Hi Joy,
Sorry with this late reply, I only came across this thread now. The rug you show in post #71 looked familiar to me, and sure enough, Parsons mentions the type in his book on the carpets of Afghanistan. He calls them Tchitchaktu. He says there was no tradition of rug weaving there, but rugs came to the market in the little town of Tchitchaktu starting in the early seventies. He says that your "bastardised form of the purdah or hatchlu" became very popular during 1978 (pp. 157-160). You are lucky that yours has good wool. We had one with horrible dead wool, something that Parsons also mentions. It seems that one of the reasons people started to weave in that area, was that there were enormous piles of wool shorn from sheep that had died in a terrible drought there. The other reason was the carpet boom of the seventies. It seems there are good quality Tchitchaktus with a supple, velvety feel (like yours
), others have the dry, dead wool (like ours
).