The Rug and the Stag

A spectacular and rare 17th/18th 'Karapinar' rug (Central Anatolia) formerly in the Alexander collection unsuspectedly uncovered the grasslands of early nomads and ancient civilisations.

 The unusual pattern of this carpet has been termed by the famous collector 'Flaming Animal Spirits'.

The design elements can be distinguished in a repeated V-form from which vertically  tree-like forms spring; along the vertical axis two more drawings complete the design-  one stems from the very interior of the V, the other punctuates the field between the Vs in the shape of a urn/vessel/ lamp at whose flanks two bird-like figures take flight.
A classical 'Karapinar' floral meander in the 'ribbon style' frames the scene

'Karapinar' carpet, Central Anatolia, 17th/18th, ex Alexander collection, Sotheby's photocredits

Detail, Sotheby's photocredits

'Karapinar' medallion carpet, the 'ribbon' style, 16th II half, Zaleski Collection

Only one more of type is recorded, now resident in the TIEM and similarly dated. Found in the Keykubad Alaeddin mosque in Konya, it applies a similar composition, but repeated in a specular way from the mid field where a diamond medallion creates the turning point.

Karapinar carpet, Central Anatolia, 17th-18th, TIEM

A correspondence with Safavid 'vase' carpets' iconography has been proposed because of the serrated/sickle leaf element and the vase, and also with some Turkmen weavings (Sotheby's catalogue, 2017).

The Béhague Sickle Leaf carpet, Kirman, 17th 

As to Turkmen weavings, echoes sound in the tree of life Yomud ashmalyk and in the rare Tekke Bird or Animal ashmalyk.

Yomud Tree of Life ashmalyk, 19th, Central Asia

Tekke Bird ashmalyk, 18th, Central Asia

To our survey yet, the only parallel to this 'plumy' feather-like design is in a rarest Anatolian border as seen in the ex-Aita 'Lotto' carpet border. Feathered leaves compose the pattern, in a V type, whose source is still to be found (see Serenissime Trame, p. 129, 2016).

Ex Aita 'Lotto' carpet, Anatolia, II half 16th, Zaleski collection

But, after all, the Alexander item presents a unique aura, quite far from Safavid and Ottoman workshop types. A story may linger herein and awaits to be told.

Overcoming the often cold rules of cataloguing and the difficulties of identifying designs in carpets, randomly imagination intrudes.
The unfamiliar V element can, in fact, be compared with a totally different and distant artifact: a mask found in a Pazyryk barrow, Altai mountains, exhibiting an extraordinary fancy antler attached to a horse mask.

The Iron Age Pazyryk Scythian culture shows typical ritual arrangements in the burial chambers. Horses accompany the dead, mummified and decorated with masks and various pieces of tack. Masks and tacks usually depict animals quintessential of this culture, among these birds, mountain goats, deers, horses, griffins. Masks seem to embody the aggregate nature of mythical beasts. One specifically bears on the head-top imposing antlers: indeed a suggestive parallel to the carpet's V shape.

Horse mask with composite headgear (wings and caprid), Pazyryk boundary, 5th, The Hermitage

 Pazyryk Culture, felt, leather, fur and gold, carved with appliqué work,  barrow 1, Pazyryk boundary, 5th, The Hermitage

Imagination played a great role in the creation of myths and symbols focusing on unique elements. Here the case at point is the deer-stag and his antlers. Creating images beyond reality, rather, creating other 'realities' (Clive Gamble,  Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind, University of Southampton ) seems to be one primal activity of human brain since prehistoric times.

Red stag with antler

Hoofed composite animal (deer-horse-griffin-bird), Xiongnu art?, 206BC-220AD, Shaanxi History Museum

Stag from Pazyryk, The Hermitage

Deer masks exist from the Mesolithic period. They were carefully modelled as headdress or frontlet after deer skull and antler with holes for the eye. The archaeological site of Star Carr in Great Britain has preserved some 24 exemplars. It is not yet given to know whether they suited ancient shamanic type of practises or incarnated symbolic beliefs, whether played as hunting stratagem or a rich symbolic pageantry.
Obviously, the deer was among the primal subsistence animal for the hunters and gatherers of the Stone Age providing them with food, skin, bones and sinews.

Red Deer headgear, Star Carr Yorkshire, Great Britain 8000BC, The British Museum

Esther Jacobson devoted much of her research to the image of the deer among the Altaic and Siberian populations. She postulated the animal to embody the mother goddess in a primeval pantheon. Constant shifting of nature, history and cultural settings caused this image to change meaning and visual representation not easy to identify.

The Early Nomads of Eurasian steppes contributed to such 'ecology of beliefs' (E. Jacobson) testifying various guises for the deer till when mysteriously disappeared from visual artifacts at the turning of the new millennium, the Scythians of the Altaic Pazyryk culture probably the most creative. The steppe Animal Style is the proper language of this various imagery.

