What is an Antique Rug?

What makes an antique rug an antique besides age?

The process by which old rugs were made is different from how they are made in factories nowadays. A nine by twelve hand-woven rug would take no less than three thousand hours of weaving. That's not even including the amount of time it takes to prepare, dye, and design the pattern, or the spin the wool and set the loom.

Antique rugs are generally hand-woven on a loom. In the old days, especially in rural areas where nomadic rug-making was born, these looms were made of wood and probably weren't perfectly straight.

A loom is strung with threads running vertically called warps. (The warps are generally wool, cotton, or silk.) Then one ties a loop around the first pair of warps to create the first knots. One by one the knots are made, altering color to weave the design. The knots are created row by row, and at the end of a row, what's called the weft is inserted to hold the structure while the next row is knotted. And so on.

Many former nomadic or pastoral weavers of yesteryears are now in villages, and many of those are now in cities. But i a rug is truly antique, it must have been made in this fashion or in a similar way- not the high-speed metal factory-work that you find in modern times.