Qom (Ghom) silk: material, foundation and sheen

By Hassan Farahani, MMA Last reviewed: 1 November 2026

Updated November 2026 · sources linked

At a glance

The Encyclopaedia Iranica counts Qom (Ghom) among the places where carpets are made entirely of silk: warp, weft and pile.
The sheen has a physical cause: the silk fibre has a roughly triangular cross-section that reflects light in many directions.
Silk in Qom is younger than its reputation: one master relates that around 1961 everyone there knotted wool. In 2007 a 65-raj carpet with a silk warp was regarded as the leading product.
Oral history describes an older dyeing practice using dugh and yoghurt, and a rinsing of the silk in qanat water.
None of the sources examined establishes where the silk of today’s Qom carpets comes from.

A Qom silk carpet (Ghom, Qum, Kum; Persian قم) ideally consists of a single material. This sets it apart from almost all other Persian carpets, which knot wool on cotton. This article explains what is established about this silk: its origin in Iran, its grading, its structure in the carpet and the reason for its sheen. Where only the trade speaks, this is stated explicitly.

A carpet entirely of silk

The Encyclopaedia Iranica names three places in central Persia where carpets are knotted entirely of silk: Kashan, Nain and Qom (Iranica, Carpets ii). The English Wikipedia is more cautious. High-quality carpets from Kashan, Qom, Nain and Isfahan, it says, have a pure silk pile (Wikipedia: Persian carpet). This sentence says nothing about the foundation.

The difference matters. A carpet can have a silk pile on cotton or a silk pile on silk. Britannica describes this for Kashan: weaving is done on a silk or cotton foundation, depending on the material of the pile (Britannica: Kashan carpet). For Qom, no such structural description exists in the specialist literature.

Auction practice shows the usual picture for modern pieces. In two sales of 2026, Chiswick in London describes signed silk Qums, each with a silk foundation and a full silk pile (Chiswick, Lot 84; Chiswick, Lot 76). The Dorotheum lists its Qom lots as “pure silk” (Dorotheum, 2020).

Examples in the trade: Qom silk rugs at BazarPort (our own shop)

Video from Hassan Farahani’s YouTube channel (Teppichbazar) Playing loads the video from YouTube (Google), which transfers data to Google.

Silk in Qom: since when?

The reputation as a silk town is younger than one might think. Mohammad Jamshidi, born in 1947/48, began knotting at the age of 14. In an oral-history session in 2022 he said that at that time everyone knotted wool carpets; silk was not customary (Hawzah News). Only a certain Mr Rajabian, he said, was already making good silk carpets. Jamshidi gradually changed over to silk. He gave his reason himself: silk does not deteriorate over the years and is not attacked by moths as wool is.

A company portrait on the carpet portal Carpetour dates the beginning of silk earlier, to about the 1940s (carpetour.net, the firm’s own statement). At first, it says, few colours and medium densities were usual, later over 60 and even over 100 raj. How the two statements relate to each other is discussed in the article Qom carpets: history and origins.

An economic study in the journal Goljaam shows the later state of affairs. For 2006/07 it names a carpet of 65 raj with a silk warp and a pile of silk and kork as the leading product of Qom province, for both production and export (Goljaam). Its index of export competitiveness stood at 0.93. The study assesses this as competitive. The leading product was thus not a pure silk carpet but a mixed form. More on this in the article Qom (Ghom) in kork wool on a silk warp.

The structure of the carpet

A knotted carpet has three thread systems. The warp runs lengthwise and ends in the fringes. The weft runs crosswise and holds the rows of knots. The pile consists of the knotted threads that form the surface. In a pure silk carpet all three are of silk.

Component	Function	Material in a pure silk Qom	Evidence
Warp	carries the carpet, forms the fringes	silk	Chiswick (foundation “silk”)
Weft	secures the rows of knots	silk	Chiswick (foundation “silk”)
Pile	forms design and surface	silk	Chiswick, Dorotheum
Knot	links pile and warp	not described for Qom in the specialist literature	–

An older example from Qom shows the same construction. The Safavid carpet from the mausoleum of Shah Abbas II in the Victoria and Albert Museum has a white silk warp and a pale yellow silk weft. The pile is knotted silk (V&A, T.438-1976). It is dated 1082 AH (1671/72). A direct workshop connection with modern Qom carpets is not thereby established.

Silk as warp has a technical advantage. The Wikipedia article on the Persian carpet cites the higher tensile strength of silk warps (Wikipedia: Persian carpet). A thin, strong warp thread allows more warps per centimetre. This is the precondition for very high knot densities. How these are measured is explained in the article on knot density in Qom carpets.

Where the silk comes from

Iranian sericulture

The Iranica article on silk names Gilan as the most important rearing region. Gilan, it states, supplies around 80 per cent of Iranian production, Mazandaran 12 to 13 per cent (Iranica, Silk ii). The rest comes from Azerbaijan, Khorasan and some oases of central Iran, among them Kashan, Natanz and Yazd. The article appeared in 1983. More recent production figures were not found in any source examined.