Couched gold deer, Scythian culture, 5thBC I half, Ak-Mechet Bay, Crimea, The Hermitage

Also the Pazyryk deer is often 'disguised' as a composite fantastic animal with the body of a horse, a griffinated snout, a tail of a lion and birds or florets sprouting from the antler branches; represented everywhere, on human tattoos as well. Intermingled  cultural influences contributed to the animalistic repertoire of the Scythians, themselves Indo-European people living at the extreme borders of the Persian empire, among such influences the Siberian and that of the Eastern nomadic galaxy.
The extremely varied nature of the Scythian cultural orbit is furthermore melted with shamanic practises more or less prominent in any ancient population, in Indo-Iranian alike (S. Yatsenko, Shamans of Ancient Iranian Nomads 2017).

The Mask was a unique invention among the Altaic and Siberian populations intimately derived from a shamanic ideology. It connected with the world of the spirits, it could become the spirit himself and possessed magical supernatural forces warding off demons and granting favours. Embodiment and/or substitute  spirit/god, the mask enjoyed a great favour also in popularised festivities and rituals up till modern times.
Animals with a paramount significance were mostly used, at times alone at times in an aggregate type reflecting the collective nature of the shamanic spirits (Guo Shuyun, Functions and features of the Shamanic Masks, transl. E. Simoncini 2003).

However, what do Anatolia and Anatolian weavers have to do with all this?

Eurasian steppes

Anatolia offers a long history of  deer presence since its earliest recorded cultures. Deer hunt is recorded since 6000BC in the wall painting of Catal Huyuk and since 11.000BC in Gobekli Tepe in the numerous rests of wild animals bones. Hunters and gatherers all over Eurasia shared similar belief systems and practises, mostly.

Deer and Hunters, Gobekli Tepe 6000BC, Ankara Museum of 

Probably reached by the Indo-European migrations in the 4000BC, an original Anatolian context merged with Indo-European themes. Luwian, Hattian and Hittite culture, all preserve the worship of the deer/stag in the pure form of the animal

Deer finial, Alaca Hoyuk, Hittite, Museum of Anatolian Civilisations Ankara

or in the personification of the Stag God, a god mounting a stag. From a primal deity it later downgraded into the multiplied pantheon of earthly tutelary deities as recorded in the Neo-Assyrian period of Hittite kingdom. In the 13th century BC it enjoyed a particular favour being included in the sacred 'trinity' of the Hittites - the Storm God, the Sun Goddess and the Stag God. Related to the primeval sacred hunt it shifted to indicate wild nature and animals and a Tutelary God of the Land. The stag or his antler alone were used also to indicate royal power as control of the wild natural forces and thence of kingly power. Antlers alone can be found to signify the deity in visual narrative on rock reliefs or in the epigraphs added below.

When did the deer become a stag? The male probably replaced the once female deer - when cultures and societies changed from a matriarchal to a patriarchal order replacing ancient cult of the feminine creative principle with the masculine institutionalised violence some 6000 years ago (as to Gimbutas, whose theories are though questioned). But historians are not clear on the terminology. Obviously, the antler of the male was a very immediate image.

Isolated deer antler, Hittite relief, from B. J. Collins, Animal Mastery in Hittite Texts and Iconography 2010

Texts from the neo-Hittite period (1180-800BC) testify the Stag God to be celebrated seasonally in various provinces of the empire with proper rituals and festivals (kilans). It appeared in cult dramas and ritual combats played by men disguised as wild animals. Such shows presumably referred to hunting magic and its symbolic meaning as relics of a distant past.

Deer hunt

Stag standards are mentioned  to be carried in processional rites during the tutelary deities festivals.

Bronze sun disk/standard encircled with deer and bulls,  Hattian, Alacahöyük 2500-2250 BCE Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara

The complex ritual prescribed offerings made to the deity to obtain favours, aside symbols of hunt, royalty and deference. Libations were also poured with ritual vessels, while rython in the form of the animal god were presented to the god for his own use. The splendid Schimmel rython gives voice to the written texts.

The Schimmel Deer Rython, Hittite 14th-13th BC, The Metropolitan Museum

Drawing by C. Koken from R.M. Boehmer, "Reliefkeramik von Bogazkoy," as modified by H. Guterbock in Anadolu 22

It is interesting to note that already in this early period characteristic features became meaningful abstract signs substitute of the whole image - antlers of supernatural protection; vases of libations to obtain divine favour; standards of ceremony and totemic value.

