"Good historically revived" is his way of saying cleaned and probably repaired. Cleaning may mean much more than just a good shampoo. RugPro knows more about this in this country than I do I am sure but there is quite an extensive and aggressive process that they used to do in the old days to bring an old worn carpet back to life. I don't know if it's still done, but I can't imagine why not. I have read descriptions that sound similar to a good oil treatment and trim of the dead frizzies to your hair.

And that guy's pictures are not near good enough to really see the rugs, which means he is, to me, aiming at the retail buyer, not someone who wants to really see up close what they are bidding on. By the way, I took a wonderful appraisal class through NYU's continuing ed program and we dealt only with hand woven Persian carpets. The class met in the shop of an old family of dealers off Madison in the 30's in Manhattan. If you are interested, you might check out the class. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. It meets one night a week in the evenings for 5 weeks.

As for this manipulating a rug back to some semlance of health.....it sounds evil....and no real rug person would engage in that. Someone commerce-driven only incidentally dealng in rugs....would. Sounds as if it is for appearances to fool the unenlightened.>>>>

Not so fast. The description I read came from a book about the Turkish carpet bazaars in Istanbul in the early 1900s and the whole district of them engaged in this process. It was how things were done. Do not think that all carpets in the east are the precious rarities they are here. People have lived on carpets, eat, slept, worked, fought, and entertained on carpets for thousands of years in Iran, Turkey, all of central Asia. Mosques, huge massive open spaces are covered with rugs, maybe a couple of hundred of them, and they are periodically turned out and replaced. They see a lot of wear, and are taken, at least they were, to these dealers who paid to have them refurbished and brought them back to life and resold them. Nothing dishonest or uncommon there at all. I guarantee you there are rugs on eBay that have undergone this or a very similar process. How else can you buy these rugs for a few hundred dollars?
A lot of the hoo-ha people expereince in the carpet industry, even in the Middle East and certainly in Turkey, is catering to this western notion that each and every carpet is a precious treasure worth an arm and a leg. It is, usually, but not for the reasons the casual western buyer thinks they are. I have read some very funny accounts of hard core western travelers who are well used to Iran and Central Asia being given the big poetic tourist run around and then when they tell the dealer they live in Iran or wherever, the merchant laughs and gets down to serious business.

Ahah! Prepare for a GOTTCHA! See this erudite and accurate post U did? Does this not belie yr premise that Magnificence can not be miigated by time and wear?

Jilly ... I seem to be having a hard time communicating here. The carpets I was talking about in the book of the Turkish bazaars, there was no reason to believe any of them were "magnificent." They could have been fine carpets, but probably produced for general use. If a mosque has 200 carpets on it's floor, I promise you they are not the same quality and value as those on the floor of the Sultan's council chamber. Not now, not 1,000 years ago. The rugs out of the mosque are in all probability not magnificent, those in the Sultans palace are. The rug on the living room of the goatherder is not magnificent.