This book discusses the connection between the process of early carpet dating and European paintings of the 16th and 17th century. It includes nearly a thousand examples of carpet types which are discussed according to places of origin: Anatolia, Persia, India and Egypt. As early as the 14th century carpets were traded from the Near East to Western Europe. This book focuses on the intersection of two civilizations: Islamic textile art in the form of carpets and Western European painting. Carpets were portrayed by artists in use as floor decorations, as table covers or to cover trunks and chests. The book concentrates on pictorial source material from about 1540 onwards, as Western paintings are indispensable references for the dating of later carpets. The presence of these carpets in paintings has enabled art historians and textile experts to document the history and to date the manufacture of Egyptian, Anatolian, Persian and Indian carpets. Pictorial sources remain a source of reference material for the study of authentic rugs and carpets preserved in private and public collections. Detailed descriptions are provided of all the carpets included in the inventory: the design of the fields, borders, guardborders and subguards, the flat-woven ends of the carpet, the fringes and the selvedges as well as other characteristics of the weaving structure.