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Azerbaijan is a border area, and up until the recent past, has suffered the usual fate of such regions. Russians, Turks and Persians and, going back still further, kings and chieftains such as the Ottoman sultans and the Safavid rulers, have fought long, hard wars in the Caucasian highlands on their path to power. Today the political boundaries of this north-western region of Iran run approximately along the watershed of the Caucasian mountains and the frontier rivers, Araks and Kura. To the north, Azerbaijan is a Soviet republic, and to the south, Azerbaijan, a province of Iran, covers an area of approximately 40,000 square miles. However, although there are only about four million inhabitants, one can still speak of a relatively dense population. Large areas of the country cover uninhabitable mountain regions, and inhabitants, many of whom are descended from the Turkic tribes and speak a Turkic language, are therefore concentrated in the inhabitable steppes, river valleys and oases of the south Caucasian foothills. The many different tribes of the region obtain their, not always secure, livelihoods from a variety of occupations: not only from agriculture, especially sheep farming and the manufacture of wool, leather and silk artifacts, but also from copper mining and the oil industry. Carpet weaving has been a traditional occupation in Azerbaijan for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but the products of today's craftsmen cannot compare in artistry with those which were made in the 19th century and earlier. Under the keen patronage of the cultured Safavid rulers works of art of incomparable beauty and inestimable value emerged from the early workshops, such as those of Tabriz. The best known early carpet designs of northern Azerbaijan are those of the early Dragon' carpets. However, even before these were produced, the court workshops of Tabriz in the south are credited with carpets which employed all the designs of the Orient.
In more recent times, the most important provenances of typical
Azerbaijani and north west Persian carpet weaving are (in alphabetical
order): Ahar, Ardebil, Bakhshaish, Heriz, Karaja, Meshkin, Sanjan and
Tabriz. |
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