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Dorothy Armstrong, "Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm here with a very dear guest to talk about a fascinating topic that I'm sure very few people have ever thought about. The book I'm going to discuss today is called Threat of A History of the world in 12 carpets. With me to discuss the book is Dorothy Armstrong. Dorothy Armstrong is a historian of material culture of South Central and West Asia. She has taught at the Royal College of Art, Edinburgh College of Art, and the University of Oxford. And this book just came out this year in 2025. Dorothy, welcome to New Books Network.
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Dorothy Armstrong
Thank you, Morteza.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Such a fascinating book. It has a fascinating cover as well. And I do strongly recommend our listeners, if they're listening to this, just Google and see the COVID of the book as well. Before we start talking about this fascinating topic, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and tell us how you became interested in the history and material culture in general, material culture of South, Central and also West Asia?
- [03:17]
Dorothy Armstrong
Well, like many people, I had carpets in my home. I'd been given them by elderly people in my family who'd had them for decades. And I began to ask myself questions about how they were made, where they came from, what their biographies had been. And those questions were very difficult to answer. So that thought stayed in my mind for. For 20 years while I had a completely different career. And then I suddenly had a moment, as many people do in the middle of their lives, where I thought, I will pursue this thing that is fascinating me. So the interest began by living with carpets that came into my life in a serendipitous way, as they do with many people. And I decided that the best way to answer this question was to re educate myself. And I went back to school and studied first at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, a diploma in Islamic Art History, and then went to the B and A, which has one of the world's great collections of carpets, where I did an MA, then a PhD in the history of Asian art with this particular specialism on carpets. So I started off as an enthusiast and I retrain myself academically. And that brings us up to today.
- [04:46]
Morteza Hajizadeh
It's fascinating. I must confess. I'm originally from Iran myself. So, yeah, I grew up with carpets. There were many carpets in my place when I grew up. Even right now that I live in Australia, I brought two beautiful rugs from Iran. But I never. Yeah, most Iranians have some pairs of rugs at home, but I never ever.
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Dorothy Armstrong
I'm sure they gig a lot to you. I'm sure they mean a lot to.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
You, but you're right, you're absolutely right. I could tell you a little anecdote. When I went to New Zealand in 2012 to do a PhD, when I walk into the office of one of the. Not my supervisors, it was one of the professors there. You had a small, beautiful rock in the office. And you know, in the west, people walk on the rock with their shoes. We never do that in Iran or in the Middle east in general. So I kind of. It was my first week in New Zealand, so I kind of walked around the carpet and then I sat on the chair and. And that guy was very surprised and said, well, he knew, of course, why, but he did say, well, you went through an extra effort not to walk on the carpet and said, well, yes, but I got over that habit later on. Yeah.
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Dorothy Armstrong
That respect is not just to do with questions of hygiene and bringing dirt from the street. It is also a question of respect. You know, somebody has made something with a great deal of craft and intention and knowledge and imagination, and you don't just walk across it, do you?
- [06:20]
Morteza Hajizadeh
You're absolutely right, because I did think about it later on myself. Part of it is, of course, hygiene. But the other point is the appreciation of the art. Because you're right, to us, it's not a. It might have changed these days because you have a lot of machine made rugs, but to us, it's more than a rug. It's more than a commodity. It's like you have a beautiful painting at home, you clean it. You care about that painting that you hang on the wall, especially if, you know, if it's an authentic painting, if you know the artist. So to us, there is that element, the aesthetic and the artistic element as well. And rugs have been so much intertwined with Persian identity, I guess, that in a way it might be a sign of disrespect.
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Dorothy Armstrong
Exactly. Yeah. And in fact, there are lots of historical paintings where monarchs, leaders of the church stand on beautiful carpets from Asia. And those usually are propagandist paintings with the intention of showing dominance. So it's not simply that it's an accidental disrespect. It was well understood that if you stood on a carpet, you were saying, I'm the kind of guy. And of course they are always guys who can control and have a lot of power. And in fact, one of the main themes in my book, and one of the places that it started from, was trying to explore this relationship between carpets and power. You know, when Henry VIII had a picture painted of himself at the very moment when he broke with the Pope in Rome and set himself up as the supreme head of the Anglican Church in England, he had a painting of himself made by the school of Holbein, probably not Holbein himself, where he was standing on an Ushak carpet, the symbolism is clear.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
I never thought about that until I read your book. It completely changed my mind. We'll talk about it, of course, about how I look at carpets now. Let me Ask you. I'm sure it was not easy. So the title of the book is A History of the world in 12 carpets. It wasn't easy to choose 12 carpets, but can you tell me how you came up with the selection criteria to, to choose those specific carpets that we discuss in the book?
