Who wove them?
Women of Persian Dari and Pashto language groups, the Farsiwan, the Tajiks, the Aimaq, the Taimani, the Belouch, and the Ghuri all wove these “War Rugs” in response to big power conflict.
For a thousand years these Khorasanis or “People of the Sunrise” were the mathematicians of the world. The Persian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017) is the only woman ever, to win the topmost Fields Medal.
She claims her facility began in childhood, in the intricately repeating patterns of the family rugs.
Why were they woven?
Progressive abstraction thru the symmetry of pattern becomes a natural skill in such a refined household. Weavers are drawn to it, Kismet, inevitable: Start with guns and end in patterns.
The aim is to leave the imagery behind and to see a design beyond conflict and war.
The landscape is Magic Realism. The future does not happen, it is made, brought into existence by the act of weaving.
And profit. Income from the sale to feed her family.
