Antique Turkmen Rugs between £0 and £0
Hand-knotted wool weavings from the Turkmen tribes of Central Asia, made on narrow looms for the yurt: storage bags, door rugs, camel trappings, dowry pieces and the big main carpet that floored the tent.
What They Are
Turkmen weaving is the pile production of the nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes of Turkmenistan, northern Afghanistan and the Amu Darya basin. Very little of it is floor rug in the ordinary sense. Alongside rugs and carpets the archive fills up with tent and dowry furnishings: chuvals and torbas, ensi door rugs, asmalyks, spindle bags, germech and tent bands.
Titles are organised by tribe and region rather than by maker, and no workshops or weavers are named anywhere in this material. Tekke is the attribution you meet most often, ahead of Ersari and Yomut. Beyond those three sit Salor, Saryk, Chodor, Arabachi, Igdyr, Goklen, Karadashli, Abdal and Karakalpak, each turning up only a handful of times.
Bag faces and small formats outnumber floor pieces. Chuval and torba between them account for far more listings than main carpet, and the gul, the repeating medallion that fills the field, is usually counted in the title: 6-gul, 9-gul, 12, 16, up to chuval faces with 25 and 30. A visible fringe of Baluch, Kurdish, Luri and Uzbek pieces is listed for its Turkmen guls rather than for Turkmen origin.
Dates run from 1750 to 1930 and cluster hard in the late 19th and early 20th century, the 1900s and 1880s heaviest by some way. Two or three listings reach the 18th century. Titles hedge in ways a single year flattens, with 'circa 1880 or earlier' and '4th quarter 19th century' common, so treat any year as the dealer's bracket.
The Range
Format sets the frame. Bag faces, the woven front cut away from its plain-weave back, run through the listings in numbers; complete bags described as having their backs, and sometimes tassels, sit higher. Main carpets and yurt door rugs hold the top of the range almost on their own, while small Afghan Tekke-design rugs and plain-weave-backed bags hold the bottom.
After that it comes down to weave and colour. Fine weave, finely woven and a velvet-like handle recur in the titles at the upper end. Colour is named more often than anything else: cochineal, madder, aubergine fields, ivory grounds, abrash, and silk or cotton highlights picked out in the pattern. These are dealer statements, not test results, but they track the range.
Age and scarcity pull in the same direction. Mid 19th century, first half 19th century and early 19th century sit above the 1920 and 1930 dates and the 'old Afghan' descriptors. So do the thinly represented tribes. A Salor, Arabachi or Karadashli attribution appears rarely and clusters upward, as do the words scarce, unusual and rare format.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for turkmen rugs between £0 and £0, 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.
About seventy-two antique Turkmen rugs are listed on Sellingantiques each year, from twenty-two dealers.
The Antique Turkmen Rugs between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Gul
- The repeating medallion, or 'flower', that fills the field. Titles count them and name the type, so a 12-gul chuval face tells you the layout before you look.
- Chuval
- Large storage or bedding bag hung inside the yurt, often offered as just the woven front, the chuval face. Torba is the shallower, wider version, likewise commonly a face alone.
- Ensi
- Also spelled engsi. The pile rug that hung over the yurt doorway, usually with a panelled, cross-divided field.
- Elem
- The end panel of a carpet, bag or ensi, plain or patterned. Tree elem and flower elem both recur in titles.
- Asmalyk
- Five- or seven-sided trapping hung on the bridal camel, frequently sold in pairs. Dizlyk, igsalyk, okbash, bukcha, germech and kapunuk cover the other trappings: knee cover, spindle bag, tent-pole cover, mirror bag, door-sill rug and door surround.
- Named gul types
- Kepse, dyrnak, ertmen, aina, tauk nuska, kedjebe and the Salor turreted gul. This design vocabulary is what fixes a tribal attribution in the title.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which tribes turn up most often?
Tekke, spelled tekke or teke, leads the archive, with the Merv and Akhal oases named repeatedly. Ersari of the middle Amu Darya and northern Afghanistan come next, taking in Beshir and Kizil Ayak, then Yomut of the trans-Caspian steppes.
Beyond those, Salor, Saryk, Chodor, Arabachi, Igdyr, Goklen, Karadashli, Abdal and Karakalpak each appear only a handful of times. Arabachi and Abdal turn up once in a blue moon.
What is a chuval face?
A chuval is a large storage bag hung inside the yurt. The pile front is the decorated part, and the back is plain weave.
Many chuvals and torbas reach the market as the face alone, separated from the back. Listings that keep the whole bag say so, with phrases like 'complete with plain weave back' or 'complete with backs and tassels'.
How old are these pieces?
The dated field spans 1750 to 1930, with the weight of it in the 1900s and 1880s, then the 1870s. The 1930s account for very few listings, so the form effectively stops there in this archive.
A small number reach the 18th century, including a Salor chuval fragment and two Teke mafrash fragments from the Akhal and Merv oases. Everything else in the samples is 1800 or later.
Are Turkmen rugs always small?
No. Small and large sizes are close to evenly matched across the listings, and main carpets run to around 479 by 291 centimetres.
The extremes go both ways. The oldest piece recorded in the samples is a fragment of 29 by 70 centimetres, and the largest single object is a yurt band stated at fifty feet long.
Do these weavings carry maker's names?
They don't. Attribution here is tribal and regional, given as Tekke, Ersari, Yomut, Salor and so on, sometimes with an oasis or river region attached.
No workshops, weavers or retailers appear anywhere in this evidence. The design vocabulary, particularly the gul type, is what carries the attribution.
How often do these come up for sale?
Twenty-two dealers have listed in this category on Sellingantiques, and roughly seventy-two pieces come to market in a year. Supply is steady rather than occasional.
Pairs are a regular feature: paired asmalyks, dizlyks, kaps, chuvals and torba faces. One listing pairs a main carpet with a matching runner, and another offered seventeen tribal salt bags as a single lot.