The continuity of the deer imagery in Central Anatolia after the fall of the Hittites during the Phrygian and Lydian kingdoms is verified by various artifacts, the parallel slow transformation into an amuletic image entering folk traditions as well. The arrival of the monotheistic religions in Anatolia -  Christianity and later Islam - would have erased such vestiges of heretical beliefs but preserved them in the popular traditions and lore.

Pitcher with hunt scene, Phrygian-Lydian kingdoms, central Anatolia 800-600BC,  Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Stag amultet, late Phrygian-Lydian bronze, 800-600BC Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Anatolian festivals in the form of cult dramas, ritual combats and re-enactments of meaningful ancient practises were performed by men disguised with masks and outfit of wild animals (P. Taracha, Religions of the Second Millennium p.68, 2009). Spread allover the empire, they imbued local traditions and found safe recovery from extinction therein.

Interestingly enough, R. Ettinghausen, addressing the theme of the dance with zoomorphic masks in some painting from the 17th century Safavid and Ottoman area, stressed the pictorial and literary evidence of spectacles/dances enacted by persons disguised as animals in the Islamic world from the Umayyad period into the 13th century, and, before, in Parthian artifacts. He did not hesitate to link them to 'earlier stages of historical developments when such dances had a religious significance'. Their appearance on luxury goods (bronze, metal work, lustre and polychrome pottery) verifies the appeal such popular forms of entertainments had on the wealthy and court patronage. The presence of a large stag in the form of a hobby-horse is mentioned in the ceremonies for a royal circumcision in Edirne in the early 17th century, a ritual of fertility (R. Ettinghausen, The Dance with Zoomorphic Masks and Other Forms of Entertainment seen in Islamic Art 1965).

Professor Metin And, pioneer researcher on Turkish traditional theatre, provides further information. He published several studies tracing the Central Asian shamanistic, ancient Greek, Anatolian, and Turkish elements in the folk-dances of present-day Turkey (T. S. Halman, The Evolution of Turkish Drama in Rapture and Revolution 2007).
The stag is main character of the Stag Play, a dance performed all over Anatolia in rural contexts  and, like many of these shows, conveys the central incident of Death and Resurrection (excruciatingly, the author does not  add any detail on the performance nor mask details differently from what he does for other plays). The performer may be completely outfit as the animal or wear only a mask.

Missing pertinent visual documents, shamanic masks of deer from other parts of Eurasia can help imagination. At time it is a real shaman, at times figures in festivals .

The shaman masked in deer (debated reconstruction), Les Trois Fréres Caves, France, 16.000BC 

Deer mask dance, Ulaan Bataar, before 1937

Siberian Evenk shaman 18th II half , Gottingen Museum Georg August University. In this case the shaman wear only the antler of the deer on the front of the dress.

Metin And informs also, quite interestingly, that the Stag Play was much in use in Istanbul in the 17th and 18th century confirming an occasional exchange of themes between the official urban theatre and the popular folk one which, otherwise, are distinct.   

Consequently, there does exist some evidence of the presence in the Ottoman and Anatolian context of the deer mask, which could be simplified with the antler.

The presence of two carpets dated to this very period with a design much resembling deer antler does not seem accidental yet pertaining to a long rooted tradition and possibly to the resurgence of the theme in that period.


Some last remarks
The tree-like forms stemming from the antlers - Although they should depict the secondary off shots of it, like hinted in the bottom line where they quite well imitate the large palmate secondary branches, in the other lines they rather suggest straight tree-forms.

Anyhow, be it a weaving feature or a subtle suggestion, it seems communicating a second nature of the antler. Typical of the Siberian-Altaic belief  deer's antlers and mountain goat's long curved horns reflect the image of the Tree of Life, the World Tree and/or World Axis. Siberian shamanism and Scythian traditions, as seen for example in the Iron Age Pazyryk culture, created a composite symbolic imagery that virtually decanted in successive generations of nomads.

Bird -  Plausible birds depicted in the light-blue and white forms, they bear a composite meaning. Soul of the dead in Islamic faith, the bird is either the Nomad's Great Eagle perching on the World Axis, either the future shaman's soul raised in nests on his branches, or the metaphor of the Spirit Realm, just to mention some roles played by this animal.

Vase - Be the design of the carpet connected to the  Death and Resurrection theme, as if inspired by the  contemporary Stag Play, the urns/lamps/vases should perform  the duty of libations to the principle of rebirth and/or symbolise the light of the final destination.

Vertical central motif - logically suggesting the World Axis for its collocation in the design economy, it may recall a processional standard to be displayed in the ritual as in ancient festivals (Peter Stone’s book, The Oriental Rug Lexicon gives the following definition of the Axis Mundi design: “A pervasive motif in oriental rugs, occurring in many variations, naturalistic, geometricized, and abstract. Generally, any primary design motif with a long vertical axis and horizontal or upward pointing limbs.”)
Plausibly yet, it may be a remind of a composite headgear/mask as well.

