How to Buy an Oriental Rug

By Andrew Lee Butters/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 and, in the process, get better at the art of buying them. I bought my first one--a prayer rug, to celebrate my safe return from Iraq--at a suq in the Old City of Damascus. Carpet seekers flock to similarly byzantine markets in Morocco and Turkey, among other countries. But 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 Land.

But no matter how good the rug selection, the endless variations in style and quality make bazaar bargaining a daunting exercise. And any transaction can conjure old cliches of naive Americans and wily, opaque locals. But such cliches are exactly that. Rug traders drive a hard bargain for the same reason everyone else does: money. And anyone who thinks Western capitalism is transparent should look to the subprime-mortgage-derivatives mess. Still, there are some useful lessons I've learned from buying rugs, which, when taken with a healthy dose of skepticism for metaphor, are also perhaps a useful guide to being an American traveling abroad.