Over the past 100 years, the Oriental rug has increasingly become valued across the globe as a work of art. The Oriental rug has a rich history and with the vibrant colors, some consider it to be the aristocrat of carpets. Even though the Oriental rug we know today may not soar through the air like the Arabian magic carpet of legend, it does perform magic, transforming ordinary interior spaces into extraordinary rooms.
Historically, the great carpet-producing areas include Turkey, Persia, the Caucasus, and Turkestan. While, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, India and China are recent additions to this list, Spain, while under Arab influence, has produced Oriental or, hand-knotted, rugs of distinction.
The term, Oriental rug, has traditionally been used to describe the hand-knotted rugs. The weaving process typically involves stretching warp threads on a loom while knotting the pile to the threads. Each row of knots is completed by the insertion of a weft thread. After the entire carpet has been knotted, the pile is trimmed, or shorn. To a large degree, the precision of the design varies depending on how tightly the rug has been knotted and the final height of the pile.
The fineness and durability of a knotted rug can be estimated based on the number of knots per square inch. The density of an Oriental rug's can be a useful indicator when determining the overall quality of a knotted rug. A high quality Oriental rug should have between 500 and 1,000 knots per square inch; the more knots the better.