Threads of empire

Threads of empire A history of the world in twelve carpets

Dorothy Armstrong

Book - 2025

"Carpet specialist Dorothy Armstrong tells the stories surrounding twelve of the world's most fascinating carpets. Dorothy Armstrong's Threads of Empire is a spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets. Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibers from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweavin...g warps, wefts and knots. In Threads of Empire, Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop. In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet"--

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Subjects
Carpets > History.
World history.
Histoire universelle.
Published
New York : St. Martin's Press 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Dorothy Armstrong (author)
Edition
First U.S. edition
Physical Description
pages cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781250321435
  • A Map of the World in Twelve Carpets
  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • 1. Chieftain: Knotted-pile carpet, third or fourth century BCE, place of production unknown Locations: Turkmenistan, Iran, Central Asian steppe, Pazyryk, Moscow, Kharkiv
  • 2. Sultan: Knotted-pile carpet, sixteenth century CE, West Asia or North Africa Locations: Cairo, Damascus, Anatolia, Berlin, Glasgow
  • 3. Shahenshah: Knotted-pile carpet, sixteenth century CE, Iran Locations: Tabriz, Kashan, Ardabil, London, California
  • 4. Samurai: Flatwoven kilim, sixteenth century CE, Iran Locations: Kirman, Hormuz, Lisbon, Nagasaki, Kyoto
  • 5. Priest: Knotted-pile carpet, sixteenth century CE, Anatolia Locations: Ushak, Brasov
  • 6. Tycoon: Knotted-pile carpet, sixteenth century CE, India or Iran Locations: Herat, London, California
  • 7. Goddess: Flatwoven kilim, eighteenth century CE, Anatolia Locations: Haymana, Catalhuyuk, London, Oxford
  • 8. Hegemon: Knotted-pile carpet, nineteenth century CE, Caucasus or Iran Locations: Shusha, Tabriz, Yalta, Poland
  • 9. Sahib: Knotted-pile carpet, nineteenth century CE, India Locations: Lahore, London
  • 10. Trickster: Knotted-pile carpet, twentieth century CE, Romania Locations: Bucharest, Cairo, London
  • 11. Migrant: Knotted-pile carpet, twenty-first century CE, Pakistan Locations: Turkmen nomadic territories, Kyber Pakhtunkwa, the Global North
  • 12. Lost: Knotted-pile carpet, sixteenth century CE, Iran Locations: Berlin, St Petersburg
  • Epilogue: The Invisible Weaver
  • Endnotes
  • Bibliography
  • Acknowledgements
  • Picture Credits
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

Like the multifaceted jewels to which they are so often compared, the multihued and intricately patterned carpets originating from various locations and eras throughout the world are among history's most coveted but arguably least-understood artifacts. Cultural historian and carpet expert Armstrong highlights 12 significant examples of this ancient fiber artistry, tying the time periods of their production and provenance to the prevailing ruling empires. From the burial mounds of fifth-century BCE warlords to the conference theaters of twentieth-century leaders adjudicating post-WWII, carpets have played both functional and symbolic roles, serving as signifiers of wealth, stealth, power, and piety. Definitively affixing the origin stories of such treasures is a slippery task, and Armstrong's meticulous research anchors the exhaustive and sometimes circuitous path such investigations assume. While emperors and priests may have desired them, the carpets themselves were produced by the lowliest members of their societies. Armstrong's gift is to humanize the talented artisans, including women, children, and enslaved people, whose patience and dexterity created indelible works preserved for posterity.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Carpets and rugs have always gripped British historian and rug collector Armstrong (Ashmolean Museum, Univ. of Oxford) and compelled her to write this history of the world, spanning 500 BCE to the 20th century, told through 12 carpets woven along the Asian Silk Road between Europe and Japan. Through a description of each rug and its creation, design, condition, and acquisition, Armstrong unfolds world history in the carpet's era. She also wonders about the lives of the largely unrecorded nomadic weavers, most of them women, who created these rugs. The book also features the stories of chieftains, kings, forgers, obsessed ultra-rich rug collectors, and museum curators. VERDICT This well-written and extremely interesting book will attract a wide audience in both world history and the decorative arts.--Mark Jones

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Weaving in the world. Armstrong, a historian of the material culture of Asia, investigates the political, economic, and cultural role of handwoven carpets, splendid artifacts of superb craftsmanship. Her meticulously researched survey focuses on 12 carpets, from a knotted-pile rug from Siberia, dating from the 3rd or 4th century B.C.E., to a 21st-century rug woven in Pakistan for commercial export. Even as early as the Iron Age the painstaking technology of rug-making already had evolved into a mature art form, likely carried out by nomads. From earliest times, Armstrong asserts, carpet weavers have been women, honing their skills in carding, spinning, dyeing, knotting, setting warps and wefts, and designing or reproducing patterns. Considerable skill, as well, Armstrong has found, is involved in rug restoration and repair. For centuries, rugs have been associated with the rich and powerful: Potentates, chieftains, robber barons, and collectors considered the acquisition of prized rugs as a reflection of their own status. Attribution of a rug's creation and provenance also connects to power. The startling beauty of a particular rug in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum led to the assumption that it was made by a team of men. That conclusion, Armstrong asserts, "suited a nineteenth-century Western view which held that if an object was art then it was created by men, and that what women practised was a lesser form of creativity described in the West as craft." Armstrong reveals the exploitation of rug makers that continues to the present. Twenty-first-century rugs sold in department stores are often crafted by "weary refugees in makeshift encampments" who create products for international trade to design and color specifications and are marketed through export houses. Nevertheless, as Armstrong's richly detailed history shows, even modern rugs can shimmer with glamor and mystique. An intriguing, revelatory historical perspective. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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