ANTIQUITY OF CARPETS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 50, 12 December 1891, Page 672

ANTIQUITY OF CARPETS.

The use of carpets, an article of household furniture, is of unknown antiquity. It dates back, in all probability, to the patriarchal epoch, and followed naturally the invention of woven fabrics that were first employed as clothing simply by winding them about the person. These fabrics were used as beds by wandering tribes, and to sit upon in their tents, and so, by a process of transformation easily understood, and with some modifications of form and texture, to cover the ground as aids to neatness. In time mats made of rushes or of long grass were in part substituted for the woollen or linen draperies as cheaper and a more efficient protection from the humidity of the soil. Thus far had humanity doubtless progressed before the building of great cities, and ere carpets made with great skill and in complicated patterns became a luxury in the houses of the rich and the palaces of kings—that is to say, long before the beginning of authentic history. Carpets were probably first used in India, or at least in those parts of Asia that are considered as the cradle of the race, but they are first heard of in Mesopotamia and in Persia, where they were made with a magnificence ami an elaborateness of design hardly excelled at the present day. The carpets of Sardis, Babylon, Persia and Tyre were famous in remote Biblical epochs. From the far East these articles of royal splendour passed into Egypt and into Greece, where, on account of their great cost, their use could not be general. The Carthaginians used them when the Romans, their traditional enemies, slept on the bare earth and led a life that was of Spartan virtue, but hard and repulsive from a modern standpoint. It does not appear that they were ever manufactured in Italy in the time of the Romans, and they could not conse-

quently be much used except by the emperors and a few of the wealthier nobles, who employed them for decorating banquet halls, covering the couches on which they reclined at meals, or to spread over the throne and dais at imperial audiences. Their use to cover floors w’as exceptional, or at least partial, since the tesselated pavements of Roman houses were works of art which it would have been in doubtful taste to conceal, even by an oriental carpet into which was woven the whole story of Theseus and Ariadne. As to their cost, it is said that the Emperor Nero, paid for a second-hand carpet that had previously belonged to Metellus a sum that might be reasonably estimated at £20,000in the currency of the United Kingdom. It was to be used at his banquets, whose magnificence was only equalled by his debauchery.

After the fall of the Empire carpets continued in use as usual in Persia, Syria and Byzantium, whose wealth and luxury were in singular contrast with the bareness and poverty of Western Europe, where this form of ornament and comfort was unknown and unimagined. French writers say that tapestries began to be manufactured at Rheims, Arras, and St. Quentin as early as the ninth century, but they must have been of poor quality, while their use was limited to hanging on the walls of castles and churches. In the eleventh century manufactories were established at Poictiers, Troyes,and Beauvais in France and in some of the cities of Flanders, the products of the latter soon acquiring

a great reputation. The tapestries of Arras were famous for hundreds of years, and were used in England in Shakespeare’s time, as we know by the famous scene in ‘ Hamlet,’ where the melancholy Dane kills Polonius behind the hangings of his mother’s chamber. The Moors brought carpets into Spain in the eighth century, and in the thirteenth Eleanore of Castile brought specimens with her when she came to England. Their use, however, was not promptly vulgarized among the English, only a few of the rich being able to afford them, and they were still only employed for ornamenting the walls of churches and castles since they were far to pretty to be trodden on. English antiquarians assert that the manufacture of carpets was introduced into the island in the time of Henry VIII., but it did not evidently make rapid progress, as we are informed that Queen Mary had her palace floors strewn with rushes after the fashion of the time, while Queen Elizabeth had but one carpet to her name, though she died possessed of 3000 silk dresses. This solitary carpet the maiden Queen naturally had spread on the floor of her presence chamber as comporting more appropriately with the richness of her silk attire, and as a cleanly precaution against the rushes soiled with the mud of London streets carelessly brought in by the boots of her courtiers.

It is curious to remark the long time it took to bring the carpets into general use. Here was the richest and greatest Queen of her time possessed of but one carpet, though carpets had been in use in royal palaces for at least 3,000 years. Fashions in dress move faster, partly because the material necessary for their display is more easily transported, and partly because in past ages of the world the human race has cared more for the vain decoration of its person than for the elegance, comfort and convenience of its habitation. Take, for instance, silk and the luxury in dress that attend its use. Since its invention there has been no nation, civilised, half-civilised, or even semi-barbarous, that has not used the stuffs made of it with greater or less extravagance, stimulated always by vanity or a vulgar desire for display.