Vintage Beni Mguild Berber Rug
This vintage Beni Mguild Berber rug features a warm red background. Weavers partially covered the pattern with other colors, visible clearly from the back. Interestingly, the back serves as the rug’s front, as users traditionally placed these rugs pile-down for underlayment. This practice likely explains why many Beni Mguild rugs remain in near-mint condition. Moreover, dense weaving gives these carpets their characteristic sturdy texture, marking them as authentic, high-quality Moroccan tribal weavings.
The Beni Mguild tribe inhabits the mountainous Moroccan Middle Atlas region. Along with the Beni Ouarain, they represent the earliest Berber presence there and boast the longest documented legacy. In 1926, Prosper Ricard published the second volume of “Corpus de Tapis Marocains,” a detailed study from the French Protectorate era. This work focuses extensively on Middle Atlas carpets, particularly Beni Mguild weavings. Ricard distinguishes between two types: ivory rugs with lozenge patterns (ichdif) and richly colored carpets with an all-over diamond grid (tazerbit).