How to read the diamonds

The short answer first. A lozenge on a Moroccan rug does not mean one thing. Neither does the X, the zigzag or the eye. The weavers do not carry a dictionary, the scholars who have lived with them have not found one, and the charts that dealers print, with a shape in one column and a word in the other, were written in Europe, mostly in the last forty years.

That is not the same as saying the shapes mean nothing. It is saying they work like a grammar. A woman learns them from her mother, places them where they belong, in the numbers they belong in, and the result is read by other women in the house and the valley. What it says is specific to that house and that valley, and it is not for sale with the rug.

Here is what the shapes are, and what can be said about each.

The lozenge, or diamond, is the base of almost everything. On a Beni Ourain it is drawn in thin dark lines on cream and repeats down the length; on a Beni M'Guild it fills the field in a lattice; on a Boujad it sits alone and off-centre. Most of the meanings given to it in the trade turn on the female body: the womb, the eye, the opening of the tent, protection. Cynthia Becker, who spent years among the Ait Khabbash in the Tafilalet and wrote the standard book on their arts, does find that fertility is a theme that runs through what Amazigh women make, and that women's textiles are where a group's identity is carried from one generation to the next. That is a long way from saying this lozenge, on this rug, means a womb. It is closer to saying that a woman wove the way her mother did, and her mother's way was full of the concerns of a woman's life.

The X, or crossed lines, often sits inside the lozenge or between two of them. Dealers call it the "scissors" or the "partridge eyes" or the "man". The weavers' own names, where they have been recorded, are usually plain, the names of tools and animals and things in the house, and they change from one tribe to the next. The same mark can be called one thing by the Zemmour and another a hundred kilometres away.

The zigzag runs along borders and between bands. In the souk it is water, or a river, or a snake. In the house it is mostly a border, the thing you weave between two fields because the eye wants a rest. On flatweaves it is also what happens naturally when a weaver steps a line of colour up and across, one weft at a time. Some zigzags are a motif and some are a technique, and from the front they look the same.

The eye is the one with the most history behind it. The akhnif, the brown cape woven by the Ait Ouaouzguite of the Siroua and traded at Taznakht in the nineteenth century, has a great red or orange eye across its back, and the museum literature that describes it says plainly that the eye is meant to turn away the evil eye. Protection is the one reading that the weavers themselves, in the fieldwork that exists, return to. A student who spent a season in 2017 among weavers at Tarmilat in the Middle Atlas framed the whole study around protection and the symbols of evil, because that is what the women talked about. The eye, the hand, the point, the thing that stares back: those are the marks that are explained the same way in many houses.

Then there is the other sort of explanation, the one that reaches back to the Neolithic. In the 1990s and 2000s several European books argued that the Amazigh rug was a storehouse of signs ten thousand years old, that a lozenge was a goddess, that the women were drawing from a prehistoric alphabet without knowing it. Those books are handsome and they sold the rugs well. Becker wrote a chapter against them, in a 2010 volume from Indiana University Press, with the title Deconstructing the History of Berber Arts: Tribalism, Matriarchy, and a Primitive Neolithic Past. The argument is in the title. The idea of an ageless matriarchal sign system was built largely by outsiders, French colonial scholars first and then collectors, and it tells more about what they wanted the Amazigh to be than about what a woman in a house in the Middle Atlas was doing with her wool.

What was she doing? The fieldwork gives three plain answers. She was making something for the house, which had to be warm, long enough for the room, and finished before the next season. She was making it the way the women around her did, in the colours and shapes that marked her people as hers and not the next valley's, which is identity, and which Becker's whole book is about. And she was putting in, at certain points, the marks that keep harm off: the eye, the hand, a lozenge where a lozenge belongs, and, many weavers say, a small flaw left on purpose so that nothing is finished too well.

Then the rug went to market and the stories began. A dealer asked what the shape meant; a middleman gave an answer because an answer sells; the answer was written down, translated, and printed on a card, and forty years later it is on a website as fact. The lozenge became fertility, the zigzag became water, the X became a man, and none of the women were asked.

So how to read the diamonds. Look at where they sit, how many there are, whether they repeat or stand alone, whether the lines are confident or wander, whether the pattern breaks somewhere on purpose. Those things tell you which tradition the rug belongs to, roughly when it was made, and something about the hand that made it. That is a great deal to be able to read. What the diamonds meant to her is hers.