Right: Ziegler carpet, West Persia, late 19th century. 3.45 x 3.81m (11'4" x 12'6"). Below right: Watercolour on paper cartoon for a sickleleaf and rosette border.

learn exactly what a ‘Ziegler Mahal’ is and how to identify one when I saw it. But it has not worked out that way. So I asked fellow rug dealers what they thought. In my neighbourhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tony Kitz does good business in antique decorative carpets. When I asked him how to identify a genuine Ziegler he said that it had never been clear to him, but that Zieglers might be a little finer and have blue wefts. He went on to suggest that maybe it was not even possible to identify Ziegler Mahals. I also spoke to David Amini and Jim Ffrench of Beauvais Carpets in New York, a respected showroom featuring upper-end decorative and classical carpets. They agreed that what was considered to be a Ziegler carpet in the market was “extremely arbitrary.” Jim Ffrench, who for some time ran the carpet department at Christie’s New York, suggested that any ‘nice’ Mahal with a large-scale design and soft colours was liable to be attributed to Ziegler & Co. However, he was quick to point out that we have no way to sort out which of them may have been commissioned by Ziegler, which may have been market goods bought-in and re-sold by Ziegler, or which may have had nothing at all to do with the compan. At one time,” he said, “Ziegler was a useful trade term which alerted knowledgeable rug people to a really good Mahal. But it has been overused and has become meaningless.” If there is any hope of ever being able to identify antique Ziegler carpets with certainty, it lies in a handful of carpets in known collections. One carpet that was sold at Christie's London on 13 May 2001 for $92,000 was said to have been owned by Sigmund Freud. I have read elsewhere about “Ziegler carpets” in the Getty Collection, and about Christie’s famous 1984 sale at Elveden Hall in Norfolk (HALI 24, pp.16-29) that included some genuine Zieglers. One may hope that eventually someone will be able to examine documented Ziegler carpets and will nail down unique signature features by which other Ziegler products can be identified. But, until then, we are faking it. So what about newly woven carpets that are sold under the Ziegler handle? My own company recently received two beautiful examples of new ‘Zieglers’, sent on approval by Renaissance Carpets of New York. Woven with sparsely-drawn designs and soft colours. they are just as Jim Ffrench described the old carpets that are most often labelled as Zieglers. So if we cannot be certain which antique carpets are Zieglers, how can manufacturers weave new carpets that deserve the name? The notion is preposterous. However, if antique rug dealers cannot support calling an old Sultanabad rug a Ziegler, and yet they do so every day, does that not give licence to producers of new rugs to do the same? Throughout the world, retailers and manufacturers alike call certain of their new carpet lines Zieglers. In the 1990s, Black Mountain Looms broke new ground by producing ‘Ziegler’ carpets in India, Turkey and Romania. Today, Peter Linden Oriental Rugs in Dublin, Ireland offers new ‘Zieglers’ setting the word in quotation marks. One of Linden’s ‘Ziegler’ carpets is a new Pakistani piece with a blue field and an all-over pattern of scrolling palmettes which an online advertisement says has 325 knots per square inch – approximately three timesas many as the original Zieglers. Jacobsen Oriental Rugs in the United States illustrates a new Pakistani rug, calling it a ‘Ziegler’ and saying that it is “A variant Sarouk design with

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