The phono-pictographic elephant's head border becomes more simplified in the later 18th and early 19th century examples. These later renditions of the reciprocal elephant's head complex lose two angled lines per complex. These lost lines of information helped to emphasize the elephant's forehead and trunk. Those extra lines helped an observer to resolve the 'head-on' perspective into a more convincing image of an elephant's head. Their loss represents design de-evolution and I believe indicates a period emphasized by a breakup of traditional values and designs. I believe this was consistent with historical Turkmen experience of the later 18th century and early 19th century, a period of turmoil. I am showing two examples of these later and more simplified border designs below. While the design complex retains it's classical meaning in the late 18th and early 19th century it soon thereafter began devolving into a design complex that was even less meaningful. The degree of meaningfulness, regarding any Turcoman design complex, is of the utmost importance to me and indicates the position of a design complex along the time line of Turcoman history.

The border to the left, slide #11, is from the purple group proto-Chodor main carpet, with velvet like wool and intense coloring, at the V&A museum in London. The other, slide #12, is from the large Bird asmalyk collected by Arthur D. Jenkins, presently situated at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.

I hypothesize that over the centuries the evolution of the bellowing elephant motif mirrored a maturing of the Turkmen's understanding of what mechanism elephant's used to produce their trumpeting sounds. It seems fairly obvious to me that the 14th century Turcoman designer/shaman/weaver felt that these trumpeting sounds were emitted generally from the front half of an elephant's body as reflected in border representation from the 14th century Turcoman rug discussed above. Later in time this stylistic idea evolved into an understanding that trumpeting elephant sounds actually emanated from an elephants head/throat area and not from its whole front end. Through the centuries this phono-pictographic design complex increasingly focused on the elephant's head with one trunk curled up and the other hanging straight down. Elephants curl their trunks when bellowing to keep the air expelled from their lungs going out through their throats and not out their trunks.


In conclusion the narrative quality of classical Turcoman weaving does seem greater than the narrative qualities of later Turcoman weavings. I have described how the red positive image of a gesticulating 13th century Turcoman shaman, wearing an animal tooth or tusk necklace, evolved into a set of four such shamen standing along the four prime meridians transecting the octagonal star centered iconogram of a long dead Turcoman people or tribe of the 14th century.

Turcoman designs evolved to suit the metaphorical needs of the Turcoman people during the classical period. I believe these needs were judged by Turcoman shamen and their Khans. During the 19th century the Turkmen were frequently under attack and were driven from the Akhal oasis in the 1830's. The Russians kept on attacking ultimately culminating in the Tekke's total defeat at the Merv Oasis in 1882. During the 19th century Turcoman weaving became much more of a commercial enterprise because of the Tekke's need to acquire capital to buy arms and materials. The commercialization of their weaving caused the slow loss of design integrity and meaningfulness throughout the 19th century. This was not a smooth decline and several periods of intense commercial weaving created a body of work punctuated throughout with rather cold flat two dimensional weavings mixed in with true dowry weavings of extraordinary quality and beauty.

My method of study has always been inductive so I am constantly looking for rugs that seem 'archetypal'. I have experienced or owned a fair number of such foundational archetypal weavings and these experiences have helped educate me. I feel that the Turcoman rug described above now housed in the Vakiflar Museum in Istanbul is such an archetypal rug and one that has been very much under appreciated.