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Before assimilation into the Russian empire, this forbidding mountainous region had an almost unbroken 800-year history of ethnic, cultural and religious strife, with a procession of conquests and re-conquests particularly by Arabs, Russians Mongols, Tartars, Turks and Persian.
The southern edge of the Caucasus region adjoins Anatolia near Mount Ararat and shares a lengthy border with Iran. Mountains and secluded valleys provide an isolated habitat for a great variety of ethnic groups since ancient times. Some of these people are of such obscure origins that philologists and ethnologists have no clues to their relationships with other ethnic families. Over eighty languages were spoken in the Caucasus during the nineteenth century and half that number still persist today.
Given racial, religious, and clannish divisions, we might expect various peoples in the Caucasus to weave dramatically different patterns.
There are clear regional differences, but rugs made by Armenians, Azeri Turks, Kurds, and others share many designs forms. Local patterns often resulted from rearranging common elements, as well as from the gradual adaptation of workshop patterns, imparting to them a more folk-art flavour.
The 1917 of communism revolution set the stage for Soviet collectivisation policies, which hastened the end of folk weaving as it had been practised for so long
It is tenable to propose that ancestors of Caucasian Kurds brought a body of the rug and kilim design into the region when they first migrated northward from Persia.
Historians’ further comment is that Ardebil designs are the evidence of influential motive to the designs and motifs of Caucasus in the north part of Persia.
This suggestion gains credence when older Caucasian folk motifs are compared with Kurdish designs in Persia/Iran.
Numerous rugs from the southern Caucasus differ relatively little in construction and structure from traditional Kurdish weavings. These similarities fade as we move further north in the Caucasus |
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