Rugs and carpets

In the following pages the terms rugs and carpets are used interchangeably. Who can say exactly where one stops and the other starts? It is impossible to differentiate—a covering for the stairs is invariably a "carpet", yet narrow strips quite as long as some stair carpets would be called "rugs".

Floor coverings of a kind must have been one of the earliest comforts of our primitive ancestors, and skins of animals or rushes were probably the first step towards the lush luxury of the modern thick pile all-over floor coverings that we know today.

It is conjectured that the art of carpet making had its earliest beginnings as far back as 5,000 B.C.;1 mats consisting of a simple weave of warp and weft are shown in paintings in the tombs of the Pharaohs; Albert Achdjian's book The Rug has as its first illustration a coloured reproduction of a smooth-faced rug, of the type known as "Kilim", woven in Egypt in the fourth century a.d., which was found in a royal tomb with the colours still bright and clear.