RugBmp

RugBmp is a collection of 64 NAQSHE: Persian-style carpet charts that exist only as numbers. A minter chooses a seed; the contract turns it into a design, mirrors the plan into a whole NAQSHE, and writes it as a bitmap, one byte for every knot. Nothing is stored but the seed.

It starts from an old idea: long before screens, the carpet chart was pixel art. A weaver's NAQSHE is a picture on squared paper, one square per knot, each square one colour from a short list of yarns. RugBmp takes that chart at its word and writes it as what it always was: a bitmap.

The look comes from a hand-painted NAQSHE: a weaver's map of 60 × 84 knots, drawn as one quarter and mirrored, in eight yarns with banded borders and solid guard stripes. Each NAQSHE is a new map in that style, knotted at its own raj: the coarse Nomad and Village weaves come out bold and blocky, the fine Town and Workshop weaves have the knots for the city rug's all-over fields, the Herati and the Mina Khani among them.

Each token is a NAQSHE, named after the weaver's chart it is drawn like, and is known by its number: NAQSHE #00 to NAQSHE #63.

RugBmp is created by Beinol, who designed the generator, wrote the contract and built this site.

On this site every NAQSHE can be seen four ways: the raw bitmap (BMP), the Rug view with wool and light, and the NAQSHE, as a quarter or whole. All four are drawn from the same bytes. The docs cover the contract in detail.

The first pixel art

Pixel art is older than the pixel. For centuries Persian carpets have been planned on a NAQSHE: a chart of squared paper on which the design is painted one square at a time. Each square is a single knot, and each knot takes a single colour from the few yarns on the loom. A picture made of equal squares, from a fixed palette, read row by row: that is pixel art in all but name, and arguably its first form, drawn long before there was a screen to show it.

The weaver works the way a display does. The rug grows from the bottom up, one row of knots at a time, each row read off the chart and tied across the warp. The library tells that story in more detail.

From loom to screen

When computers learned to draw, they arrived at the same answer. Early screens were grids of cells, each holding an index into a small palette, because memory was scarce: eight or sixteen colours chosen with care, as a weaver chooses yarns. The bitmap file, which every computer still opens, stores an image just as a NAQSHE does: the palette first, then one entry per cell, beginning with the bottom row.

1. 5th c. BCE

   The Pazyryk carpet, the oldest knotted-pile carpet known, is buried in a Scythian tomb in the Altai. It is found frozen in 1949.

2. 16th c.

   Safavid court workshops turn the carpet into a designed art: painters draw the plans, weavers execute them.

3. 1539–40

   The Ardabil carpets are finished, signed by Maqsud Kashani: the medallion-and-corners plan at its height.

4. c. 1600

   Under Shah Abbas I, Isfahan becomes a centre of silk and luxury carpet weaving for the court and for export.

5. Late 19th c.

   European demand revives commercial weaving in Tabriz, Kerman and elsewhere. Synthetic dyes arrive, and with them faster fading.

6. 2010

   UNESCO inscribes the carpet-weaving skills of Fars and of Kashan as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

7. Today

   64 NAQSHE are drawn as quarters, mirrored, and written knot by knot by an Ethereum contract.

Every part of the old craft has its counterpart here.

The point is not to imitate a rug on a screen but to show that the rug was digital all along: a finite grid, a fixed palette, and a set of instructions that anyone can follow to the same result.

The full technical reference is in the docs; what you may do with a NAQSHEyou own is in the licence.

Questions about the project, a licence for commercial use beyond what the IP and licence rights already allow, press, or anything else: write to naqshe@beinol.xyz.