Description Eagle Group I Torba
88 x 45 cm (2’ 11” x 1’ 6”)
Turkmenistan, ca. 1870
Condition: very good, full pile, selvages partially rebound and partially minimally damaged
Warp: wool, weft: wool, pile: wool
In 1988, at the ‘Carpets of Central Asia’ symposium held in Leningrad, Dr Jon Thompson gave a memorable paper, regrettably unpublished, on Turkmen pile bags or trappings of this art historically important ‘birds within roundels’ design type. It is one of the rarest Turkmen designs documented: no more than about ten examples are known, with even fewer in print, and the present lot is only the second to come to the auction market. It belongs to a wider group of structurally and chromatically distinctive Yomut family Turkmen tribal weavings that, since the publication in 1990 of A. and V. Rautenstengel and S. Azadi’s monograph Studien zur Teppichkultur der Turkmen, have generally come to be known under the ‘eagle-g?l’ group label.
Birds within octagons (pearl roundels) is a classic pan-Asian design that may have entered the Turkmen vocabulary from an earlier Central Asian (Sogdian) textile tradition. The relationship between Sogdian textile design and aspects of later Turkmen iconography was discussed at length by Jürg Rageth in ‘Turkmen Carpets, A New Perspective (2016)’.
A very similar piece from the Alan and Beverly Gilbert Collection, but with twelve rather than the six octagons containing avian figures seen here, appears in Louise Mackie & Jon Thompson’s Turkmen exhibition catalogue (Textile Museum, Washington DC, 1980, pl.57, p.138). A nine-octagon example was sold at Locke & England auctioneers of Leamington Spa in the English Midlands in March 2011 (lot 97, see HALI 168, p.145), while a Yomut ten-g?l kapunuk of similar design, formerly in the collection of the Asgabat Museum of Art, appears in Carpets of the People of Central Asia, the O’Bannon and Amanova-Olsen edition of Valentina G. Moshkova’s classic work (1996, fig. 109, page 255)