The history of this silk has a deep rupture. The silkworm disease pébrine reached Iran in the 1860s. Gilan produced around 1,000 tonnes in 1854 and 1864, but only 99 tonnes in 1877. Only imported Japanese eggs made a recovery possible from 1890. For 1908 the source gives around 500 tonnes a year. The old Iranian silkworm breeds disappeared in the process. All figures: Iranica, Silk ii.

For Qom this means: when silk carpets were made there in the 20th century, Iranian silk was already a rebuilt industry based on imported silkworms. None of the sources examined establishes whether Qom workshops today use Iranian or imported silk. This question remains open here.

Three grades

In the Iranica, Jasleen Dhamija describes the grading of silk from Gilan and Mazandaran. It is reeled in three grades (Iranica, Carpets ii):

Grade	Persian	Use according to the Iranica
finest	dana	knotted pile
medium	hashti	warps of very fine wool carpets
coarsest	pudi	wefts of silk carpets

This classification explains why a silk carpet does not consist of “one” silk. Pile and weft can be of distinctly different qualities.

The sources disagree

Two Iranica articles paint a different picture. The carpet article expressly names Qom as a place of pure silk carpets (Carpets ii). The silk article by Bromberger and Bazin lists the silk-carpet centres Arak, Isfahan, Kashan, Kerman, Tabriz and Yazd, but not Qom (Silk ii). The silk article appeared in 1983, the carpet article in 1990. One explanation could be that Qom was still regarded as a young centre at the time. This is a conjecture.

Why silk shines

The characteristic shimmer of a silk carpet has a physical cause. The fibre of the mulberry silkworm has a triangular cross-section with rounded corners. It is 5 to 10 micrometres wide. Its flat sides reflect light in many directions (Wikipedia: Silk). The thread is 75 to 80 per cent fibroin, a protein, coated with 20 to 25 per cent sericin, the so-called silk gum.

For buyers this sheen is a central feature. A study in the journal Jelve-ye Honar analysed more than 100 new Qom carpets in 2017 and surveyed buyers. The sheen of the silk ranked, alongside colour, fineness and regular knotting, among the most important factors (Ensani).

In the carpet this effect varies with the angle of view. One dealer describes in Qom silk a glow that changes with the viewer’s position (rugs.net, trade claim). No specialist source describing this effect specifically for Qom carpets was found.

Silk has a further property that can be seen. It permits very fine drawing. Britannica describes experts who took the tomb carpets of Shah Abbas II for velvet (Britannica: Rug and carpet – Persia). The Wikipedia article on the Persian carpet calls silk piles exceptionally fine, with a short pile and an elaborate design (Wikipedia: Persian carpet).

Colour on silk

Silk takes up dye differently from wool. No scholarly source on the dyeing of Qom silk was found. There is, however, an account from practice. In 2022 Jamshidi described how some colours used to be dughi (Hawzah News). The silk, he said, was dyed with dugh, a yoghurt drink, and with yoghurt. Afterwards it was laid in water from a qanat, an underground irrigation channel. The longer the water ran over it, the stronger the colours became. Only qanat water had this effect. This is knowledge from experience, not a chemical analysis. In the same session the Qom researcher Mohsen Mohseni named rang-e dughi as a term that belongs in a dictionary of the Qom carpet.

Trade claims about the range of colours differ widely. Rugman speaks of more than 40 colours in a silk carpet (rugman.com, trade claim). The Iranian portal Beytoote gives four to six colours as usual and more than forty in newer pieces (beytoote.com). Bizsan describes a classic palette of ivory, red, navy and turquoise as well as a newer trend towards pastel shades (bizsan.hu, trade claim). Auction houses confirm both: in 2026 Chiswick describes a garden carpet in soft pastel shades (Chiswick, Lot 76).

The auction house Nagel describes a particular technique. In a Qom from the Jamshidi workshop, two threads of different colours were worked into a single knot. This produced a mottled ground, called “salt and pepper” in the catalogue (Nagel via veryimportantlot).

The weaknesses of silk

Silk is strong but delicate. It is among the strongest natural fibres, yet loses up to 20 per cent of its strength when wet. Too much sunlight weakens it (Wikipedia: Silk). It absorbs around 11 per cent moisture.

Christie’s names the practical consequence. Silk, it says, is more delicate than wool, more prone to abrasion and sensitive to moisture. If a silk carpet gets wet and is dried incorrectly, the foundation becomes dry and brittle, and splits develop (Christie’s Collecting Guide). Wikipedia, too, calls silk piles less hard-wearing. For this reason, it says, they are often used as wall hangings (Wikipedia: Persian carpet).

For you as an owner this means: a silk Qom does not belong in a thoroughfare or in direct sunlight. Wet cleaning should be left to specialists. More on this in the article Caring for silk carpets properly.

How to recognise genuine silk

The trade cites simple tests. In a pure silk Qom, it says, the fringes are also of silk, because they are the ends of the warp (rugs.net, trade claim). A cotton foundation rules out a pure silk carpet, but not a silk pile.

Methods from textile conservation are more reliable. The Canadian Conservation Institute describes the burn test and microscopy. Silk shrinks away from the flame, self-extinguishes and smells of burnt hair. Cellulose fibres such as cotton continue to burn and smell of paper (CCI Notes 13/18). The institute stresses that neither test is conclusive on its own. The article Recognising fake Qom silk treats this in detail.