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Dorothy Armstrong
I wanted to write about carpets that had had a particularly rich historical life that would tell us about how the world had turned. So I wasn't looking for the best carpets. I absolutely didn't want to write a book about which were the best carpets. There are many great books written about this and there are many classical great carpets in the book. I, I wanted books that would act as a kind of way of entering the past. So some of them are famous. You know, the Ardabille carpet is in there. That's one of the most famous carpets in the world. But some of them are very humble. There's a carpet that I saw in a department store in Edinburgh where I live, and I trace the history of that type of carpet back to its beginnings. So it was very much about carpets that gave an insight into history. The second thing I wanted to do was look at certain time periods and certain geographies. So I wanted to choose carpets that would enable me to talk about the Silk Roads. And there's a great sort of channel for ideas, technology, objects. I wanted to be able to talk about west, south and Central Asia, where most of the great carpets of the world have been made. And I wanted to talk about the global north in terms of their kind of hungry fascination with these carpets. So I wanted carpets that would allow me to talk about those three geographies. I also wanted to talk about a number of time frames, also three. One was the movement of Turkic people out of eastern Central asia during the 5th century BC onwards. And this was a continent changing Eurasia, changing movement of the Turkic peoples out towards the West. I wanted to talk about the great moment in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries when the whole of Eurasia seemed to come back to, to life and great carpets were made, great art of other kinds was made. But this is a period of the Safavid Empire, the Mughal Empire, the height of the Ottoman Empire. So I wanted to talk, wanted carpets that would enable me to talk about that. And I also wanted carpets that would enable me to talk about the peak of European colonialism. Because one of the very interesting things about this carpets and power story is that they were adopted. Asian carpets were adopted as instruments of propaganda for the great European empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries. So my carpets had to kind of fit that scheme, and then they had to be carpets that I loved and knew about and was interested in. So they kind of chose myself themselves.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
It's fascinating. And what I really liked about the book, that it. It's sort of like a global history, takes around different parts of the world. We get to talk about it. But one thing that I think you mentioned at the beginning was that carpets as a symbol of, let's say, authority and control, they're made by humble people, people that we don't even know, but they go on to become symbols of authority and control, and they become associated with political and religious power and also empires. That aspect I never thought about. Can you expand on that, what you mean by carpets being the symbol of authority, political, religious power and empires?
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Dorothy Armstrong
Well, the story begins really with how we began to explore the history of carpets at the end of the 19th century. I mean, carpets were imported across Asia and into the west for centuries. But at the end of the 19th century, a moment came where something called Islamic art history began to be born. And a scholarly process of understanding Islamic art began largely in Europe. So there are obviously extreme problems with this because it's an act of appropriation. It's a Western scholarly field that is built on the products of. On Asian products. But one of the things that was very important to the development of early Islamic art history and to the development of carpet studies, which were one of the central things in early Islamic art history, was that we had a whole lot of Renaissance paintings from Italy, from the Netherlands, from Germany, where, from Britain, from where famous historical figures, powerful, rich people, merchants, were shown with their carpets. And that enabled an initial dating of these carpets. So we know that there were Ottoman carpets being woven in Anatolia with what we call confronted birds, two symbolic birds facing each other in the 14th century, because we've got paintings that date back to the 14th century which show them. So the first kind of way of thinking about carpets in the west historically was through these paintings. So, of course, when I started studying Islamic carpets seriously, that was the history that I studied. And what becomes clear is that just as now the guys in Silicon Valley have to build rockets and send rockets into the sky as a demonstration of their huge authority and their huge wealth and their huge power and their huge machismo, there were no rockets in the 14th century. But to get a fantastically rare Ottoman carpet, or a bit later on in the 16th century, to get a fantastically beautiful, rare, expensive silk uran and carpet and have that in your study or under your feet. It was a propaganda act, a demonstration of your authority. So, as with many things, scarcity, expensiveness, association with other powerful groups that you possibly don't quite understand. So the fact that they weren't from the west, that they were from the east, added to their cachet for these Western power brokers. Because, look, I'm not only a powerful, rich person who can get Holbein to paint my portrait in England, I'm also somebody who can get access to the great art products of the East. I'm that kind of global dictator. So it's part of the natural and often observed human instinct to display wealth and power through what is rare and exceptional and elite. You can't have it. You can't. You, Morteza, can't send your own rocket into the sky. Right, because you're an academic. But I, Elon Musk, can send a rocket into the sky. It's exactly the same principle that completely.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Changes my perspective towards the rocks that I have at home now. Yeah.
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Dorothy Armstrong
But there is this other fascinating thing, which is that there's a huge gulf between the people who consume these exceptional goods, particularly the most accomplished, the most beautiful, and the people who made them. There's a total gulf between those things. And actually, I personally believe that that gulf is wider with carpets than it is with almost any other kind of artifacts. So if we think for a moment about ceramics, there are great Asian traditions of ceramic. Ginger Jen in China, Arita in Japan, Iznik in the Ottoman Empire, and in Iran itself, of course, these great traditions of ceramics which produce great decorative artworks comparable to carpets, they were usually made in factories, and those factories were usually sponsored by local elites. They might be courts, as in Zhengjejian, that was connected to the Chinese court, as in Iznic, that was connected to the Ottoman court. So the folk who did the manual work might have been quite humble, the designers probably less so because they had a direct connection to the court. But the whole setup was not one where a village weaver in Ushak is weaving a carpet that will end up under Henry VIII's feet at the English court. That's a bigger gulf than the gulf between the potters of Gingergen or Areita and Iznik and their final consumer. This episode is brought to you by kpmg. Making an impact is how KPMG helps make the difference. KPMG applies advanced tools and strategic thinking to convert data into actionable knowledge and deliver value by improving performance through transformation, modernizing processes with technology, harnessing the power of data, navigating complex MA transactions and enhancing trust among stakeholders. Go to KPMG US Advisory to learn more. KPMG make the Difference Difference Mint is.
