Considering that Persia is probably the cradle of the craft, and of Moslem inclination, very few prayer rugs have been handed down from the past. Those which have survived, most of which are now in museums, are the products of the Golden Age court manufacture. Finely woven, and of extremely good draughtsmanship, these pieces, as much as the court carpets of the period, convey an artistry which has never been surpassed in the textile field. No particular weaving centre has been attributed to them, the assumption being that as the court moved from place to place, so the ancilliary services went too, including the rug factories. With the decline in Persian art after the seventeenth century, nothing is found until the beginning of the nineteenth, when prayer rugs appear to have been made in silk as well as wool in Tabriz, Heriz, Kashan, and irman. The designs of these later pieces do not however copy the masterpieces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
New ground was broken in design, as can clearly be seen from the illustrations. It was left to the Armenian weavers of Istanbul at the beginning of the twentieth century to copy designs of the earlier period, in the so-called Kumkapu weave. That they copied faithfully there is no doubt, and to make the product look even more luxurious they used gold and silver threads in parts of the warp and weft, creating an embossed effect, and making the rug shine in the sun like a jewel.