This small silk carpet belongs to a set of twelve almost identical carpets, designed to fit around the walls of the twelve-sided room of the Mausoleum of Safavid Shah Abbas II, in Qom, Iran. One of these twelve carpets is inscribed "the work of Ustad Nimatullah Jawshaqani in the year 1082H". Citing a personal conversation held with the Shrine's custodians in 1929 and 1930, Arthur Upham Pope wrote that the tomb itself is or was covered with a metal-thread carpet of similar design, while a much larger twelve-sided carpet filled the centre of the room. The principal metal-thread carpet and six of the smaller carpets are reproduced in Pope's <i>Survey of Persian Art</i> plates 1257-1260, and several were exhibited "disposed just as they are to be seen round the tomb" at the 1931 Persian Art Exhibition held at Burlington House in London. A year later, Kendrick published a short article in The Burlington Magazine, indicating the existence of this carpet (now V&A T.438-1976), then in a private collection in London. A detail of the twelve-sided central carpet, now on loan to Iran Bastan Museum in Tehran, is reproduced in Bennett <i>Rugs and Carpets of the World</i> (1977) p.64.