Battle of the bands? How about a combat of the carpets? Who is original and who is derivative? Who copied whom and who inspired whom? Which came first?

We date Turkish Oushak 19239  as circa 1880 or somewhat later, and Irish Donegal 18754 as circa 1900. 

Oushaks employing selected Persian design motives were introduced by the predecessors of Oriental Carpet Manufacturers (OCM) who took over production of export oriented workshops in the late 19^th century.

Irish production, which seems to have begun around 1898, certainly had Oushaks available as prototypes. Oushak carpets, woven mostly in Smyrna on the west coast of Turkey, were simplified in design and stripped of extraneous ornament to facilitate quicker, cheaper production. Wool in both Ireland and Ottoman Turkey was abundant and labor was cheap.  Coarse carpets were easy to design, easy to weave, and could be priced reasonably.

The design vocabulary certainly overlaps: bold palmettes, flowering racemes in field and border, angular arabesque segments. If anything, the Donegal carpet is graphically stronger than its Turkish competitor.

The designers of each have eliminated extraneous ornament and enlarged what they retained. Less was certainly more. The Donegal  carpet employs chunky Persian booths on the arabesques while the Oushak borrows equally Iranian weeping willows. 

The palette of the Donegal is wider, with ochre, grass green, dark blue and ivory, while the Oushak hits hard with a striking gold border.

Interestingly, the outer flame-like narrow border has been cleverly adopted and adapted from the peripheries of the medallions on 17^th century Oushak carpets made for export to Europe.