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An Introduction to the
Exhibition
by Mike Tschebull
What
is it that so intrigues collectors about transport and
storage bags from North Africa and the Middle East?
Some of their fascination derives from the sheer
beauty of the objects. Some find equal interest in the
amazing variety of their structures and formats.
Others favor these bags from an art historical
perspective, perhaps motivated by the thought that
they are vectors for the westward movement of ancient
and important graphic design motifs and concepts. And
some find them intriguing simply because they are a
link to a now largely bygone way of life, that of the
pastoral nomad.
Transport and storage bags from the largely treeless
geographic swath stretching from the western gates of
China through the Maghrib were produced largely by
nomadic people, with the remainder made by villagers
in more limited formats. Most often they were woven
with wool and hair sheared from local livestock.
The bags had to be practical and durable. They also
had to be reasonably quick and easy to make, as nomads
frequently pulled up stakes and followed their flocks
to new grazing areas. Over time, bags became emblems
of a sort, serving as identifiers of clan or tribe.
They also served as expressions of beauty, became
outlets for artistic creation, functioned as capital
to be liquidated at appropriate times, and were
enduring reservoirs of design concepts. Transport and
storage bags were part of the nomads’ matrix of
household furnishings and shelter – almost all being
fabricated from animal fiber using methods developed
as a result of evolving nomad technology. Its other
elements included felt or woven hair fabric to cover
yurt or tent frames, bands or straps to hold yurts in
place or to secure bags on animals for transport, and
floor coverings or ground cloths on which to sit, eat,
and be warm and protected from the dirt.
In addition to animal fiber, cotton and sometimes silk
were used for embellishment, both woven and
embroidered, and also for foundations. Normally use of
cotton was restricted to areas where it was
cultivated. Silk, in all cases, was a trade item.
There was also a felt-making tradition in Central Asia
that stretches back millennia, and there is one felt
bag in the exhibition (plate
36).
Weaving with animal fiber could not really begin until
selective breeding had developed woolly sheep starting
about 6,000 years ago.1
The first record of woven bags comes from Assyrian
cuneiform tablets, dated to about 2,000 BCE, that
document trade of textiles and tin between the Tigris
and Euphrates river valleys and Anatolia. None of
those bags survives.2
The first group of early nomad bags to actually
survive comes from the Pazyryk Tombs in Siberia.
Because objects in these 5th century BCE Scythian
tombs were preserved in permafrost, a great deal can
be learned from them. Found in the various sites,
according to Elena Tsareva, were “twelve different
leather and fur bags, including one saddle bag”, but
no woven bags, only scraps of wool cloth that might
have been parts of bags at one time.3 The
fiber remains include magnificent felt fragments, but
no felt bags. To this day, there is a Central Asian
tradition of using both leather and felt bags.
Evidence of the further development of transport bags
can be seen, for example, in Tang dynasty (618-907 CE)
and Uighur fired clay tomb camels, many with readily
identifiable representations of what must have been
wooden packframes supporting large double bags.4
Many miniature paintings survive from 15th – 18th
century Middle Eastern court ateliers, and one would
think that they would offer glimpses of bags in use.
But a recent search shows they have few secrets to
reveal. Baggage trains followed Ottoman troops across
a wide area, but there are apparently no paintings of
them. Mounted troops themselves are depicted in many
miniatures with bow cases, quivers and saddle rugs,
but without bags. Safavid scenes of encampments are
highly stylized, and are generally acknowledged as
depicting members of the court rather than more
ordinary nomads. One such example in Harvard’s Sackler
Museum,5 shows a “nomadic encampment” scene
in which there appears to be a large, horizontally
striped bag hanging at the back of a white tent in the
lower right quadrant of the painting. A second Safavid
example,6 a painting by
Mirza 'Ali shows a shepherd with a vertically
striped shoulder bag that is complete with a strap,
open at the top end, and exhibits a format much like
plate 24 in this exhibition. Its red and white stripes
would be unusual to encounter in a weft-faced weave,
suggesting the illustration may represent a warp-faced
fabric.
The bags in this exhibition are primarily examples of
ethnographic art. While they are beautiful, they are
or were also fully functional in their cultural
context. Learning something about the culture from
which they come can be very rewarding,7 but
therein a problem lies. Although anthropologists
studying these tribal groups may accurately describe
present day cultural conditions, their information
cannot always be applied to the past. And as an aside,
anthropologists are seldom very interested in
textiles, a point of frustration to many collectors.
To make things more difficult, seldom do there exist
good period accounts of the production and use of folk
art textiles such as transport and storage bags. To
form a complete picture of why and how bags were woven
- let alone where and when, or what the designs on
them might mean - the collector, unless he wants to do
the fieldwork and other basic research him or herself,
is left to cobble together information from specialist
historians,8 geographical and climatological studies, travelers’ accounts, and the
memories of dealers.
To overlook the cultures from which transport and
storage bags come and appreciate them only for their
color harmonies or arresting designs is to miss a
prime ingredient of their importance. They are
remnants of a way of life that is fast disappearing
from the globe. When they are gone, there will be no
more like them to be found. As such, today’s
collectors are the stewards of artifacts that possess
as much value in their historic significance as in
their many esthetic merits.