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Dorothy Armstrong
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Dorothy Armstrong
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- [19:56]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Let me ask you another question about and again, that's something that attracted my attention in the book. So like I told I'm a regional from Iran and I've watched a couple of documentaries about rugs that are woven in Iran. They're usually woven by very, very poor families who live in regional or faraway towns. And unfortunately, they don't even make a lot of money out of that because that takes a long time. Hand woven rock takes a long time to be prepared. But then there's usually a middleman who takes it and sells it to a big shop somewhere in the city. And most of the people who do that are women. And in the book you also emphasize that carpets embody these skills and vision of women weavers. And they rarely appear in historical records. You don't know who they are. But at the same time, these carpets that are made by these unknown artists become symbol of power, domination, wealth, imperial grandeur. Can you talk a little bit about this aspect? How can we recover or balance historical records in a way that we can recover these hidden voices and the labor of these women?
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Dorothy Armstrong
This is one of the great challenges of writing material history and one of its great opportunities. So classically, history is written from texts, and texts are not left by nomadic peoples. They're rarely left by women until very recent times. So if you have a historical tradition, which we do, that depends on Texts, you automatically exclude the illiterate, the poor and women, and you exclude children, actually. So that's been our tradition of history. One of the reasons I have written the book in the way that I have, which is from the objects rather than from texts, although I do use textual evidence to back up the observations that I make from the objects, is that the objects bring you pretty much as close as you're going to get to the people who made the artifacts, made the carpets, made the ceramics, whatever it is you're looking at. And then you have to do a kind of imaginative triangulation. You have to try and understand what the technique was. That is what they chose to do. So by understanding what they chose to do, you understand something of the practicalities of their daily inch by inch weaving of these carpets. Okay, so there's something which, horrifically, in the west, we call a lazy line. So on the back of carpets, you can often see a kind of not perfectly straight line. And what it indicates is that the weaver has turned back at that point and gone back along the line that she's just been weaving. So she hasn't woven all the way across the rug, she's gone to a point near the middle, and then she's turned back. And then from the other side, a row of knots is woven, and then it turns back, and that indicates two people weaving together. So suddenly, by close attention to the technique of the artifact, you have a vision of these two women, maybe they're sisters, maybe it's a mother and daughter. They're weaving a carpet together, they're halving the work between them. They're sitting on a bench, they're winding the carpet up as they go. They're chatting, they're singing. So close attention to the object does imaginatively transport you into the world that they lived in. The other thing that we can use for this, what I call imaginative triangulation, is fieldwork with contemporary weavers, because there are still enough weavers weaving, not absolutely in the production environments of the past, but fairly close, that you can make some conjectures. And then the third source is the text that we have. So. So the Ottomans were great record keepers. We know quite a lot about how long it took to weave the carpets that the Ottoman court ordered from weavers. We know quite a lot about how many carpets were exported from the Ottoman Empire during the course of the year. So we kind of can guess how many weavers were employed. There's a kind of economic historical, set of economic historical records that can give you insight. And from these Three things we just have to earnestly and urgently and with a great deal of respect and imagination, try to put together some sense of what their lives were like.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And I must confess that when I was reading the book, I had difficulty choosing questions. I didn't know which part of the book to go to. So I drafted some questions from parts of the books that attracted my attention a bit more. And I guess I was a little bit biased as well. I went for, you know, areas that are more related to Iran, because I understand that those parts may be a little bit more. One of the carpets you discuss is Ardabil carpet, and you describe it as both a devotional object and at the same time, a political one as well. It was made during Safavid rule, if I'm not mistaken. But can you talk about how an object, a material object, like carpet in this particular case, can bring. Can bridge the gap or bring these two seemingly distant or different areas, which is a spiritual and also the imperial dimensions together?
