It’s unlikely that Joseph Stalin ever paid attention to the art and study of carpet weaving in Central Asia. Nevertheless, he pops up regularly in their 20th-century trajectory: Not only did his oppressive regime drive the carpet-weaving Tatars from Crimea and Turkmen out of Turkmenistan, it imprisoned archaeologist Sergei Rudenko for alleged Ukrainian nationalism in 1933, delaying for nearly 15 years the discovery of the world’s oldest surviving carpet at his Siberian excavation site.
Dorothy Armstrong’s lively Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets offers a trove of such unexpected connections as she explores the relationship between the coveted carpets of West, Central and South Asia and the dreams, status games and sales pitches that Europeans and Americans have projected and imposed on them for centuries.
Armstrong, a carpet expert at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, focuses on 12 historic carpets, most created by anonymous weavers in the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires. Long desired by Westerners as symbols of wealth and culture, the carpets ultimately landed in the capitals of newer empires, where their beauty has been admired by curious tourists and their mysteries studied by scholars.
If those carpets could talk, they’d keep you up late with their life stories. Take the one from an Anatolian village that found its way, with several others, to a Lutheran church in Transylvania; Bram Stoker was inspired by accounts of these carpets when he wrote Dracula. “Perhaps the association with Islam through its carpets opened up a wider sacred and imaginative landscape,” muses Armstrong. Or take the one from Iran turned into a samurai warlord’s tunic in Japan.
Armstrong’s common thread, if you will, is that collectors consistently misinterpret the carpets’ origins, seeing only what they want to see. Why are Persian carpets so valued? They’re not intrinsically better than carpets from elsewhere. The curators of one esteemed museum were duped twice because they had stars in their eyes: once by a forgery, and again by exaggerations about a rug’s provenance.
Throughout, Armstrong describes the carpets exquisitely, her love for their complex art evident. She sees them as emblematic of the power relationships among different cultures. But her mission is also to honor the unknown weavers, many of them women who worked in tents, village houses, large workshops and even prisons to create these works of art.
Most, she notes, were practical craftswomen who didn’t get hung up on any fancy symbolic meaning of their designs. Still, they wove masterpieces that are treasured worldwide. Threads of Empire is a tribute to these artisans and the stories their creations tell.