Nevertheless, the statistics for the year ending June 30, 1902, show this general result: The total value of that year's import of these "whole carpets, Oriental, Berlin," etc., was a trifle below three million dollars. Two and a half millions of this value came to New York with only half a million left to divide between Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and other ports of entry. The supremacy of New York City as the Oriental rug mart for this country is easily manifest, although it is not so easy to estimate what proportion of the two and a half millions of value was in Oriental rugs and what in modern carpets. One expert figures the value of the Oriental rugs imported that year into New York as more than half the total, or perhaps two millions. It is as fair an estimate as may be had. Considerable as this amount may be, it seems much less than might be expected. It may perhaps indicate the cheap grade and low quality of most of our present acquisitions in this category.
The gathering of the rugs by the buyers, in the first instance, involves great hardships, endurance, and even danger; and the deeper their incursions into new and strange territory and unopened and unexplored sources of supply, the more profitable their spoil, but the greater their toil. Beluchistan, as previously suggested, would appear now to be one of the remotest regions yet remaining to yield up a few new treasures to the persevering buyer.
These rugs so gathered to the centres of trade in Constantinople, Tiflis, and other distributing points, quickly find their way thence to New York, and help to make the magnitude and seeming wonderful complexity of the large wholesale depots. Whoever is fortunate enough to have the _entrée_ to any of these great New York storehouses will be first among those who understand the importance, value, and appreciation of the Oriental rug.
In addition to the many patterns, figures, devices and symbols, which are used for ornamentation, rugs and carpets are often embellished with hieroglyphic writing, somewhere in their field, and commonly at top or bottom. Not unfrequently complete borders are thus composed, as is evidenced in old Kirmans. These designs are so graceful in their many angles and occasional curves that they scarcely suggest mere lettering. Such they are, nevertheless; and our English script, with all its loops and turns and recurrent "lines of beauty," would hardly avail for like effective results. It is but another proof of the artistic possibilities of angular lines and geometric figures, so often demonstrated by Oriental weavers.