Most significantly, it has been remarked that a theriomorphic religious idea was laid to rest at the foundation of Anatolian religion (Alberto R. W. Green). The Animal Style of the steppe found there consonances and Shamanism added pivotal collective bonds.


The only Anatolian carpet bearing similarities of content/design is held in Istanbul.
It displays a ritual composition too  - A Tree of Life/World Axis with perching birds flanked by fantastic animals with griffinated snout, wings, antlers and multiple legs.It could be speculated that the rectangular green design on their back signifies a saddle to be mounted.
Fantasy can ride.

Anatolian animal carpet, 15th (?) Vakiflar Museum Istanbul

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On the subsistence of shamanic practises in Anatolia throughout its long history there is no doubt, specifically of Central Asian shamanism. This set of beliefs was brought along by the Turks from their supposed fatherland in inner Mongolia during their moving westwards.
Probably, they came in contact with it during their living in the Rouran khaganate, North of China, bordering what are today thought to be a cradle of Siberian-Altaic shamanism:Tungusic, Siberian and Samoyedic people practiced it.
"As for true shamanism.....we do know from Altaic mythology and ethnography that it did emerge as an institution among the Turkic tribes in this region ( E. Jacobson,  Shamans, Shamanism and Anthropomorphising Imagery, 2001)

Turk epic shows the Turks emerging in the Great History within the Rouran khanate and creating a vast dominion from the Chinese limits to the Sassanian empire. They replaced the Scythian power (9thBC-2ndCE), looted their burials and partly appropriated customs and practises of the subjugated populations. The Turk empire vanished in around the 8th century.

Aside the significant influences received from the great empires of the day, the Sassanian, the Byzantine and the Chinese, they maintained important traditional features even despite conversion to Islam starting from the 8th century (The History of Islam in Turkestan, in Frank Kressing "Shamans, Mullahs, and Dervishes –Islam and Mysticism in Turkestan).
The Turk Oghuz, forefathers of the Turkomans, the Azeri and the Turk of Anatolia and Balkans converted in circa the 10th (Haas 1987). Some shamanic practises were embedded and accepted in Islam thanks to sufism, a mystical ascetic branch of Islam.
"Sufism emerged as a religious lore almost concomitantly in several Arabian countries and in Iran. Its well-known democratic attitudes (especially in its first stage of emergence until approximately the 12th century, and compared to the Muslim orthodoxy), as well as an attitude of flexibility and compromise towards local pre-islamic belief systems being popular among different peoples enhanced its wide distribution in the countries of the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Caucasia and Middle Asia” (Demidov 1988).

Shamanistic features like healing practises, magical flight, technique of ecstasy, mastery over fire and weather are recorded in a long literature composed by Byzantine envoys (6th century), Persian and Arabic geographers, Tang Chinese Annals and European travellers - Mahmud al Kashgari, Rashid al Din, W. of Rubruk and the envoys of Louis XI among them - throughout the Mongol, the Ilkhanid and the Timurid period in diverse regions of Central Asia. The Ghuz and the Turks are the most mentioned aside the Mongols and other Turkic nomads of Central Asia.

One last mention may be dedicated to the stag imagery in the Iranic-Persian world. Cultural connections are in fact most probable in the ancient composite scenario. While the deer has not a prominent role in Iranian mythology (Avestan and Vedic texts), the deer/stag is mostly present from the Achemenid period onwards, in the Sassanian specifically in the stag hunt , a royal activity par excellence.

Deer ornament, Axhemenid period, 500BC, Oxus treasure, British Museum

Of this very period we do have carpet deer representations like one held in the Al Sabah collection.

Stags in a row, carpet, eastern Iran (?), 5th-6th AD, Al Sabah collection

While the authority of Boris Marshak favours for a royal Stag Hunt depiction in this stag row, Spuhler devises some interpretation problems because the curled legs in a rest-like position do not combine with the right up head and the stretched neck ribbon, indicating rather a moving row.
It may be added that couched animals are easily found in the animal steppe imagery. Specifically, curled legs deers are typical of Neolithic Mongolian steles and later Scythian art. Although quite distant from each other, these images furthermore testify a dramatic spread of the deer imagery in Eurasia to which each  culture added its unique content.
The Al Sabah carpet antlers if seen from the front would be pretty similar to the Anatolian carpet V pattern. We would not go further to interpret the Alexander pattern as a typical Persian row of stags because of the obvious priority Anatolian connections do have.

But a procession of stags could yet apply to the ancient Anatolian festivals, stacked antlers a tenable abstraction.

Inner Mongolia, Neolithic stele

Gold cast Deer, late 7th, Komstroskaian kurgan, Norther Caucasus, Hermitage

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