GUEST: My father bought this at an estate auction probably in the 1940s. It's been in my family since I was a little girl. He had a college classmate that was an Armenian, dealt in Oriental rugs in Connecticut. And he told us this was a Bokhara saddle bag.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: That's as much as I can tell you.
APPRAISER: Okay, do you have any idea what he paid for it when he bought it?
GUEST: Probably not very much.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: He was very good at picking out things that didn't cost much, bringing them home and then trying to figure out what to do with them.
APPRAISER: Right, that's fantastic. Well, the information you know about it is somewhat true.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: It's actually from Turkmenistan, it's a Turkmen storage bag. It's not really a saddle bag. It was woven by a Turkmen subgroup known as the Yomuds. They're a semi-nomadic tribe, and they roamed to what is today Turkmenistan, eastern Iran, Afghanistan, those regions really in the Central Asian plains. I think it was woven between 1850 and 1875. And being semi-nomadic people, the Yomuds lived in yurts, which are tents.
GUEST: Right, right.
APPRAISER: And so this would have originally had a back attached to the reverse side of it, and they would have hung it on the wall of the yurt and used it for storage when they were in residence in the yurt in a particular area.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: And it's a really good example. It's got wonderful color, it's a wonderful design. I think one of the interesting things about Turkmen weaving-- be it Yomud or any of the other tribes-- is their rugs are incredibly finely woven. These were nomadic people working with very primitive materials, but the rugs always have a very, very fine knot count. I didn't count this rug, but I'd imagine it's probably about 300 knots per square inch, which is quite fine.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: They weave with very fine wool and it's wool on wool. It's wool knots tied to a wool foundation. And at this period, all of the dye stuffs would have been natural, would have been either vegetable dyes or mineral dyes or insect dyes. And these chuvals always have this sort of design where they have the main body of the field and then they have this panel here that's called an elem panel. And that was just to indicate when it was hanging that it made sense designwise for its use. It would hang and it had a base and then a main part of the body.
GUEST: I always wondered if there was another piece that went up there that was missing.
APPRAISER: No, no.
GUEST: This is actually... It was made this way?
APPRAISER: Absolutely, it's fairly complete. What's missing is originally it would have been woven further down here and then it would have been folded up and sewn on the back to form the bag.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: For something that's this old, it's maintained in remarkably good condition. The market for Turkmen pieces is a little weak at the moment. And I would put a value on this at auction of between $5,000 and $7,000.
GUEST: Dollars?
APPRAISER: Yeah, dollars.
GUEST: Whoa.
APPRAISER: It's a really good piece, it's a nice thing.
GUEST: My goodness, I had no idea.
APPRAISER: Yeah, yeah, it's great.
GUEST: I was thinking $200 at the best.
APPRAISER: No, no, it's much, much better than that.
GUEST: Wow, I'm impressed.
