Woven between 1539 to1540 by Iranian artists, the unique carpet of Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili is a symbol of Persian art and mysticism.

Why the Ardabil Carpet was made?
One of the main historical sights in the town of Ardabil in north-west Iran is the shrine of Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili, who died in 1334. The Shaykh was a Sufi leader, who trained his followers in Islamic mystic practices. After his death, his followers remained loyal to his family, who became increasingly powerful.
In 1501, one of his descendants, Shah Isma'il, seized political power. He united Iran for the first time in several centuries and established the Shi'i form of Islam as the state religion. Isma'il was the founder of the Safavid dynasty, named after Shaykh Safi al-Din.
The Safavids, who ruled without a break until 1722, promoted the shrine of the Shaykh as a place of pilgrimage. In the late 1530s, Isma'il's son, Shah Tahmasp, enlarged the shrine, and it was at this time, too, that the carpet was made as one of a matching pair.
The completion of the carpets was marked by a four-line inscription placed at one end. The first two lines are a poetic quotation that refers to the shrine as a place of refuge:
'Except for thy threshold, there is no refuge for me in the entire world.
Except for this door there is no resting-place for my head.'
The third line is a signature, 'The work of the slave of the portal, Maqsud Kashani.' Maqsud was probably the court official charged with producing the carpets. He was not necessarily a slave in the literal sense but called himself one to express humility, while the word for 'portal' can be used for a royal court or a shrine. Perhaps Maqsud meant both, as in this case the court was the patron of the shrine.
The fourth line contains the date 946 in the Muslim calendar, which is equivalent to AD 1539 - 1540.
 
How the Ardabil Carpet was made?
The basic structure of the carpet is hidden by the pile. Like most textiles, it consists of warps and wefts. The warps are the threads running the length of the carpet. The wefts are the threads that run across its breadth. Both warps and wefts are made from silk, which is a very strong fiber when new.
The first stage in production was to tie the warps on to a huge, vertical loom. The weavers then knotted short lengths of wool around the warps to create a row of pile. When the whole row was finished, they inserted three rows of weft over and under the warps to hold the knots in place. The pile was then packed down with a special comb-like beater. Finally, the pile was trimmed with special scissors to achieve a uniform length. This process was repeated again and again until the huge carpet was finished, when a final trimming would have taken place.
The pile is made from wool, which holds dye much better than silk. The pile is very dense - there are about 5300 knots per ten centimeters square (340 knots per square inch). This density allowed the designer to incorporate a great deal of detail, but making such a large carpet with so many knots would have taken a team of skilled weavers several years.
Up to ten weavers may have worked on the carpet at any one time. Most carpet weaving was done at home by women, but for a court commission such as this, the weavers may have been men.
The weavers would have worked from drawings provided by a specialist designer. The patterns are generally symmetrical, but there are often small differences between the two halves. This suggests that the drawings showed the overall pattern required but not the color of each knot.
The pattern includes ten colors. The wool was dyed in batches using natural materials such as pomegranate rind and indigo, so the shades vary slightly. For example, the blue background appears to 'ripple' where darker and lighter batches of wool were used.
The direction of the pile shows that the weavers began at the end with the smaller lamp. The colors are best viewed from that end.

The Ardabil Carpet and the V&A
The two Ardabil carpets were still in the shrine of Shaykh Safi al-Din in 1843, when one was seen by two British visitors. Thirty years or more later, the shrine suffered an earthquake, and the carpets were sold off, perhaps to raise funds for repairs. The damaged carpets were purchased in Iran by Ziegler & Co., a Manchester firm involved in the carpet trade. Parts of one carpet were used to patch the other. The result was one 'complete' carpet and one with no border.
In 1892, the larger carpet was put on sale by Vincent Robinson & Co. of London. The designer William Morris went to inspect it on behalf of this Museum. Reporting that the carpet was 'of singular perfection, logically and consistently beautiful', he urged the Museum to buy it. The money was raised, and in March 1893 the Museum acquired the carpet for £2000.
The second, smaller carpet was sold secretly to an American collector, and in 1953 it was given to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Ardabil carpet hung on the wall in this gallery for many years. In 2006, the Museum created the extraordinary case in the centre of the gallery so that the carpet could be seen as intended, on the floor. To preserve its colors, it is lit for ten minutes on the hour and half-hour.
                                                                 (Source: The Victoria and Albert Museum)