Why are the red, yellow, and blue colors used in the world’s oldest knotted-pile carpet still so vivid and bright, even after almost two and a half thousand years? Researchers have now been able to uncover the secrets behind the so-called Pazyryk carpet using high-resolution x-ray fluorescence microscopy.

The Pazyryk carpet is the world’s oldest example of a knotted-pile carpet and is kept at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The carpet, which was made out of new wool at around 400 BC, is one of the most exciting examples of central Asian craftsmanship from the Iron Age. Ever since the carpet was discovered in 1947 by Russian archaeologists in a kurgan tomb in the Altai mountains, experts in traditional dyeing techniques have been puzzled by the vivid red, yellow and blue colours of the carpet, which lay buried in extreme conditions for almost two thousand five hundred years.

Red fibres under the microscope

Prof. Dr. Karl Me?linger from the Institute of Physiology and Pathophysiology at FAU, and x-ray microscopy experts Dr. Andreas Spath and Prof. Dr. Rainer Fink from the Chair of Physical Chemistry II at FAU have now shed some light on this secret. Together, they came up with the idea of imaging the distribution of pigments across the cross section of individual fibres of wool using high-resolution x-ray fluorescence microscopy (?-XRF). Dr. Spath and Prof. Fink conducted the experiments using the PHOENIX x-ray microscope at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland. With three to five micrometres, the microscope provides sufficient spatial resolution combined with high sensitivity for characteristic chemical elements.

Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.