Antique Persian Rugs
Hand-knotted wool rugs, carpets and flatweaves from Iran and its borderlands, made for floors, seating, storage bags and animal trappings, and listed by weaving group or region rather than by any maker.
Antique Persian Rugs
Knotted pile rugs and flatweaves have been made across the Iranian plateau for centuries by town workshops, village weavers and migratory tribes. Weaving for the Western market grew through the later nineteenth century, and that is when the bulk of what reaches the market now was made.
The form you'll meet most often is a wool pile rug or carpet named for a north-west Persian weaving centre, dated somewhere between the 1890s and the 1930s, with dimensions given in the title in metric or imperial. Carpet leads the terms used, runner comes second, and Heriz is the most-named weaving group in the Sellingantiques archive at more than twice the next group, appearing as carpet, runner and small rug alike.
Beyond the north-west block sit tribal and nomadic weavings - Qashqai, Khamseh, Afshar, Baluch, Kurdish, Luri, Bakhtiari - which make up roughly a third of the category. Central and city workshop rugs from Kashan, Isfahan, Qum, Kirman, Nain, Sarouk and Mahal form another block, and runners, long rugs and kellehs about a sixth.
A visible minority are not pile rugs at all: kilims, soumak panels, saddlebag and vanity-bag faces, sofrehs and embroideries. Sizes run from mounted bag faces and mats of around 52 x 54cm to oversize carpets past four metres, including a 407 x 480cm Karadja and a stair runner recorded at 32 feet.
Where The Range Splits
Naming does much of the work. Titles that say only Persian Wool Rug or Vintage Persian Rug sit at the bottom of the range, while specific weaving groups - Serapi, Bakshaish, Sauj Bulagh, Sultanabad - cluster at the top. Portrait and pictorial rugs, of which a few surface, sit well above the middle.
Size and format pull hard in the same direction. Mat and bag-face pieces of 50 to 90cm sit low; room-size and oversize carpets of three and a half to five and a half metres, and runners of four to six metres, sit high. Narrow runners are a recurring speciality, several logged under 90cm wide against lengths past four metres.
Then age and handle. Pieces dated 1850 to 1880, or described as third or fourth quarter nineteenth century, sit markedly higher than 1920s and 1930s examples of the same weaving group. Fine weave, kork wool and silk are cited on upper pieces, as is praise for colour: soft pastel, ivory ground, superb colour.
Antique Persian Rugs Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for persian rugs, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
The dated field runs from 1800 to 1960, though the earliest clean dates in the archive are a Senneh kelleh and a silk jajim of 1850 and 1860.
The Antique Persian Rugs Glossary
- Runner
- A narrow rug much longer than it is wide, made for halls and stairs. Runner appears in well over two hundred titles, long in another sixty-seven.
- Kilim
- A flatwoven rug with no pile. Forty-six titles use the word, among them Senneh, Qashqai and Varamin examples.
- Bag face
- The decorated front of a saddlebag or vanity bag, sold on as a small rug or a mounted panel. Khorjin is the Persian term; fifty-five titles carry the word bag.
- Ground
- The field colour lying behind the pattern. Ivory, camel, red and blue are all named, and ground turns up in forty-odd titles.
- Kelleh
- A long, wide format, broader than a runner but far longer than a room rug. Thirty-four titles use it.
- Boteh
- The teardrop motif, described in listings as all-over, floral, or mother and child.
Antique Persian Rugs: Frequently Asked Questions
How old are most Persian rugs on the market?
The dated field runs from 1800 to 1960, with more than seventeen hundred listings carrying a clean year. The mass sits between 1880 and 1930, and two decades alone, the 1900s and the 1920s, account for well over eight hundred of them.
Earlier decades thin out fast. Dates of 1850 and 1860 do appear, attached to a Senneh kelleh, a silk jajim, a Kerman millefleurs prayer rug and a Sauj Bulagh carpet.
Why do so many listings say Heriz?
Heriz is the most-named weaving group in the archive, at more than twice the count of the next group. Around half of those titles read Heriz carpet, and thirty are Heriz runners.
It sits in north-west Persia, and that region dominates the category generally: west, north and north west between them appear in hundreds of titles.
What sizes do these come in?
The spread is wide. At one end are mounted bag faces and mats of around 52 x 54cm; at the other, a 407 x 480cm Karadja carpet, a 495 x 380cm Khorasan and a stair runner logged at 32 feet.
Narrow runners are a recurring line, several under 90cm wide against lengths of four to six and a half metres. Room-size carpets of three and a half to five metres are common enough.
Are the dates in titles documented?
Often they are the dealer's estimate rather than a record. Eighty-three listings are dated only to the nineteenth century with no decade, and a handful fall back on Edwardian, Victorian or c.1900.
Where a decade is given, treat it as a placing within the broad 1880 to 1930 band that holds most of the category.
Which unusual forms turn up?
Alongside rugs and carpets the category carries kilims, soumak panels, sofrehs, jajims, mafrash and khorjin bag faces, plus embroideries. Together these are a minority, under a tenth.
Rarer still are one-offs: a Qashqa'i baby cradle, a horse blanket cover, a wheat-sack or tacheh, a Rasht silk-on-felt embroidery, a khalamkari, a Zoroastrian embroidery and a velvet ikat from Yazd.
Do these rugs carry maker names?
As a rule, no. They're listed by weaving group or region, and a scan of the archive returned no makers of any consequence. Where a named weaver or workshop does appear in a title, it happens once or twice at most.
So the identifying information is geographic: Heriz, Tabriz, Karaja, Bidjar, Qashqai, Baluch, Kashan, Mahal, and so on.