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An Extensive Range Of Rugs From Around The World
It’s not exactly known when the weaving of rugs first began, however some indication can be sought in the oldest rug found to date which is the Pazyryk carpet found frozen in a burial tomb in Central Asia. This has been dated to around the fourth century BC. Judging by the quality of the weave and materials used it can be reasonably assumed the craft and art of rug weaving was established some considerable time before Pazyryk carpet.

How Rugs Are Made
Oriental rugs are either knotted or flatwoven, or a combination of both. Rugs are often made to varying degrees of technical distinction using a variety of weaving techniques and materials.

As with the basic structural foundation to all textiles the constituents of oriental rugs consists of warps and wefts, warps are the strands of yarn that span lengthways to the top and bottom of the loom and the wefts are strands that run widthways. To form the pile a small piece of yarn, usually wool is tied around two or more adjacent warps so that both ends of yarn protrudes through the foundation, this process is repeated before the weft is beaten down with the entwined warp, thus creating the knotting between the pile and the foundation, it's this repeated knotting process that give oriental rugs their incredible strengh.

Two types of knot are generally used, the Senneh and the Ghiordes, neither of which are notably superior to each other albeit a knowledge between two can help in determining the attribution of a rug  i.e. the Senneh is typically attributed to Persia and Ghirodes to Turkey.