The Ghiordes knot or Turkish knot is one of the two most-used knots employed in knotted-pile carpets

Carpet

A carpet is a textile floor covering consisting of an upper layer of "pile" attached to a backing. The pile is generally either made from wool or a manmade fibre such as polypropylene,nylon or polyester and usually consists of twisted tufts which are often heat-treated to maintain their...

. (The other is the Senneh knot, typical of Persian carpets.) In the Ghiordes knot, the colored weft

Weft

In weaving, weft or woof is the yarn which is drawn through the warp yarns to create cloth. In North America, it is sometimes referred to as the "fill" or the "filling yarn"....

 yarn passes over the two warp yarns, and is pulled through between them and then cut to form the pile. The Turkish knot has a symmetrical structure.The Ghiordes knot is the knot used in the oldest surviving pile carpets, the fragments found in Pazyryk

Pazyryk

The Pazyryk burials are a number of Iron Age tombs found in the Pazyryk Valley of the Ukok plateau in the Altai Mountains, Siberia, south of the modern city of Novosibirsk, Russia; the site is close to the borders with China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.The tombs are Scythian kurgans, that is...

 kurgan

Kurgan

Kurgan is the Turkic term for a tumulus; mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves, originating with its use in Soviet archaeology, now widely used for tumuli in the context of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology....

 burial mounds, in the Altai of Central Asia.

External links

• Rug knots