Inspecting an antique is the ordinary rug inspection plus four checks that only matter once a rug is old.
1. Yarn — the hard floor under any age claim
Hand-spun wool varies in thickness along its length. Machine-spun does not.
Pull a fibre from an inconspicuous area and look along it. Perfectly even yarn means twentieth century, and in village production usually post-1930. That single observation eliminates a large proportion of overstated age claims before you look at anything else.
2. Dye behaviour
Bend the pile back along a knot row and compare base to tip.
Natural dye is usually richer at the base, where light never reached, and softer at the tip. Early synthetics — widespread from about 1900 — tend to fade towards grey or brown rather than towards a softer version of themselves, and may bleed past the outline of a motif.
Look for abrash, the banding from small-batch dyeing. And check two specific things:
Green drifting blue, because Persian green is indigo over yellow and the yellow gives out first. Black worn low, because iron-based blacks corrode wool over decades — you can feel the relief with a flat hand, and it is very hard to fake.
Details in rug colors and Persian rugs: colors and dyes.
3. Wear pattern
Real use wears unevenly
Genuine age produces wear that follows how the rug was used — heavier at the traffic lines and the ends, lighter where furniture stood, foundation showing first at points of pressure. Even wear across the whole field means chemical or mechanical distressing, not age.
Chemical washing, sun-fading, shaving and tea staining are all routine commercial treatments applied to new rugs to produce an aged appearance. They are done well and they are not always disclosed.
4. Restoration, under raking light
Stand at one end and look across the rug at a low angle with light behind you. Reweaving and repiling show as differences in sheen and pile direction that are completely invisible face-on.
Assume it has happened. A rug in domestic use for a century will have had its selvedges rebuilt at minimum, and the absence of any repair on a rug claimed to be 130 years old is a question rather than a reassurance — rug repair.
Good restoration is invisible from the face and should still be disclosed. It affects value materially.
5. The foundation
Fold a corner back gently. A sound foundation flexes; a dry-rotted one crackles.
Dry rot is not repairable in any economic sense — the affected area has to be rewoven entirely. On an old rug this is the single most consequential condition finding, and it is easy to miss because it is invisible from the face.
6. Pile depth, everywhere
Press a fingernail into the field at the centre, the traffic lines, and near each edge. Pile depth is finite and unrecoverable, and it varies far more across an old rug than across a new one.
What the answers give you
Roughly when it was woven, what has been done to it since, and whether the structure has life left. Those three are most of an antique's value — what drives a rug's value.
What they do not give you is a firm attribution, which is inferential and worth commissioning from someone independent — how rug appraisal works.
What should stop you entirely is in antique rug red flags.
Common questions
How can I tell how old a rug really is?
From four things on the object: whether the yarn is hand-spun or machine-spun, how the dyes have aged, whether the wear follows actual use, and what finishing and repair it has had. No document dates a rug reliably.
Should an antique rug have been repaired?
Almost certainly, and its absence is more suspicious than its presence. A rug in domestic use for a century will have had selvedges rebuilt at minimum. Assume restoration and go looking for it rather than hoping there is none.