The Sheep Behind the Wool
Most Middle Atlas rugs begin on a brown-faced Timahdite sheep, sheared by hand each spring. The breed, the cold, and why mountain wool suits a floor.
In spring, in the hills around Ifrane, the sheep are sheared with blades: iron shears, no electric clippers. It happens once a year, and in the villages it is treated as a small celebration, the start of the new season.
The sheep is usually a Timahdite. The breed takes its name from a small town in the province of Ifrane, at around 1,800 metres in the central Middle Atlas, where winters are among the coldest in Africa. The animal is easy to pick out: a brown face, white wool, medium legs. It is the most numerous native breed in Morocco, carrying roughly a sixth of the country's ewes, and the province of Ifrane alone counts some 700,000 sheep.
Morocco has about twenty million sheep, and nearly all of them are local breeds rather than imports. Each region has its own. The Sardi grazes the plateau around Tadla, the Beni Guil the high eastern plains, the Beni Hsen the Atlantic lowlands, where the wool is finest. The D'Man lives in the southern oases and carries a mix of hair and wool. Geneticists who traced these breeds through their DNA think the Timahdite came from a cross between the Tadla type and the old mountain sheep, and that the Middle Atlas itself worked as a wall, keeping eastern and western flocks apart.
The Timahdite's fleece is described in the breeding literature as coarse and semi-open. That is not praise in a sweater shop. On a floor it is exactly right. Wool for clothing runs finer than about 25 microns; carpet wool runs between 35 and 45. Coarse wool is more durable and pills less than fine.
Raw wool is also greasy. A fleece straight off the sheep carries lanolin, the wax the animal makes to shed rain and snow, along with dust and bits of plant. Industrial mills scour all of it out with detergent and alkali. Wool that keeps some of its grease resists water, which is why fishermen's sweaters were once knitted from it. A damp rug that smells faintly of sheep is telling the truth about where it came from.
The cold explains the rest. Middle Atlas winters once dropped to twelve below zero, with deep snow, and older flocks moved with the seasons: down to the plains for winter, up to the high pastures for summer. Fewer families make that journey now; drought has made it too costly for many, and winters are milder than they were. But the rugs were made for the old winters. A thick white Beni Ourain was a mattress and a blanket before it was ever a carpet in Paris.
Between the shears and the loom the wool is washed and spun. For the cream rugs of the Beni Ourain it is often left undyed, so the colour on the floor is the colour of the flock. Where there is dyeing, the knowledge passes from mothers to daughters, along with the small rites that go with it.
So a vintage Middle Atlas rug holds a particular year in it: a flock on a particular hillside, a spring shearing, a winter spent spinning. The pattern belongs to the weaver. The wool belonged to the sheep first.