- [25:51]
Dorothy Armstrong
Well, the Ardabil is a very, very good example for this. So let me just give a little bit of a background to the carpet. It's not one carpet. There are two. There are twin Ardabils, or one of them is now in the V and A, where it's in a glass case that's like a shrine in London. It's complete. Its borders are complete. It's a fabulous, fabulous object. It's one of the great treasures of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The other one is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and it was given to them by John Paul Getty, who, even though he was in Elon Muscopy's day, felt that it was too much for him to actually have an Ardabille carpet in his private apartments. So they were woven, and he gave it to the museum. They were woven as a pair, the VA's carpet, to make it perfect. The restorers, not at the va, cannibalized the Los Angeles carpet. So the Los Angeles carpet has lost its borders, and they have been inserted into the VA's borders so that it's completely perfect. So you've got these two carpets, which were pretty much identical. They were woven in a court workshop. So we've been talking a lot about weavers in villages, weavers in small workshops. But this was a court atelier. This was where the most skilled and talented weavers, designers, were brought together or some way involved, not necessarily physically brought together to make objects for the emperor, for the Shah. So Shah Tamasp, who was the second I think of the Safavid Shahs. He was doing a lot of work on the families sacred site, which was the mosque at Ardabil. So he was working on that building which was already a couple of centuries old. He added a huge audience hall to it. So this place was a spiritual place. It was associated with Safa Al Din, Shah from whom the Safavids take their name. It was the center of Shia Muslim. And he had added a hall which enabled him to greet visitors from overseas at Ardabil. So he's the shah, he embodies political power. He is in the holy site of his ancestor who was a Sufi, a great Sufi leader. And he's added this beautiful big hall, audience hall, the Gennassare. And he's had two carpets, identical, huge carpets, five meters by two meters, woven for it. And the carpets are spectacularly beautiful. But also many people describe their spirituality, how they seem to suggest the endless inventiveness of the universe, how they have religious symbols within them. So you've got carpets that are woven to be ecstatic, to inspire spirituality. Then you have two of them and they're huge and they're in a new and beautiful part of the old mosque, site of a Sufi mystic. And then you have the Shah greeting visitors from abroad. So ambassadors from Europe, ambassadors from Portugal, ambassadors from Spain, ambassadors from the UK in this hall, not on the carpets, but with the carpet laid out between where the Shah is sitting and where the visitors are making their addresses to him. So it's a very fascinating example of how that whole thing comes together.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, absolutely. And I googled, I didn't know about that carpet myself and I googled it before when I came across the name in the book. That actually could segue to my next question. And we have touched upon this idea before, but I do like you to expand on that if possible. And that's the idea of carpets as agents of ideology rather than as only aesthetic artifacts, because we normally tend to think of them only as artifacts. And the first time, I must confess, the first time I started to think about it, carpets a bit differently was when I started Googling carpet museum in Azerbaijan, if I'm not mistaken. And that time it was a part of the Soviet Union and there were a lot of carpets with political messages and they were fantastic, fantastic works of art. But there was this propaganda there. And also I think I came across a carpet and I saw only the picture when I say I came across a carpet ruined in Afghanistan, more or less a recent one which had the pictures of Airplanes dropping bombs. And that made me think of carpets a bit differently, that these carpets do transfer a message. It's not only a static object, but. But there is a political message there as well. Sometimes there's a hidden ideology there that we can't see. Can you expand on this point? Carpets as agents of ideology.
- [31:34]
Dorothy Armstrong
So I'll start with the war carpets that you mentioned. So Afghanistan obviously has had this tragic history in the 20th and 21st centuries. I mean, it's had problematic history before that, of course, but absolutely tragic history in the 20th and 21st centuries, where many of the world's great powers have just decided to have their disputes in those mountains. So they have suffered extreme aggression. They've suffered at the hands of the world's military industrial complex. And they carried on weaving. Weavers are incredible. The way that they just pick themselves up and carry on weaving. You can build a loom from very little. You can build a loom from sticks. If you've got a sheep, you can spin. If you've got some vegetation around you, you can make dyes. So it's very persistent. And that's one of the wonderful things about it, actually. So they carried on weaving. There were points in time where they couldn't export to the markets outside of Afghanistan. There were embargoes. It was just very physically difficult to get things out of Afghanistan. But they carried on. And since they no longer had a great industry in Reading, in weaving Bokhara carpets, you know, the Turkmen variants that the west so loves, they turned their hand to expressing what was happening around them. So we get carpets with tanks, we get carpets with flags, we get carpets with bombers, we get carpets with dead people on them. And they're a very traumatic thing to look at. So they absolutely were sending a message. And not just sending a message, but also expressing something that was happening to the people who were weaving them. And let's hope that they got some comfort from expressing what was happening in weavings. There's a little bit. Well, there are a couple of things that are troubling about this. One is that once these things started to be able to be exported, there started to be a market in them. And there's something very queasy to me about the idea that they have become a kind of recherche collectors object. But no doubt the money's very welcome. The other thing that's a bit strange about the war carpet story is you can absolutely see I've told this story of them having an experience and moving it into their rugs. But There is. There's another strange story. So there's an Italian artist called Boiti, who was a modern artist who was interested also in weaving and established links with Afghan weavers in Pakistan when they were in refugee camps, because obviously can't go into these kinds of areas for quite a lot of time in the late 20th and the early 21st century. So Bowisi made links with Pakistani, with Afghan weavers in Pakistan and made the suggestion that they should start weaving carpets not just with their traditional motifs, but with war motifs. So we've got two competing narratives of these war rugs. One is that they're a natural expression to what was happening to the Afghan people, and the other is that they were deliberately. They were an intervention by an Italian fine artist who thought that this would be a cool, creative idea. So many different ideologies expressed in those war carpets, but they're very powerful and extraordinary pieces. You talked also about Azerbaijan and Armenia, and Azerbaijan and Armenia are one of the most fascinating examples of how rugs, whatever their iconography, maybe it's just floral, or maybe it's geometric, or maybe it's derived from old Caucasian patterns like dragon carpets. The motifs are not where the controversy lies. The controversy between Azerbaijan and Armenia lies in who is the home of carpet making. And this is such a live and violent idea in both countries. And of course, is exacerbated by the fact that Nagorno Karabagh, which partly has an Armenian community and partly has an Azeri community, both of whom are weaving, is a disputed territory and continues to be disputed between the two countries and has regular outbreaks of civil war. So when the Armenians had an opening exhibition of their great carpet museum in Baku, the Azeri press saw that as a political act directed against them. By the way, you're Iranian. The Azeris don't believe that carpet weaving, that Iran is the home of carpet weaving either. And they would that the Ardabil, which we've just been talking about, one of the most revered carpets in the world, they would say that that was woven by Azerbaijan.
