The inscription is upside down, that makes it hard to read. (I've turned it the right way round, it seems to be Farsi or something related, but its stylized/simplified - read from right to left.)

I agree that the rug doesn't look Persian. Colours and knotting of the fringe (do you have a close-up?) look compatible with Turkish to me (but you are more of an expert than I am). Could it be Caucasian? There are some turn-of-the-century Caucasian rugs with similar colour palette.

The writing doesn't look Armenian, and if it were Arabic, you'd perhaps expect more little signs above the letters. As I'm sure you know, Turkish rugs often have Arabic script on, even though the weavers may not be able to read it, so a discrepancy between weaving place and script origin is not in itself unusual.

The writing also isn't perfect Farsi, for that the vertical stroke (Alef) should not go beyond the base line, and go higher up.

The first letter of the longer inscription is "eyn", then "be", then probably "dal", then wrongly written "alef" (?), then possibly "dal", "nun", "vav", "re". Vowels can be inserted, there seem to be no vowel signs. "eb.dad.nur" (for the dots you could put in a short unstressed e or a, the initial e would also be just short)????? Is there any such place or name?

The short inscription looks like ordinary Arabic (as in "European") numbers, not like letters, as in 184, possibly 186, I guess anyone can see the resemblance.

Spanish - that sounds exciting, I know hardly anything about antique Spanish rugs - was there a Moorish influence (e.g. via Morocco), or is the influence via France? Here's one I found on the Doris Leslie Blau site, c.1940, beautiful.

Hi Chris,
I'm not 100% sure, but don't know of an alternative. Farsi uses Arabic letters, but doesn't use many of the sub- and superscripts Arabic uses (these little swirls above and below the letters). Hence my guess it's Farsi. But any language can in principle use Arabic lettering, I just don't know of other languages that do, or someone could have left out the super- and subscripts on Arabic, but I don't think this is common.

Yup, especially if the weaver didn't know Arabic writing themselves. It would be nice to have some evidence on another rug for comparison. Usually the Arabic on Turkish rugs is either elaborate Koran quotes and the like, with all the sub- and superscripts, or it is some strange ornamental totally illegible simplification.

Shereen.
This is really great investigation, thank you very much.
I will take that as Ebed Adanur, turkish Ushak or Tulu weaving from about 1900, thats what it is! But possibly also from 1840...or piece production No. 184 ,-)

Where is the 'l'? and what is the halfway horizontal line before and connected to the 'n' (reading from right to left)?

Ah, I see, Jahann&sons may be right on the name. In that case what happened is that both the 'alef' and the 'lam' are written wrong. The 'lam' ('l') should be longer upwards, and the 'alef' (as I said before) should be moved up onto the main line.

I'd imagine that Abdel Nur is a common first name, meaning 'servant of light' or something similar.