Stepped Cross
A cross built from steps rather than smooth lines — partly a choice, and partly what the loom will allow.
The stepped cross is old. Cross forms like it turn up across North Africa and the wider Mediterranean, and in Amazigh weaving the shape has been in continuous use for a very long time.
You will read that it stands for the four directions, or the seasons. Maybe. What is certain, and more useful, is that the stepped shape is partly the loom talking. In a flatweave you cannot make a clean diagonal — the structure forces you to climb in right-angled steps — so a cross woven in kilim comes out stepped whether or not the weaver means anything cosmic by it. The symbolic reading and the technical fact are not at war; the technique has its own logic, and the shape follows from it. That is worth remembering before you assign it too much intention.
How it is placed tells you more than what it "means." At the centre of a field, a stepped cross anchors the whole composition around one point. Repeated across a grid, it becomes texture rather than focus. In a lot of High Atlas work it hides inside a lozenge grid — from across the room the rug reads as diamonds, and only up close do you see a small cross sitting inside each one. That second layer, revealed on closer looking, is the real pleasure of the motif.