- [37:29]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, there's. I have one last question about carpets in Iran, and then I'll try to move to the other parts of the book. You mentioned that carpets is an important part of Iranian identity. I think we alluded that there is also the famous book of poetry, the epic poetry, Shahnameh, or the Book of the Kings, which is an important part of Iranian identity, and different scenes from that epic poetry has been woven into carpets. And in the book, you discuss how during the Safavid dynasty. So Safavids used carpets as a visual counterpart to shahnameh or Book of the Kings. I'm interested to know how carpets translate epic poetry into political or even cultural legitimacy. Would be great if we could talk about that, please.
- [38:26]
Dorothy Armstrong
So carpets and shahneme are very intimate relationship. A lot of the wonderful illustrations of the various versions of the Charlemagne contain carpets. So they have a kind of iconographic value in the way that the Charlemagne was illustrated and therefore the way that those stories were told. And in fact, a lot of what we know about early Iranian carpets, so I'm talking about before 1550, basically comes from the illustrations in the shahnamet. And one of the things that is proposed is that those miniatures show a strong relationship with the carpets of the Timurid Empire. Now I have to say straight away that we don't have any Timurid carpets, nor do we have any very early Iranian carpets. We have early Anatolian carpets, but we don't have early Iranian or Timurit carpets. So one of the interesting bits of carpetology about the Shahnameh is that in the illustrations the carpets are often very close to what we think of as the Timurid international style. So the pre Safavid Central Asian empire that preceded the great Iranian empires. The other part of your question is about how carpets can validate authority by representing very well known and well loved stories and then using those stories in a different kind of environment. There's a long tradition of illustrative rugs in Iran. So one of the things that is just not true about Iranian art is that there's no figurative art in Iran. This is one of the things that people say and just isn't true. And figurative carpets are very much part of the Iranian tradition. And obviously the great stories are endlessly woven into carpets and endlessly. By endlessly, I mean up to this minute there will be people in Iran and in Afghanistan and in Pakistan weaving versions of the Shanti stories into carpets. And this kind of activity, as much as it's in its early form historically it bolstered the connection between the new Iranian imperial families, the Safavids and then later on the Qajars, it bolstered their relationship with these earlier heroic pre Islamic emperors. But it also acts in a much more humble way just to tie, to knot together, if I can make a pun, to knot together modern life and the ancient culture of Iran. So if you are living in modern Tehran and you have a carpet with an illustration of Rustam defeating an enemy on it, you are every day Encountering stories that go back beyond the moment that this shahnameh was written way before the 11th century. And you have your culture close up and intimate all the time. And so I think that's a hugely powerful aspect of carpets. They can make memory live and they can make past parts of your own culture come back to life for you in a very intimate and domestic way.
- [42:39]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah. There is another carpet in the book, and I'm absolutely sure I'm gonna butcher the pronunciation. Am I correct to pronounce it Pajiric carpet carpets? Yeah.
- [42:53]
Dorothy Armstrong
Well, that's just me Anglicizing, so who knows? Who knows? You might be newer than me.
- [43:00]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Well, I have absolutely no clue, but I'll trust what you've written in the book. And I didn't know about anything about this carpet myself, so I started googling to liter a little bit more about it. And I find it fascinating. It's one of the oldest surviving hand knotted carpets. Can you just introduce the carpet, tell us what it is, what it depicts? But again, what I'm interested in is the narrative, the historical narrative in that. And you tell us that it shows something about the sophistication of nomadic societies, which kind of goes against the biases that we have about these nomadic societies.
- [43:42]
Dorothy Armstrong
Yeah. So just to introduce the carpet, it's about a meter square. One corner of it is a bit tattered, but otherwise it's complete. It's got several broad borders. And those borders show horses walking with horsemen. The next border shows deer, what are clearly deer with great antlers. The central field, what we call the field, the main part of the design is lotus blossoms and lotus buds. And it's the classical colors of Asian carpets that we see all the time. It's a dark green, it's dark red. It has a kind of camel color, natural color in it, some black. It's absolutely vivid. It lives now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. And it was made probably around 500 BCE. We're talking two and a half thousand years ago. And probably the single most remarkable thing about it is that this is not a carpet that shouts, I am at the beginning of a tradition. You know, I'm at early steps in what was going to become a great tradition. It's a fully realized, extremely sophisticated, extremely beautiful carpet. So it was made 2,500 years ago. And the tradition must go way back beyond that, actually. We know from archaeological remnants that weaving was one of the earliest things that people did, and that the earliest forms of architecture were actually heavy woven fabrics like carpets that were draped Over a framework of sticks, tents, in other words. So this is a very ancient practice amongst humans. And this is the oldest pile carpet that we have. It's definitely not the oldest pile of carpet that was made. It was clearly the product of a long, long tradition and it's very, very sophisticated and beautiful. And if you didn't know, if I hadn't told you, you would think it could have been made in 16th century Iran or 18th century Central Asia. It's absolutely vivid and alive. But it has a most poignant story, as many of these carpets do, in that it almost didn't come out of the ground. It was in the burial chamber of a Scythian chieftain. So the Scythians were a nomadic tribe that went from the Black Sea or possibly even the Ukraine, all the way across to China and up into Siberia and down towards Uzbekistan. Huge confederation of nomadic tribes, Scythians, Iron Age. So sort of from about the 7th century BCE through to about the 2nd century