that was to prove unusually tenacious in later Islamic animal depictions, and was at times given a more almond-like shape.

The group to which this samitum-woven textile belongs has been ascribed on the basis of an inscription on a similar textile to the Central Asian city of Zandane, near Bukhara. The city was incorporated into the Umayyad caliphate in the beginning of the 8th century.

Inv. no. 10/1996