Featured A textile maven I ain't - where is this from?

It's not ancient, definitely machine-woven, and has metallic thread. There are designs around the edge that want to be Arabic or Sanskrit but definitely aren't. Anyone know where it's from? My guess is some sort of piano/table topper. Value probably isn't much.

 

How big? Could be a piano shawl, as you say. Don't think it's Arabic. Looks more like from India to me.

 

It is jacquard woven. Mid 1800s. The complex design was completed by using punched cards and stringing them together. This string of cards is fed into a dobby mechanism at the top of the loom and dictates which shafts are raised and at which time. That is how the pattern is generated. I saw one of these machines in action at a Weaving museum in the Netherlands. The punch card idea was also used to program early computers. Maybe the pattern was made to look Indian for the British market, when Orientalism was taking hold.

 

Punch cards were still around when I got into IT. Oh, the joy of dropping the whole bloody stack. They hung on in machine control for even longer.

It isn't Devanagari, but I do think it's an Indian script.

@Any Jewelry

 

Could it be a botched up Latin script? Latin as in the script we write.
I keep seeing WESKI, which is the surname of a well known Dutch lawyer.

 

I, too, remember punching cards in college for assignments. My Dad also brought stacks of them home from work for us to use in craft projects.

 

I used them in college, freshman year. Still have one that I use as a bookmark. Didn't think it was old enough to be a jacquard loom piece; the condition is too good. The moths didn't get to it. Orientalist design doesn't surprise me.

About 22x24 without the fringe.