This country, which shares with Peru, Turkestan and Siberia a climate which can preserve textiles almost indefinitely, has never revealed knotted pile fabrics of earlier date than about the fourth century AD. These are not, however, of the right weave to be classified as Oriental rugs, as the knotting is rather coarse and the pile consists of uncut loops. Some authorities claim that the pile was cut, but as many pieces still contain a looped pile it is a fair contention that it was wear rather than the weavers’ shears which made the separation. They resemble Turkish towels in appearance. Specimens can be seen in a number of museums featuring Egyptian art.
Carpets are mentioned as having been used in Court circles in the twelfth century, but we do not know if they were made in Egypt or even if they were knotted. In the Mameluke period, however, carpets were actually made in Cairo, and the art of manufacture stemmed from Persia and not Turkey, as the knotting used is Persian.
Unfortunately these pieces, of which there are a number in various museums, have tended to be attributed to Damascus, which is totally wrong, because there is no evidence that carpets were ever made in Syria. The explanation may be that there is some resemblance between the effect of the peculiar designs and colours of these pieces, and damask, a cloth also used in that period, particularly in Venice from where it was exported to the rest of Europe.
Always geometric in design, these Cairo or Mameluke pieces have neither forerunners nor copiers. They appear to have been made only during the period up until the conquest which brought Egypt under the Ottoman Empire in 1517. From then onwards a change of style set in, due no doubt to the demands of the Turkish Court, as the new style, while following the old weaving techniques, featured designs somewhat akin to the Persian Court manufacture, that is, properly proportioned pieces, with corner pieces matching the medallion; but they lacked the overall grandeur of the Persian examples owing to the inferior draftsmanship employed.
What kind of carpets Cardinal Wolsey got in reply to his demand for ‘Damascene’ carpets will never be known. In June 1518 he asked the Venetian Ambassador for some pieces, in return for which he would ‘take him before the Council and obtain audience for his arguments in regard to the repeal of the duties of Candian wines imported into England by the Venetian traders’. At the end of that year he got seven pieces. His next demand, still with the repeal of the wine duties. contingent upon it, was for a hundred ‘Damascene’ carpets. This was in 1519. We do not know if he received them all, but we do know that sixty carpets arrived for him from Antwerp, which he graciously accepted. As with all the other producing countries a decline set in, but much earlier than with the others, as from the seventeenth century nothing more is heard of Egyptian carpets, and there was no revival in the nineteenth century.
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