BCE, a big empire with a lot of longevity and a great deal of culture, but no texts. So the culture is all horses, horse strappings, carpets, jewelry, woodwork, and it's fantastic. So this carpet was made for a Scythian chieftain. It was buried with him in his tomb, which is in Siberia, in the Altai Mountains, in this place called Pazurik, that neither Mortesa nor I know how to pronounce. And there was a big interest in Scythian archaeology in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century, because there was gold. There was gold. In fact, it probably dates back further than that, to the 18th century in Peter the Great. So they were looking for hoards of gold. They went back in the 1920s to have another look at these mounds that somebody had reported but hadn't properly excavated, a guy called Rudenko, who was a very senior archaeologist. So off they went in the late 1920s to have a look at these burial mounds. And they opened the first one and it was full of fascinating stuff, but no gold. They got ready to open the next one and Stalin came to power in Russia, and the Bolsheviks had a very clear idea of what history and archaeology should be in line with the rest of their Marxist ideology. They believed it should be about the economic relations between classes and particularly about the inevitable process by which the proletariat would overthrow the exploitative classists, rentiers, capitalists, whatever you want to call them. What these archaeologists were doing in the Altai Mountains of Siberia was digging up the graves of princes of the chieftains of this great empire. So they weren't. There were no proletarian rustic encampments there, particularly to be near the sky, to be near the gods, to be away from everything. So Stalin and the Politburo clamped down on the Psyric archaeologists, the Altai archaeologists, but they did more than close the dig because it was a decadent exploration of the. The artworks of very wealthy and elite people. They imprisoned the archaeologists. In fact, one of them committed suicide in prison. So it just was forgotten. And then after the war, Rudenko was rehabilitated because he had had a very distinguished war record. He knew about ice. So he got supplies across to Leningrad, across the frozen Lake Ladoga, and he was accepted back into Soviet Society in 1948. So we're talking about 20 years later, he went back to Berzerik and he opened up the rest of the tombs. And there, amongst the skeletons of horses, the mummified remains of the chieftain's wonderful jewelry was this scrunched up frozen ball in a corner of the horse chamber. And. And when they unthawed it, it was this amazingly complete and beautiful carpet. So once it actually came to the surface, despite all the difficulties in getting there, there was a big argument about who had made it. So the Scythians are nomads, it's buried with the Scythian chieftain. The immediate assumption would be that it was a Scythian artifact. The other things in the barrows were Scythian artifacts. But there was a huge resistance to believing this because we're talking about 1948. We've had 50, 60 years of carpet studies within Islamic art history at this point. And a theory had emerged, and the theory that had emerged was that carpet weaving reached its aesthetic peak in the 16th century in Iran with carpets like the Arabel carpet. And they are wonderful, they are wonderful. But there's no doubt that this was a very narrow perspective. So the story that began to be told was that this was actually an Iranian carpet that had been woven in Iran. Even though we have no Iranian carpets before the early 16th century, we have no evidence at all for this, that it looked like its designs, looked like the designs that were used by an early Iranian empire, the Achaemenids, and that nomadic tribes did not have the skill to do it. And this became the story for decades. One of the Russian archaeologists who actually dug it up said, well, you know, Tukmenistan is a pretty refined carpet tradition. We know that there were carpets made there from the Bronze Age because we found carpet weaving tools in Turkmenistan in Bronze Age sites. Why would it not have been made in Turkmenistan by the Turkmen carpet weavers, who are absolutely the artists of Central Asian carpet weaving. But this conviction that had grown up amongst particularly German scholars of Islamic art, they were the leading scholars of Islamic art in the early decades of the discipline. They were absolutely convinced that anything of this level of refinement of design, crafts, technique and sophisticated craftsmanship must have come from Iran because that's the storage sold themselves. We don't know, we don't know we can do. People often say, when I say we just don't know about so many carpets. Well, can't we do scientific tests? Aren't there? Can't we do carbon dating? Can't we look at the dyes and yes, we can do all those things and we do do all those things. Carbon dating not very helpful for carpets because it can be wrong 50 years in either direction. And also the materials that made of are not, they're not very responsive to carbon dating dye analysis. People endlessly do die analysis. But we're talking about Eurasia, we're talking about the Silk Roads, we're talking about plants that grow across a 5,000 mile zone. So they grow in Russia, they grow in China, they grow in Central Asia, they grow in the Middle east, they grow in Europe. So you can say, well, this is madder, right? And this kind of madder does grow in Iran. But you can't go beyond that because madder's grown everywhere. It's a weed. Madder is the plant that red dye comes from. It's a wonderful example of a whole set of ideas came into being at the end of the 19th century as Europeans basically tried to grapple with this wonderful cultural tradition of the Middle East, Central Asia, West Asia, South Asia. They were grappling with that tradition, they were trying to understand it, they were doing a good thing. They were saying art isn't just about the European Renaissance, it's also about this amazing tradition from Asia. But they came to a set of conclusions basically to give themselves some guidelines that have stuck as being a kind of orthodoxy. And so when the psyric carpet came out of the ground in 1948 and people tried to understand how it got there and who made it and what was the tradition behind it. The natural assumption was Iran. And of course tied up with this is a belief, unquestioned until very recently, that settled communities with writing were superior to nomadic communities that had other forms of historical and cultural expression. We're not so sure about this as we used to be in terms of values. So at that time it was inconceivable that a nomadic community could produce such a thing.
