Numbers on back of Oriental rug?

Just looking at the one photo, it doesn’t look handmade. Just my gut reaction from buying lots of rugs. From the style, it doesn’t look very old either. Maybe vintage? But definitely not antique.

How much does the seller want for it? Are you buying to resell or for your own home?

The handwritten numbers dont look like any special marker from my experience. I’d rather see a handwritten tag if it was handmade in another country.

Wonder if anyone else here has another opinion?

–Can you provide a photo of the actual pattern itself?
–That one photo doesnt look antique to me.
–How large is it? Does it feel like wool?

Three years ago, any old wool rug sold very well because people liked the distressed look. But if you good “distressed wool rug” on Amazon, you can buy very cool wool “distressed” rugs for pretty cheap. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=distressed+wool+rugs&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

Only rugs we buy now must be a really incredible pattern. We know it when we see it.

All I can suggest is to look online and see what rugs sell. It’ll give you a idea of what rugs people buy and what they pay. Again, wool rugs arent what they used to be because the market is flooded.

Acquired a 12 foot by 16 foot antique Tabriz carpet once, from an early 1900s house. Didn’t have a car, so I moved it on a bicycle. Slowly.

Last time I visited an antiques fair, dealers were asking about £40 for acid-washed Afghan rugs (the kind of golden-coloured ones that were deep red before they were washed). Not selling. I paid £8 for two unwashed Afghan rugs in good condtion. Local auction house in Nottingham (who have just revamped their website so their results aren’t yet available) regularly sell rugs and small carpets, hung on racks so they can be inspected. Something 12 foot long would be too big for the sale.

When I have seen large carpets at auction they haven’t sold- for example a 20 foot roll of new Axminster failed to start at £80. A carpet 50 years old has half-a-century of household dust embedded in it, plus the life that lives on dust, so it’s even less desirable.

The number is just a stock or pick number by the exporter. Note the characteristic non-US style numbers.

It’s hard to be sure without seeing it in person but it appears to me to be a hand-knotted wool rug imported from Pakistan of the kind carried by big box furniture stores, Overstock.com, etc in the $1,000 – $1,300 range for that size, new.

They are nice rugs – the design has much finer lines than Chinese or machine made rugs and doesn’t look “fuzzy”. Also they have deep colors and when they’re new they have a color shift depending on which way you look at them. The fibers of the pile are very fine and directional. They also have relatively high knots per square inch counts.

The plastic sewn along one edge may have been done to hold the edge down. Rugs can end up with permanently curled edges which is considered a defect.

My experience recently is similar to Jay and Ryanne’s. Ebay does not seem to be the place to sell rugs. Due to the Iranian goods embargo, using the wrong words in a listing can trigger eBay to take it down. People still buy rugs though, I guess just not on eBay.

If you’re interested in learning about rugs them I recommend spending some time looking at them closely and feeling the materials – fronts, back, edges and fringe – at retailers. Look at machine-made ones at Lowe’s and department stores, mass-market handmade Chinese and Pakistani at the furniture stores, and nice handmade ones at the specialty rug stores. There are hundreds of different designs and styles from different parts of the world.

Realised sales, last Saturday.

Didn’t know that Pakistan now has a big carpet weaving industry! I used to see the Indian rugs around- they were rumoured to be woven by prisoners, but they were pretty awful- acid green and red, and roughly woven. Chinese sculpted rugs were also common.

Those would be low prices on those rugs here, I think. Old furniture used to go very cheap. Years ago people made good money filling ocean shipping containers with vintage furniture from auctions in England and selling them to US auctioneers and antiques wholesalers. I vaguely remember a round figure of about US$10,000 to have a container crammed to the gills show up on your loading dock in Philadelphia or wherever. Not sure if that’s still a thing. They used to say that Dear Old Blighty was the storehouse of the world. Do you think you’re running out of stuff? I doubt it.

Oh yeah, I forgot about the junky Indian rugs. We get them here, too. Funny thing about the Pakistani rugs, I’m not so sure Pakistan actually does have a weaving industry. They do certainly have active trade with their neighbors (ok, so maybe not India so much). I would not be surprised if the same rugs came to you in the UK as Iranian because that’s what they really are. Iranian goods cannot be imported into the US. It’s probably easy for the paperwork to get “corrected” for rugs put on the ship in Pakistan and going to the US.

Yes, I wondered whether the Pakistan carpets were Iranian, but apparently they do have a thriving industry, using wool from Australia.

Still plenty of brown furniture around- I saw an 8 foot by 6 foot double-fronted office desk in a thrift warehouse last Friday. The top was covered in red leather with gold tooling. Somehow they’d managed to get it up a flight of stairs (in three parts- the whole must have weighed half a ton).

Another UK-USA trade that was supposed to ne a thing was “Instant ancestors”- a dealer would call round the auction houses and buy up unsold portraits from the 17th and 18th centuries and ship them over for the upwardly mobile in need of an ancestor or two.