Why do pile rugs appear under kilims?

Kilim ends are the flat-woven skirts at either end of a knotted pile rug, and a description mentioning them can bring the piece into this category. Flat-weave techniques also sit side by side with plain kilim weave. Cicim, jajim, zili, verneh and soumak all show up in titles here.

How old are most of these rugs?

The dated field spans exactly a century, 1860 to 1960, and two decades account for more than half the archive on their own: the 1920s and the 1900s. Earlier material is scarce, with only a handful dated to the 1860s. Post-1930 dating is rare too, and the latest recorded entry is a single Turkish Konya kilim dated 1960.

What are mafrash and chuval?

Both are tribal storage bags. A mafrash is the large kind, and its side panels and base are often sold on their own or made up into a small kilim. Chuval, juval and torba are bag names as well. The woven face usually comes to market without its back, which is why so many small panels appear in this category.

The extremes are wide apart. Room-size pieces include a Bessarabian kilim at 5.10m by 4.05m and a Turkish Konya rug at 475cm by 166cm. At the other end are silk-warped Senneh fragments around 42 by 65cm. Long narrow runners are an oddity of proportion, with two Kurdish examples close to five metres long and under a metre wide.

Are any kilims signed or stamped by a maker?

No. These were domestic and tribal weavings, and the category carries no workshop, weaver or retail names at all. Regional and tribal attribution does the identifying instead: Konya, Malatya, Kayseri, Fars province, Senneh, Qashqa'i, Baluch, Shahsavan, Uzbek Kungrad.

How many come up for sale each year?

About 42 kilims come to market on Sellingantiques in a year. Twenty-four different dealers have listed them, so no single dealer shapes what the category looks like.