- [56:24]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah. The point you just made is quite interesting to me because I've been living in Australia for about 10 years and when I talk to some of my Australian friends, they usually tell me, well, you come from a common country with a very rich culture. This is a very young country and they mean good. But I guess that kind of bias is already embedded in the mindset that cultures that don't have that kind of written tradition, like the west, the culture, cultural art, doesn't exist, whereas we know that the oldest cave paintings belong to Australian Aboriginals. Yeah.
- [57:04]
Dorothy Armstrong
First nations culture in Australia is fabulous, but it's not a written culture any more than the Scythians were a written culture. And that's a really big barrier for a highly civilization to get over.
- [57:20]
Morteza Hajizadeh
You're right. Let me ask you a couple of questions about the Ottoman Empires. We've talked about Iran. How did the Ottomans use carpets to project their. It was a huge empire back then. But how did they use carpet as an ideology, let's say to project their spiritual or even their worldly power in their empire?
- [57:44]
Dorothy Armstrong
Well, worldly power is never a problem with the Ottomans. Worldly power is what they were about. So the Ottoman Empire, for listeners who don't know, was one of the longest lasting empires. So beginning around the 13th century CE, Common Era AD and not finishing until 1925. Okay. So through to the First World War, from medieval times, huge empire. And at its peak in the late 15th, 16th centuries, it was the biggest empire the world has ever seen. And for those listening with a European background, there was serious concern in the 16th century and the 17th century that the Ottomans would take very significant parts of Europe. So great monarchs in Spain, Britain, Portugal armed themselves to fight the Ottomans. And the Ottomans got as far as Vienna. Right. They conquered the whole of the Balkans and they got as far as Vienna in Austria. And it was only at that point that they were turned back in about, I think, 1673. So they were perceived as a real threat. Huge trading empire, incredibly efficient trading machine and government machine. Many modern industrial methods and industrial ways of recording things were evolved in the Ottoman Empire. And of course it was vast. So let's say the furthest point east is more or less in Iran. The furthest point west is Vienna, south Cairo, north up into the Caucasus. Huge. Absolutely. So many people's, so many different ways of life. And there, there was an Ottoman nomadic population and an Ottoman settled population, and there were centuries of negotiation between the two of these two. So the Ottomans, like every other court in the early modern period, used fabulous carpets as a way of demonstrating their power. You know, so Ottoman court carpets, if you go to the Topkapi, you'll see lots of Ottoman court carpets, very finely woven, wonderful floral designs made to reflect the glory and the grandeur of their rulers. But the big thing for the Ottomans about carpets was that further east in Asia and further west into Europe, people loved them. The Ottomans could sell carpets across the entirety of Eurasia, and they did. So carpets for them were about economic power. And there are many quirks in this story. So they're busy organizing an export trade in hand woven carpets. Some of them made in small factories, some of them made in urban workshops, many of them made in villages, and then through intermediaries, finding their way across into Europe and then through to northern Europe or across into Asia and then across to Japan and China. But there are quirks, moments when the whole system kind of collides. And one of these is the case of what are now called Transylvanian carpets. So in Romania, there are a whole collection of churches. They were Lutheran churches. The people who lived in these towns and around these churches were German and from the Low Countries, places like the Netherlands and Belgium. They weren't Romanian, they certainly weren't Turkish. And what they loved to do was decorate their churches, these austere Lutheran churches that had. They'd taken all the stained glass of the Catholic church away. They painted over the frescoes. But what they liked to do was decorate their carpets with. Decorate their churches with Islamic carpets, small village rugs from Anatolia. So they're not Transylvanian carpets at all. They don't come from Transylvania. They happen to be in these Transylvanian towns. But they're Turkish carpets. They're just. They've been brought in from Turkey as part of this huge export trade. But for some reason, the Lutherans love them. But they're prayer rugs. They're made in the villages around Ushak, which was a great carpet making center in Anatovia. They're pile carpets with either a prayer niche, a single prayer niche, the pointed arch, or a double ended prayer niche. They're absolutely clearly prayer carpets. Sometimes they have a dangling mosque lamp in them, and they're in these Lutheran, these white painted Protestant Lutheran churches. And you do wonder both about the spiritual resonance of this. So these deeply devout Protestants were totally comfortable with the spiritual resonance of these carpets that had been made by Muslim women. They felt some kind of profound empathy with it. And when you turn the Spotlight in the other direction. What did the women weaving in the villages around Ushak think about the fact that their intermediaries explained to them that they should be weaving carpets like this because people in Europe loved these prayer carpets. There was a point in time where the sultan tried to stop carpet weavers who were weaving for export from using religious iconography. But it doesn't seem to have made any difference. They continue to export them. They continue to be collected for these Romanian churches. There are 200 of them collected in these Romanian churches. So, yes, it's the same story in the sense that they had court carpets which were, to glorify their amazing empire, huge and with great longevity. But a lot of it is about economic power. And the economic power at the more granular level, at the level of individual people and places and individual carpets, has this very interesting spiritual dialogue.
- [65:20]
Morteza Hajizadeh
It's fascinating, and it's just amazing to know about that. The cultural exchange between the east and the West. I mean, here, Ottoman and Europe, as you mentioned at the beginning, these Eastern carpets or Ottoman carpets or Persian carpets sometimes even featured in European paintings as well.
