Turkmen Bag Face (1800s): Art, History and Details

Turkmen Bag Face (1800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The front of this bag, called a bag face, displays the distinctive hallmarks of the Saryk tribe. The main guls, or lobed motifs, are subdivided in quadrants and alternate with angular minor guls in staggered rows. It is the oldest known weaving of the Saryk tribe, with a soft red ground color and white cotton and magenta silk pile highlights. Essential storage containers, bags were suspended from wall trellises inside tents and transported by pack animals during seasonal migrations. Bags were woven in one piece with pile on the upper part for the front face and plain weave on the lower part for the back face, and then folded and sewn along both sides.

Object facts

• Title: Turkmen Bag Face
• Date: 1800s
• Culture: Turkmenistan, Saryk tribe of the Turkmen people (1850-1899), 19th century
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Wool, silk, cotton; 252 symmetrical rug knots per square inch
• Dimensions: Overall: 88.9 x 127 cm (35 x 50 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 2008.223

Collection credit

Gift of Arlene C. Cooper

Further reading listed by the museum

• Thompson, Jon, and Thomas J. Farnham. Timbuktu to Tibet: Exotic Rugs & Textiles from New York Collectors. 2008.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.