A Qashguli pictorial rug, South West Persia

A gift from the Chief of the Qashguli tribe to the British Vice Consul in Shiraz, Colonel John Teague, in 1919. Thence by descent.

By the time Colonel Teague arrived in Shiraz as the Vice Consul in 1919 (charged with military intelligence) he had already had a distinguished army career; firstly as a young Captain in the trenches of the Somme, where he was wounded twice and mentioned in despatches, later as an Indian Army officer on the Khyber Pass with a mounted Baluch Regiment, then with the Sykes Mission in South Persia, and in 1918 as a Staff Captain in the Shiraz Brigade. In Shiraz he undertook liason work with the tribes in South Persia. He found that his work amongst these tribes was made difficult by the fact that most of them were strongly anti-British, the result of successful propaganda by German agents working with the Turks. The Chief of the Qashgulis (a section of the Qashgai tribe) was an exception. Teague struck up a rewarding friendship with him - winning him over to the British side, and the Chief was so taken by this quiet mannered yet vigorous Persian speaking intelligence officer that he gave him a gift, to mark their friendship. This present had a special prestige in the tribe. It was the rug which the chief had commissioned for his tent and hung in the entrance in a place of honour.

Teague left Persia with the carpet for the North West Frontier of India in 1930. As Liason officer with the RAF in Palestine he served during the Arab Revolt in 1939, when he left for Cairo during the Second World War as one of the heads of Military Intelligence Middle East in 1942. In 1945 he returned to England as Director of the Middle Eastern Section of MI6. He retired in 1958. He died in Tunbridge Wells in 1983 with the Qashguli rug on the wall of his home.

The imagery of this rug is borrowed from late 19th century French lithographs, republished in Persia, of the famous Armenian bas-relief showing the Emperor Xerxes held aloft, supported by two tiers of servants. Above, the winged figure is the Zoroastrian deity Ahuramazda. The inscription, which consists of two lines of poetry, talks of the beauty of the nightingale, and the nightingale's love for flowers.