The ready availability of wool, the basic stuff of the carpet, and the easy assembly and dismantling of the horizontal and vertical looms used for weaving as well as versatility and portability of the product closely link the origins of the art of the carpet to the nomadic tribes. Turkish tribes played a major role in bringing this art to the West in the great westward waves of migration out of Central Asia.
The art of the carpet underwent a major development in Seljuk Anatolia, making carpets an intensively traded commodity. Many travellers who passed through the Seljuk lands beginning in the 12th century mention the extraordinarily beautiful carpets woven there. Like many other arts, the Ottomans took over the art of the carpet from the Seljuk tradition. The group of Seljuk carpets dating back to the 13th century and known as ‘Konya Carpets’ for the area in which they were found has a special place in the history of carpets and constitutes the best known group after the Pazirik carpet, the oldest known example of a knotted carpet, which was found in a fortress in the Altay Mountains and dates to the 4th-5th century B.C., and the findings from