نشریه گلجام
پیاپی 16 (تابستان 1389)

Findings and opuses of Islamic civilization era are designed and rendered on different surfaces such as wood, stone tablet, tore, cloth, kilims, jijims, carpets and rugs in geometrical or curvilinear forms of motifs existing in nature or purely spiritual symbols. The art of carpet designing and weaving which was mixed with its concurrent crafts and industry as well as naturalistic and visual symbols, is the key to the connection of the artist to his/her surroundings and even his/her thoughts, faith and beliefs and incorporated with novelty. This research is mainly concerned with such Persian carpets which their designs include a Mihrab on a carpet (prayer rug). This paper focuses mainly on Persian Mihrabi carpets to present the common concepts in the culture of Islamic era, such as, "Taqe Mihrab" and "Darvaze"(gate). Then the origins of such carpets are examined regarding the painting works, and some works are introduced. Some early examples, in which flowers, plants and birds are used as well as two common symbols in such carpets, i.e., Qandil and cypress tree, are discussed and analyzed.

Nomadic "salt bags" are a group of nomadic textiles which are less known in comparison with other nomadic weavings such as carpets, rugs, kilims, etc. These functional bags are generally found among other nomadic products. They have special features in form, structure, texture, color, pattern, motifs, and decoration which all make their examination significant besides studing other nomadic products. Afshars of Kerman -as an example in here- having a long history in weaving, are among those nomads which have various and noteworthy salt bags. Afshari salt bags are generally woven by women and are expressive of Afshars’ characteristics, though the effects of outer cultures are discernible in them. For this reason, in this article, it is tried to study Afshari tribe, their weaving history, as well as their former geographic realm, and eventually the influences of the other regions on their weavings. Therefore an overall recognition and understanding of their products -especially salt bags- may be built up and the originality of patterns and other properties may be determined. In this connection, the aesthetic and physical aspects of salt bags were studied and analyzed, and the acquired information was compared with weaves of other tribes as well.

If a carpet is put under pressure during use or storage, its thickness decreases instantly and continues to decrease slowly as the pressure is not removed. Some part of this loss of thickness is not recoverable. This phenomenon is called creep and is influenced by parameters such as temperature and humidity, and it may cause breakage, burst, crease, bump, and folding line in the carpet. By studying creep of carpets, it is possible to predict their behavior under such loads to reduce the damages and effects of the creep. In this paper, a sample of folded–carpet is put under pressure of a 170 kg dead weight for 48 hours and its compression strain under various thermal and humidity condition is measured on-line. Then different statistical models were regressed on the collated data proving that creep-model of Voight-Kelvin is assumed as the best formula for determination of creep behavior of the folded carpet under different thermal and humidity conditions. Analysis of data variance detected a significant difference between various levels of thermal and humidity parameters in creep model implying their direct influence in the equation, although they are negligible compared to time effect. This research extended to calculate the Young modulus, creep constant and viscosity coefficient of the folded-carpet.

In this paper, the specimens woven by the same weaver with identical materials but with four different types of knots, i.e., symmetrical, asymmetrical, jufti and U knots, which their details are given in a previous paper by these authors, are used. The effect of these knots on such physical properties as width of the weave, length of the motifs, length of yarn in a knot and the carpet weight are measured. The woven samples are produced in two different methods. Resulrs show that the width of jufti and U knot samples were reduced after cutting off the loom, while the change in the width of the other two is little. The change in the length of motifs depends on the change in the carpet length, i.e., in samples with change in carpet length, the motifs length change as well and in cases that there are little change or no change in the carpet length, accordingly no change or little change is observed in the motifs. In the meantime, by subjective investigation of shapes of motifs in the four different knots, the change in their details and the sharpness of the lines and curves in them are studied. The results of computation of the ratio of the wool yarn to cotton yarn demonstrates that in symmetric and asymmetric samples more than two third of the carpet weight is built up by wool yarns, so that it is predicted that they have better mechanical function compared with other knots. Jufti sample has the lowest ratio of wool to cotton yarn, so it would show the worst mechanical performance.

The cotton hand-woven products of Iran and India are in the category of flat and without knot wovens; Both are suitable for warm climate and some of them have same colour, pattern and composition. These cotton wovens reveal the cultural, psychical and aesthetics distinective characteristic and even climate conditions of weavers. In this study using the library and field research the hypothesis that (colour, pathern and composition in some of cotton woven of Iran and India are the same) has been tasted. In this research Iranian cotton woven "Zillo" and Indian one "DHURRIE" have been introduced. Initially we have shown both of woven, Then we have studied their similarities and differences, and finally we have shown difference between old and new ones because in recent years due to acceptance of other culture, these wovens have changed. Changes in these wovens through function traditional methods on the countinous annual were very little and straw and therefore in this study have not in mind confined time. In this article we only have studied ones that have two or three colour.

University is a learning institution that train students in economic, social and cultural fields and develop their professional skills which causes opportunities for their progress and prepares them to enter the working areas. The growth and spread of these institutions have led to the significance of customer-centered strategies and to improve their services. To this end, the ServQual methodology was applied to identify customer perceptions of the actual service received. However, a questionnaire consists of 5 dimensions and 27 questions used to collected the data. Finally, characteristics/quality components were prioritized with fuzzy-TOPSIS technique that meets the requirements of students as customers of the educational system. The results show that the quality of educational services are in medium level. Also, ranking of quality parameters demonstrate that visually appealing facilities and recording educational documents of students are the best and worst quality components, respectively. Some suggestions are made to improve the most significant quality parameters of educational services.

The study of Sun and Mehr motifs and symbols, their continuity and transformation, related religions and myths in all Iranian pre-historic cultural fields and Islamic period especially in the traditional carpet art is an inevitable necessity in order to get more acquainted with the content of the work. With the change of moon-worshipping custom to Sun-worshipping one, the elements and motifs of the past religion were realized in the elements of the new religion and left many motifs in various arts and particularly in the carpet of different regions of Iran, such as Fars area. Mithraism is the most important related religion with the sun that becomes a global religion and other related symbols with this religion are being illustrated in various Iranian fields, especially Iranian rural and tribal carpet-weaving until today. In this article, the semantic and visual motifs of Sun and Mehr in the Persian carpets and handcrafts have been analyzed by the comparative-analytical as well as library method. By studying various pictures from handcrafts with the required content in various urban, rural and tribal styles, all related motifs were examined in a three-fold categorization. Broad geographical understanding of motifs is among the findings of this research.