SOME NOTES ABOUT THE BAGS IN THIS EXHIBIT
Drawn from New England Rug Society members’
submissions, this group of bags and bagfaces is by no
means a balanced representation and contains flashy
examples that may not be typical. Many nomad and
village-woven bags were utilitarian but not
particularly interesting or beautiful, and those
groups of weavings are not represented.
Bags woven within the boundaries of historic Iran
represent an eye-opening two thirds of the total
pieces exhibited here. This is due, among other
reasons, to a long and strong Iranian artistic
tradition, high value given to textile art, very good
geographical conditions for nomadism, and the cultural
influences of the many invaders who made up these
nomadic populations.
Pile-woven bags, representing a bit more than 40% of
the total exhibition, are probably over-represented,
and many were probably originally woven for sale.
It is interesting to see that sumakh-decorated bags
constitute almost as large a percentage of entries as
pile-woven ones. The term sumakh may well be a
fabricated word, but the weaving technique it defines
is real enough: wefts are wrapped progressively, ever
forward, around groups of warps to form patterns. It
is a very basic “pileless” weave that may have had its
beginning in basketry. Sometimes the weaving term is
spelled “soumak”, sometimes “sumak”. One theory is
that it derives from the town of Shemakha in the
eastern Transcaucasus. Another, put forward by
Mahammedkhan Mahammedkhanov, a Daghestani
ethnographer, is that the term has Daghestani origins.
To muddy the waters further, Roya Tagiyeva, Director
of the Carpet Museum in Baku, prefers to use the word
“geyik” rather than any variation of “sumakh”.9 The spelling we use in the plate
descriptions is sanctioned by Danny Shaffer, editor of
Hali. In general, transliteration of Turkic,
Arab and Iranian words from the original into English
is more art than science.10
Since the concentration of sumakh-woven textiles – not
only bags, but also rugs, horse covers and other
animal trappings – comes from the Transcaucasus,
Daghestan and Azarbayjan in Iran – it is reasonable to
conclude that the technique developed there. A number
of academics and other specialists concur, and many of
the designs one sees on sumakh bags may be indigenous
to the area, perhaps derived from pottery and baskets.11
It must be said that collecting transport and storage
bags from western and central Asia can be an
inexpensive way to learn about a wide variety of
formats and structures, unusual cultures, and art
objects that will draw you in and often not let you
go.
RET
Raoul "Mike"
Tschebull has a special interest in village weavings
of northwest Iran and the Transcaucasus, which has
taken him to Iran and the Caucasus to speak at
conferences and to do field research. He has authored
several journal articles on the subject, and is
perhaps best known for his seminal 1971 exhibition
catalog "Kazak: Carpets of the Caucasus". A former
international banker, he is now the owner of Tschebull
Antique Carpets in Darien, CT.
1)
Private correspondence with Dr. Elizabeth
Barber, Professor of linguistics and archaeology at
Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA
2) Barber, E., Women's
Work, The First 20,000 Years, New York, 1994,
chapter 7
3) Private correspondence
with Dr. Elena Tsareva, senior researcher in
the Department of Ethnography for South and
Southwest Asia and head of textile programs at
the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of
the Russian Academy of
Sciences in St. Petersburg.
4) Attribution on the basis
of Metropolitan Museum of Art signage.
5) An image of
the Sackler museum miniature can be found on the web at:
http://www.currentmiddleages.org/tents/xfigure2.htm
6) Currently part of the
Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Iran, 1501-1576
at Asia Society in New York and entitled “Rustram
recovers Rakhsh”. Illustration 4.15 (p. 98) in the
catalogue Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Iran,
1501-1576, edited by Thompson, J. and Canby, S.,
Milan, 2003. The miniature is from Shah Tahmasp’s
Shahnameh, from the period 1522-35.
7) One of the latest sources
of good information on the culture of nomadism is
Tapper, R. and Thompson, J (Editors), The Nomadic
Peoples Of Iran, London, 2002
8) The history of the
Transcaucasus and northern Iran is very interesting to
study, as the textiles from that area are beautiful
and the politics are complex. An excellent source on
this subject is Atkin, Muriel, Russia and Iran,
1780-1828, Minneapolis, 1980
9) Opinions of Mahammedkhan
Mahammedkhanov and Roya Tagiyeva about the term
“sumakh” were part of their unpublished papers given
at the Azerbaijani Carpet Symposium in Baku in May,
2003
10) Witness the multiple spellings
of words like khorjin and chuval. Sometimes the best
way to transliterate is to hear the original
repeatedly and just have at it. Sometimes
transliterations come into English through another
language, like German, and make almost no sense in
English. Conventions change, and spellings mutate into
new forms. Governments can play a role. In Azarbayjan,
local Turki is written in Arabic script. In
Azerbaijan, the written script was Arabic, then
gradually Cyrillic when the Russians arrived, now, by
fiat, Roman script, like in Turkey. But in Azerbaijan,
they now use "Q's" to begin words that Turks in Turkey
would use "K's" for (Quba, Qarabagh, etc.).
11) See Wertime, J., “Back
To Basics: Primitive Pile Rugs Of West & Central
Asia”, Hali 100; private correspondence with Dr. Elena
Tsareva; for examples of pottery design forebears, see
Tagiyeva, R., Azerbaijan Carpet, Baku, 2001
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