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A carpet is a textile floor covering typically consisting of an upper layer of pile attached to a backing. The pile was traditionally made from wool, but since the 20th century, synthetic fibers such as polypropylene, nylon or polyester are often used, as these fibers are less expensive than wool. The pile usually consists of twisted tufts that are typically heat-treated to maintain their structure. The term carpet is often used interchangeably with the term rug, although rugs are typically considered to be smaller than a room and not attached to the floor.

Carpets are used for a variety of purposes, including insulating a person"s feet from a cold tile or concrete floor, making a room more comfortable as a place to sit on the floor (e.g., when playing with children or as a prayer rug), reducing sound from walking (particularly in apartment buildings), and adding decoration or color to a room. Carpets can be made in any color by using differently dyed fibers. Carpets can have many different types of patterns and motifs used to decorate the surface. Carpets are used in industrial and commercial establishments such as retail stores and hotels and in private homes. Today, a huge range of carpets and rugs are available at many price and quality levels, ranging from inexpensive, synthetic carpets that are mass-produced in factories and used in commercial buildings to costly hand-knotted wool rugs that are used in private homes of wealthy families.

Carpets can be produced on a loom quite similar to woven fabric, made using needle felts, knotted by hand (in oriental rugs), made with their pile injected into a backing material (called tufting), flatwoven, made by hooking wool or cotton through the meshes of a sturdy fabric, or embroidered. Carpet is commonly made in widths of 12 feet (3.7 m) and 15 feet (4.6 m) in the US and 4 m (13 ft) and 5 m (16 ft) in Europe. Since the 19th and 20th century, where necessary for wall-to-wall carpet, different widths of carpet can be seamed together with a seaming iron and seam tape (formerly it was sewn together) and fixed to a floor over a cushioned underlay (pad) using nails, tack strips (known in the UK as gripper rods), adhesives, or occasionally decorative metal stair rods. Wall-to-wall carpet is distinguished from rugs or mats, which are loose-laid floor coverings, as wall-to-wall carpet is fixed to the floor and covers a much larger area.

The GoodWeave labelling scheme used throughout Europe and North America assures that child labour has not been used: importers pay for the labels, and the revenue collected is used to monitor centres of production and educate previously exploited children.

History

The knotted pile carpet probably originated in the Caspian Sea area (Northern Iran) or the Armenian Highland. Although there is evidence of goats and sheep being sheared for wool and hair which was spun and woven as far back at the 7th millennium, the earliest surviving pile carpet is the "Pazyryk carpet", which dates from the 5th-4th century BC. It was excavated by Sergei Ivanovich Rudenko in 1949 from a Pazyryk burial mound in the Altai Mountains in Siberia. This richly coloured carpet is 200 x 183 cm (6"6" x 6"0") and framed by a border of griffins.

Although claimed by many cultures, this square tufted carpet, almost perfectly intact, is considered by many experts to be of Caucasian, specifically Armenian, origin. The rug is woven using the Armenian double knot, and the red filaments" color was made from Armenian cochineal. The eminent authority of ancient carpets, Ulrich Schurmann, says of it, "From all the evidence available I am convinced that the Pazyryk rug was a funeral accessory and most likely a masterpiece of Armenian workmanship". Gantzhorn concurs with this thesis. At the ruins of Persepolis in Iran where various nations are depicted as bearing tribute, the horse design from the Pazyryk carpet is the same as the relief depicting part of the Armenian delegation. The historian Herodotus writing in the 5th century BC also informs us that the inhabitants of the Caucasus wove beautiful rugs with brilliant colors which would never fade.