- [65:42]
Dorothy Armstrong
Yeah, they're a great feature in European Renaissance paintings because they were the ultimate elite consumer good. So religious paintings, you often get very important emperors. So these paintings, when I say religious paintings, these are paintings that are commissioned by the church to be hung in churches or in buildings which do church governance. And quite often the concept is that an important patron who might be a wealthy merchant or a wealthy ruler or indeed a king or an emperor, is shown humbled on a carpet in front of a priest or an archbishop. The classic example of this is a carpet where the emperor Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, ruled a huge tranche of Europe is shown on an Anatolian carpet, as it happens, being blessed by a very humble rural priest. Okay. So we, the Church, can command all the worldly goods of societies across the world. We are the epitome of wealth and power, but we're also the epitome of religious power because Charlemagne is going to kneel on this carpet before this humble priest. So lots of them in religious paintings with this complex message and also a constant reminder to these threatening, particularly Ottomans, who were trying to infiltrate Europe through both trade and military meanings. A constant warning that the Roman Catholic Church could dominate them. We put your artworks on our floors and our kings kneel on them. Right. We are a big, powerful force. We, the Catholic, can raise armies. So very consistent pattern in Renaissance paintings. So I'm talking about 14th, 15th, 16th century. There's also a secular Tradition of using them in paintings that starts at about the same time, maybe a bit earlier, 14th, 15th century, and goes on to contemporary times, where merchants, prestigious people from the world of culture have themselves painted with carpets or have themselves in some way represented with carpets. And if you look at portraits of, say, Queen Elizabeth ii, God bless her, rest her soul, she was often painted in a room that had a beautiful carpet in it. And I don't know if in Australia you've had the television series the Crown.
- [68:51]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yes. Yeah, it is here as well. Yeah, I haven't watched it, though.
- [68:55]
Dorothy Armstrong
No, no, we didn't. No need to watch it. But there's a wonderful scene where Mrs. Thatcher, who's played by Julian Anderson in the series, brings a dignitary into Downing street, the center of the UK government. And the dignitary looks at the floor and says, oh, that's lovely. And she says, yes, it's beautiful, isn't it? And it's a replica of the Ardabille carpet. And it does indeed lie in the reception room at Downing Street. So it's still going on. This is still going on.
- [69:30]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Wow. When I sometimes watch classic movies on, I think it was A Brief Encounter by David Lyncher, David Ling, I watched that movie five or six times, but there was a scene that I do remember, it was in a room that there's carpet hanging on the wall and there are Arabic words written it on that. But I just found it amazing, that. And I don't know if there's. There was. I don't think it was any messy. It was just an accident. But it was just, to me, amazing how a carpet was there in a movie from 19, I don't know exactly when it was 1960s, if I'm not mistaken, there was a carpet with Eric woods written in a movie in England.
- [70:16]
Dorothy Armstrong
Well, you know, the British relationship with Asia is long. Yeah, it's really long. It goes back to the 16th century. So the British East India Company, which was basically its trading company in Asia, it was founded in 1601. Queen Elizabeth gave it the first, gave it its father. And then, although we think of Britain in India as being, you know, the central imperial act, if you like, trade was going on with Asia for centuries. And what was coming back were carpets, spices, other kinds of text. There's this long and intimate trading relationship. And then in the 19th century, Russia began to expand towards India. Russia expanded into Central Asia, and that was a huge threat to the British in India. So the British then became very concerned with Central Asia. So you'll also find in the houses of people who were sort of young, at the beginning of the 20th centuries, they were full of Central Asian carpets because the troops, the British troops who've been defending the northwest frontier from Russian troops coming down into Central Asia and Afghanistan, they brought Central Asian carpets back with them. So it's a long, long trading relationship.
- [71:48]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah. So as a last question, it was a fascinating book and I do strongly recommend our listeners to read the book and even look at the pictures in the book. We look at carpets. I've started to look at carpets quite differently after reading the book. But what do you hope your readers to carry forward with them after reading your book?
- [72:10]
Dorothy Armstrong
Well, I hope they have an ignited interesting carpets because they're wonderful objects. I hope they've encountered some bits of history and geography that are unfamiliar and take them outside the normal way that history is talked about. But more than anything else, I hope they come away with a huge respect for those women who, whatever the weather, whatever the circumstances, carried on just weaving their carpets.
- [72:43]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Absolutely. I must say, this is a message that resonated with me. I knew that a lot of these carpet makers, at least in Iran, are women. We don't know. But after reading your book, it just struck me that this enduring art has been created by them. But unfortunately, we don't really have much record of who they were, what they did. And this message really, really resonated with me. Yeah. Dr. Dorothy Armstrong, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. The book we just discussed was Threads of History of the world in 12 carpet. I do recommend our listeners to read the book. It's a highly accessible book. There's a lot about art, there's a lot about politics and history. There's something in the book for everyone, with every taste, with any kind of taste. Thank you very much for your time.
- [73:32]
Dorothy Armstrong
Thank you. Bottesa, your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change your receipt. Did the sausage McMuffin with egg extra.
- [73:51]
Marshall Po
Value meal includes a hash brown and.
- [73:53]
Dorothy Armstrong
A small coffee for just $5 only at McDonald's for a limited time.
- [73:59]
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