BERBER CARPETS OF MOROCCO
BRUNO BARBATTI
The top artistic quality of Berber carpets has already been a source of inspiration to artists such as Paul Klee and Le Corbusier. This book reveals a new slant on the origins of Berber carpets and on the sources and meanings of its motifs. Genuine Berber carpets are not the successors of well known Oriental carpets dating from the Islamic era but similarities in knotting techniques and certain motifs point to common roots harking back to the Neolithic period in Asia Minor. Because textiles wear out over time and a sequence of carpets across millennia no longer exists to prove the point, it is here that an author, for the very first time, presents the results of some in-depth, comparative research initiatives.He links the motifs of Berber carpets to rock art symbols and artefacts created by the first human civilisations, demonstrating that Berber carpets employ the same rules when using symbols and shapes and that there is a stunning similarity of correlation even with the characteristics evident during the Upper Palaeolithic period in Europe or the Neolithic Orient with the Mediterranean basin. The Berber carpet can therefore be considered as a definitive, genuine testimony of this archaic world. The book will speak volumes to anyone who is captivated by the origins of art and for whom the deciphering of symbolic language leads to a deeper knowledge and understanding of true meaning.
