EPIC AND MYTH IN PICTORIAL CARPETS OF QAJAR ERA IN IRAN

The history of Iranian hand-woven carpet dates back to thousands of years and throughout the time, various changes has been seen in the design and motifs. Like other applied arts, carpet has been influenced by cultural and social trends and different eras have seen various designs and weavings. The 19th century is among the times in which Iranian hand-woven carpet reached a high level of variety in its design and motifs. Some of the motifs including the pictorial carpets were first created then by the influence of social, cultural and industrial patterns. The theme of these pictorial carpets was generally taken from Iranian epic and mythological literature. The characters woven in these carpets distinctly represented ore-Islam and Islamic cultural features and the whole composition of them was copied from the popular photo frames of the time and the printing industry. The aim of this paper is to introduce these 19th century carpets. The content of the pictures in these pictorial carpets clearly reveals that social, archeological and cultural factors had the greatest impacts on their formation.