Hi Joy,
I would think your attic rug is post-1900, and older than the one you found on Google (though the latter observation is not necessarily true, see below).
I attempted to suggest in my next previous post that village and cottage production of Persian rugs in, say, the first half of the twentieth century, and reaching back into the nineteenth as well, tended to undergo a process of homogenization in terms of the distinctive character of rugs from specific venues. Referring to rugs marketed as "Hamedan" (not including your attic rug, strictly speaking, though it is very similar in character to rugs from that group), which covers literally several hundreds of villages in the vicinity of Hamedan, items woven in the separate venues in, say, 1890, were much easier to distinguish one from the other, than rugs from the same venues, respectively, woven in 1940. To a substantial extent, this tendency resulted from various dynamics in the rug-weaving economy of the region by which elements of the process became standardized. One aspect was the substitution of cotton for wool in the foundation material, and often the cotton was procured and distributed by middlemen on a relatively wide basis, where the earlier practice had been for weavers to make their own decisions and arrangements for such details. Also, the dyeing of certain major colors was provided on a centralized basis (sometimes on the weavers' own wools, sometimes on 'pools' of collected wools), and other colors were done by the weavers themselves the "old-fashioned way." Etc.
Regarding your attic rug, I do not doubt Joel's attribution to Taleghan, or close by. And as I mentioned, I had not heard of the place before, so I have no specific knowledge of how those rugs would have gotten into the market. But it is a reasonable guess that the process was not very different from what occurred with the Hamedan rugs. The Taleghan rugs would have been aimed at the same (moderately priced) niche in the market. Getting to the comparison of your rug to the one you found on Google, it would seem the Google version is certainly a more modern version of the output, based on the comments above. The question lies, however, whether the 'shift' (wool foundations to cotton, etc.) happened uniformly across the production area. It is conceivable that there was a period during which the change was taking place gradually, and both wool foundation and cotton foundation rugs were being woven contemporaneously. So, as I suggested above, your rug appears, perhaps superficially, to be older than the other, but not necessarily so, and not necessarily a lot older.
I mention the point because the palette is distinctive in the two rugs and similar between them. If we were to hypothesize that the weavers of your attic rug were more independent of the pressures from the middlemen in the marketplace than the weavers of the other rug, that 'fact' might account for a lot of the observable difference between them.
BTW, here is another unsolicited piece of advice for a novice ruggie: Be skeptical of any statement of the age of any rug. The underlying reasons for the great majority of such statements are typically missing, but the implied (unwritten) reason is usually, "Trust me!" (Though I have no reason to think 1930 is especially inaccurate for the Google find.)
Rich
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