A map showing the geographical distribution of Eastern rug-making reveals the relation of the industry to semi-arid or saline pastures, and makes the mind revert at once to the blankets of artistic design and color, woven by the Navajo Indians of our own rainless Southwest.  Rug weaving in the Old World reached its finest development in countries like Persia, Turkestan, western Afghanistan, Baluchistan, western India and the plateau portions of Asia Minor, countries where the rainfall varies from 10 to 20 inches or even less, [See map page 484.] where nomadism claims a considerable part of the population, and where the ancestry of all traces back to some of the great shepherd races, like Turkomans and Tartars.  These peoples are hereditary specialists in the care, classification, and preparation of wools.[1160] Weavers of rugs form an industrial class in the cities of Persia and Asia Minor, where they obey largely the taste of the outside world in regard to design and color;[1161] whereas the nomads, weaving for their own use, adhere strictly to native colors and designs.  Their patterns are tribal property, each differing from that of the other; and though less artistic than those of the urban workers, are nevertheless interesting and consistent, while the nomad’s intuitive sense of color is fine.[1162]

[Sidenote:  Architecture of nomad conquerors.]

The principles of design and color which these tent-dwellers had developed in their weaving, they applied, after their conquest of agricultural lands, to stone and produced the mosaic, to architecture and produced the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal.[1163] Whether Saracens of Spain or Turkoman conquerors of India, they were ornamentists whose contribution to architecture was decoration.  Working in marble, stone, metals or wood, they wrought always in the spirit of color and textile design, rather than in the spirit of form.  The walls of their mosques, palaces and tombs reproduce the beauty of the rugs once screening the doors of their felt tents.  The gift of color they passed on to the West, first through the Moors of Sicily and Spain, later through Venetian commerce.  Their influence can be seen in the exquisite mosaic decoration in the cloister of Mont Reale of once Saracenic Palermo, and in the Ducal Palace and St. Mark’s Cathedral of beauty-loving Venice.[1164] This has been almost their sole contribution to the art of the world.

Pastoral nomads can give political union to civilized peoples; they can assimilate and spread ready-made elements of civilization, but to originate or develop them they are powerless.  Between the art, philosophy and literature of China on the one side, and of the settled districts of Persia on the other, lies the cultural sterility of the Central Asia plateau.  Its outpouring hordes have only in part acquired the civilization of the superior agricultural peoples whom they have conquered; from Kazan and Constantinople to Delhi, from Delhi to Peking they have added almost nothing to the local culture.