TEHRAN - Two monumental 16th-century Ardabil carpets--woven in the Safavid court for the shrine of Sheikh Safi al-Din Ardabili--now lie thousands of kilometers from their home, housed separately in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). 

Once a matched pair and among the finest products of Iran’s golden age of carpet weaving, the works were removed from the Ardabil shrine in the late 19th century after earthquake damage and sold abroad. Today, they are celebrated centerpieces of Western museums, while Iran displays only a contemporary reproduction in Ardabil.

Commissioned in 1539–40 during the reign of Shah Tahmasp I, both carpets bear identical signatures attributing the work to Maqsud of Kashan, believed to have designed and overseen the project at a royal workshop, likely in Tabriz. They are also inscribed with a verse from Hafez: “I have no refuge in this world other than thy threshold / My head has no resting place other than this doorway.”
The pair belongs to a period when court-supported workshops and skilled designers transformed carpet weaving into one of Safavid Iran’s most celebrated arts. Many masterpieces of that era survive today not in Iran but in international museums.

The larger and more renowned example, now owned by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, is described by the museum as “the world’s oldest dated carpet and one of the largest, most beautiful and historically important.”
The colorful carpet features a unified design built around a vast yellow medallion, flanked by two hanging lamps and surrounded by intricate scrollwork rendered in natural dyes. The dense pile, about 5,300 knots per ten square centimeters, contains an estimated 26 million knots in total.

The V&A notes that the carpet was still inside the shrine when British visitors saw it in 1843. Following the earthquake that damaged the complex roughly three decades later, it was sold to a Manchester firm and eventually put on the market in 1892. The museum acquired it in 1893 for £2,000 after designer William Morris praised its “singular perfection.”

In the late 19th century, the London carpet underwent extensive restoration, during which sections of both original Ardabil carpets were used to complete it--further altering the pair’s integrity. Today it lies in a custom-built display case in the V&A’s Jameel Gallery, illuminated for brief intervals to preserve its colors.

LACMA holds the second surviving carpet, measuring 718 by 400 centimeters, described as “spectacular” and woven with wool pile on a silk foundation. 
Like its mate in London, the LACMA carpet bears the date 946 AH (1539–40) and the signature of Maqsud of Kashan. The museum explains that the pair was likely a royal commission for Shah Tahmasp, intended for the Safavid ancestral shrine at Ardabil.

LACMA’s account emphasizes the carpets’ shared origin and notes that their exceptional scale, quality, and inscriptions point to production at a royal Tabriz workshop. Its composition mirrors the London carpet’s medallion-and-lamp design, though the Los Angeles version is displayed with less restoration and remains closer to its original proportions.

Today, Iran preserves only a modern replica in the Sheikh Safi al-Din Ardabili Museum.
While millions visit them in London and Los Angeles, but far from the shrine for which they were created nearly five centuries ago.

AM