ORNAMENTATION OF CARPETS COKE. 185 



tars — as the richest princes in the world. Their religious tenets 

 formed the basis of that uniformity of taste with which they required 

 the art craftsmen who served them to comply, and the earlier of these 

 artificers and ornamentists appear to have been Copts in Egypt, and 

 Persians in Mesopotamia. The Arabs themselves were not, during 

 the first periods of Mohammedanism, artistic craftsmen, although 

 they were builders. As regards the output of carpets about this time 

 we have, I think, to look to the weavers in Syria, Armenia, Mesopo- 

 tamia, Persia, Bokhara, and Turkestan, whose ornament was chiefly 

 of a geometric style, with Kufic inscriptions. About the beginning 

 of the thirteenth century the Mogul ruler, Jenghis Kahn, " a true 

 leader of man," deported thousands of men of arts and crafts from 

 their homes at Samarkand to work in distant part of his realm for 

 his princes and nobles. " This," the historian writes, " was the be- 

 ginning of the Mogul system of recruiting by force, of compelling 

 the service of artisans, of confiscating industries for the benefit of 

 the nation." Besides his military exploits and his zeal in public 

 works, he gave new impulse to the trade with China. Soon after, 

 his great nephew, Mangu, became Kahn, and lived in splendid com- 

 fort in his capital at Karakoram (long since gone to ruin) in south- 

 east Turkestan — where in front of his throne was placed a silver 

 tree having at its base four lions from whose mouths there spouted 

 into four silver basins, wine, kumis, hydromel, and terasine. At the 

 top of the tree a silver angel sounded a trumpet when the liquors 

 ran short — another instance of Mohammedan luxury which is hard 

 to beat even now. Halagu Kahn, also a great nephew of Jenghis 

 Kahn, undertook big expeditions, and amongst other places captured 

 Bagdad, which still retained fine traditions of Haroun-al-Raschid's 

 flourishing times. Accompanying Halagu were hundreds of Chinese 

 artificers, who are sometimes spoken of as engineers only, but for 

 all that I think it more probable that amongst them were workmen 

 proficient in branches of ornamental industries, and that they intro- 

 duced some fine Chinese ornament into the metal mounting of the 

 spheres, astrolabes, and globes which Halagu's astronomer set up at 

 Bagdad. 



At this time we get indications of high achievements in branches 

 of Mohammedan art — notably so in the metal work, the earlier bits 

 of which are considered to have been made at Mosil, on the Tigris, 

 some 200 miles northwest of Bagdad, whose glory was then on the 

 wane. The ornament of this metal work has a considerable bearing 

 upon that of rather later Persian carpets. With its arabesque key 

 patterns, scrolls, hunters, animals, inscriptions, and floral devices, it 

 is the exemplar of a Mohammedan style that passes on from phase 

 to phase between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, with so 

 little change that it is difficult to classify them according to locality 



