How To Buy an Oriental Rug

A rug shop in the Old City of Damascus

One of the fringe benefits of being a Middle East correspondent is that my travels in the region have allowed me to start a decent little collection of oriental rugs. This may sound like I'm acting out an imperialist fantasy, but it's actually a fairly practical pastime. Rugs are the perfect piece of furniture for a modern nomad. Originally designed to fit on pack animals, modest-sized rugs easily fold into airplane carry-on; their irregular, hand-made patterns brighten up cookie-cutter hotel rooms; and as exotic gifts, they appease far-flung friends disappointed that you missed their wedding or the baptism of their child.

The first purchase I ever made was a small prayer rug from a souk in the old city of Damascus to celebrate the safe completion of a stint working in Iraq. Syria is a particularly good place to pick up rugs, and has been ever since Silk Road travelers from the great weaving cultures of central Asia passed through this final arc of the fertile crescent on their way to the holy lands. Those days are long gone, but Iranian pilgrims visiting Shia Muslim shrines in Syria still sometimes bring rugs in order to evade restrictions on taking hard currency out of the Islamic Republic.

But even in Syria, rug buying can be pretty intimidating for the beginner. All the seemingly innumerable variations of region, style, and quality make valuating any particular rug seem like the ultimate in bazaar bargaining, and any transaction a potential clash of civilizations between straight-forward, naïve Westerners and wily, opaque Orientals.

Naturally, these clichés are exactly that. Arab traders drive a hard bargain for the same reason everyone else does: money. And anyone who thinks that Western capitalism is inherently transparent should try making sense of the sub-prime mortgage derivatives mess. But if it's a whole lot easier to enter the rug market than get a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, there are still some useful lessons I've learned from buying rugs, which, when taken with a healthy dose of skepticism for metaphor, are also perhaps useful as a guide, if not to the Middle East, than at least to the post-everything era we live in now.

They are going to win because they invented the game. Friends in the industry tell me that the way to start buying rugs is to start doing homework: go look at the catalogs from big auction houses, ask big dealers for their prices, and then hit the small shops and look at a lot of rugs. In other words, develop your own expertise.

I tried this for a while, but one thing got in the way: reality. I've got a job to do and friends I don't see enough and no matter how much time I spend trying to tell the difference between a Iranian Kurdish sumac from an Azeri kilim there's still little chance that I'm going to out-fox a shop owner who has years of experience and generations of rug traders in his blood. One way or another, I'm going to have to pay the pink-face tax.

So play your own game. If the rug works for you, it's a good rug. Conversely, if you got a great price on a rug that doesn't fit in your apartment, you're still a sucker. Early on, I decided that I much prefer simple, single-knot tribal rugs that have a homespun quality to them, as opposed to the grand, Persian, double-knot silk carpets that go well in a living room full of ivory elephant tusks. This may mean my tastes aren't very elevated, but I've saved a lot of money.

But don't care too much. Life is unfair. It's easier to get a job when you already have one, easier to get laid when you already have a girlfriend, and easier to get things when you don't really want them. I did my best-ever bit of bargaining while killing time on a layover in Istanbul in the middle of January. A rug trader lured me into his shop and showed me a beautiful Anatolian kilim. “I'm on my way to Iraq, I don't want to buy a rug,” I kept telling the guy, as the price kept plummeting.

The way you keep from taking feeling embarrassed about an expensive purchase on the one hand, or from wanting any one rug so much that you end up paying through the teeth is to think about the big picture. And the big picture is grim.

The wars and upheavals of the 20th century have almost completely destroyed the nomadic herding cultures that created these wonderful rugs. And although the Antiques Roadshow hasn't shown up in Damascus yet, the heavy hand of globalization has almost finished scouring the souks of Syria for all that is old and good and shipped it off for sale in antiseptic showrooms in London, New York, and Dubai. The rugs that you see before you now are almost certainly the best you will ever see again, artifacts from a time when humans made things of meaning and value. Why not salvage them? On the other hand, Hizballah has re-armed, Israel could attack Lebanon again at any time, Iran is probably building nuclear weapons, the surge in Iraq is mirage, and America is falling apart. Is now the right time to spend $1,000 on a wool mat?

Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus