WHAT WE LEARN FROM TURKMEN CARPETS
Authors: AZMUN Yusuf 
Published: December 2018

Despite
an ever-increasing interest in Turkmen carpets in the West, little information
was available about them until recently. Most studies are about the aesthetic
and technical aspects of the carpets and rugs. This article looks at these
carpets from a linguistic point of view. Initially, the article deals with the
etymology of the word halı meaning ‘carpet’ which has been the subject of an ongoing dispute
between Turkic and Iranian carpet experts who are not linguists. While studying
the Turkmen verb yügürt-
meaning ‘to begin weaving’ in carpet terminology, we
found the root of the word yurt originally meaning ‘abandoned tent site’
in the word used as yügürt &gt;
yüwürt in
Turkmen dialects. This
term also helped us find the root of the archaic Türkic word yurç
meaning ‘the husband’s brother’. For getting married or tying the
knot in some Turkic languages the term nikah kıymak ( nikah kəsmək) is
used. Nikah is an Arabic word meaning ‘marriage’ and Turkic words kıymak
and kəsmək mean ‘to cut, to slice’. No one has ever paid attention
to this anomaly about nikah being cut. The equivalent of nikah in
Old Turkish is tügün which means ‘knot’. Therefore, to get married
in Old Turkish is to cut the knot. The fact that the act of cutting the
knot is related to carpet weaving, could be observed in Turkmen marriage rituals; when a mullah is
conducting the marriage ceremony, a woman constantly opens and closes a pair of
scısors as if cutting a knot. The most important pattern of the Turkmen rugs
and carpets is called gȫl meaning ‘lake’. Every Turkmen tribe has
its own gȫl. This pattern is related to the yir sub ‘earth and
water’ cult of Shamanism. The concept of earth in Shamanism is expressed by the
mountain that is regarded as a sacred place. Animals that live in the mountains
are thought to be awliyas or saints. For example, the mountain
ram called Konurbaş is an awliya and it bears the name of
a mode in Turkmen folk music called konurbaş mukamı. In Turkmen carpets
mountain is used as a pattern in the form of an Old Turkish runic letter t/ta.
For the pattern of home which is also a sacred place, the letter
b/eb is used. In the Turkmen Sahra region of northern Iran, at the foot of
the mountain called Gökçe Dağ, near the historic graveyard of Halid
Nabi, there were watermelon-shaped tombstones with symbols on them. These
symbols are similar to some of the patterns seen on the Turkmen carpets. Many
carpet experts have written about the relationship between carpet and music,
but no one has reached a concrete conclusıon. This article proves that the name of the carpet in the oldest Turkic texts
had derived from the word kopuz, the oldest musical instrument of the
Turkic peoples. The Turkmen carpet loom, like a stringed musical instrument has
a bridge and a stick functions as a peg by keeping the weft tight. The weft
resembles strings of a musical instrument and in Persian it is called tār, a
word that is noticed in the names of musical instruments like dutār, a
two-stringed musical instrument and sitār a three-stringed instrument.
The name of a carpet loom in Turkmen is gurama/ kurama which denotes
setting up and tunıng.