Secret History of the Flying Carpet
Iranian Cultural Heritage
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004 2:26:33 AM by freedom44
LONG before the broomstick became popular with witches in
medieval Europe, the flying carpet was being used by
thieves and madmen in the Orient. Factual evidence for what was a long-standing
myth has now been found by a French explorer, Henri Baq, in Iran.
Baq has discovered scrolls of well-preserved manuscripts in
underground cellars of an old Assassin castle at Alamut, near the Caspian
Sea. Written in the early thirteenth century by a Jewish scholar
named Isaac Ben Sherira,' these manuscripts shed new light on the real story
behind the flying carpet of the Arabian Nights.
The discovery of these artifacts has thrown the scientific
world into the most outrageous strife. Following their translation from Persian
into English by Professor G.D. Septimus, the renowned linguist, a hastily
organized conference of eminent scholars from all over the world was called at
the London School of Oriental and African Studies. Baq's discovery came under
flak from many historians who insisted that the manuscripts were forgeries. M.
Baq, who could not attend the conference because of the birth of his child, was
defended by Professor Septimus, who argued that the new findings should be
properly investigated. The manuscripts are now being carbon dated at the
Istituto Leonardo da Vinci, Trieste.
According to Ben Sherira, Muslim rulers used to consider
flying carpets as devil-inspired contraptions. Their existence was denied,
their science suppressed, their manufacturers persecuted and any evidence about
incidents involving them systematically erased. Although flying carpets were
woven and sold till the late thirteenth century, the clientele for them was
chiefly at the fringe of respectable society. Ben Sherira writes that flying
carpets received a favorable nod from the establishment around AD 1213, when a
Toranian prince demonstrated their use in attacking an enemy castle by positioning
a squadron of archers on them, so as to form a kind of airborne cavalry; the
art otherwise floundered, and eventually perished in the onslaught of the
Mongols.
The earliest mention of the flying carpet, according to Ben
Sherira's chronicle, was made in two ancient texts. The first of these is a
book of proverbs collected by Shamsha-Ad, a minister of the Babylonian king
Nebuchadnezzar, and the other is a book of ancient dialogues compiled by one
Josephus. None of these works survives today; however, with their aid, Ben
Sherira compiled a story relating to the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon that
is not found elsewhere. Located at the southern tip of Arabia, the land
of Sheba occupied the area of present-day Yemen,
although some geographers claim that Ethiopia
or ancient Abyssinia was also part of its territory.
This country was ruled by a beautiful and powerful queen who is remembered in
history as the Sheba of the Bible, the
Saba or Makeda of the Ethiopian epic Kebra Negast, and
the Bilqis of Islam.
At the inauguration of the queen in 977 BC, her
alchemist-royal demonstrated small brown rugs that could hover a few feet above
the ground. Many years later she sent a magnificent flying carpet to King
Solomon. A token of love, it was of green sendal embroidered with gold and
silver and studded with precious stones, and its length and breadth were such
that all the king's host could stand upon it. The king, who was preoccupied
with building his temple in Jerusalem,
could not receive the gift and gave it to his courtiers. When news of this cool
reception reached the queen, she was heartbroken. She dismissed her artisans
and never had anything to do with flying carpets again. The king and the queen
eventually reconciled, but e wandering artisans found no abode for many years,
and eventually had to settle near the town of Baghdad in Mesopotamia
in c. 934 BC.
In the Ben Sherira chronicle, certain passages describe the
workings of a flying carpet. Unfortunately, much of the vocabulary used in
these parts is indecipherable, so little has been understood about their method
of propulsion. What is understood is that a flying carpet was spun on a loom
like an ordinary carpet; the difference lay in the dyeing process. Here, the
artisans had discovered a certain clay, 'procured from mountain springs and
untouched by human hand', which, when superheated at 'temperatures that
exceeded those of the seventh ring of hell' in a cauldron of boiling Grecian
oil, acquired anti-magnetic properties. Now the Earth itself is a magnet, and
has trillions of magnetic lines crossing it from the North to the South Pole.
The scientists prepared this clay and dyed the wool in it before weaving it on
a loom. So, when the carpet was finally ready, it pulled itself away from the
Earth and, depending on the concentration of clay used, hovered a few feet or
several hundred feet above the ground. Propulsion went along the magnetic
lines, which acted like aerial rails. Although they were known to the Druids in
England and the Incas in South
America, only recently are physicists beginning to rediscover the
special properties of these so-called 'fey-lines'.
Ben Sherira writes that the great library of Alexandria,
founded by Ptolemy I, kept a large stock of flying carpets for its readers.
They could borrow these carpets in exchange for their slippers, to glide back
and forth, up and down, among the shelves of papyrus manuscripts. The library
was housed in a ziggurat that contained forty thousand scrolls of such
antiquity that they had been transcribed by three hundred generations of
scribes, many of whom did not understand the dead alphabet that they bore. The
ceiling of this building was so high that readers often preferred to read while
hovering in the air. The manuscripts were so numerous that it was said that not
even a thousand men reading them day and night for fifty years could read them
all. Although the library had been damaged in the civil war under the Roman
emperor Aurelian, its final destruction is attributed to a Muslim general. He
burnt the papyrus to heat the six hundred baths of Alexandria,
and the carpets, which frightened the wits out of his Bedouin Arabs, were
thrown into the sea. Ben Sherira comments bitterly that the knowledge of Alexandria
went down the drainpipe in 'washing the dirt of philistines'. Flying carpets
were discouraged in the Islamic lands for two reasons. The official line was
that man was never intended to fly, and the flying carpet was a sacrilege to
the order of things, an argument that was spread enthusiastically by a zealous
clergy. The second reason was economic. For the establishment, it was necessary
to keep the horse and the camel as the standard means of transport. The reason
was that certain Arab families, who had access to the inner chambers of
successive rulers, had become rich because of their vast stud farms, where they
bred hundreds of thousands of horses each year for the army, merchants and the
proletariat. It was the same with camels. Certain Egyptian king-makers (listed
by Ben Sherira as the Hatimis, the Zahidis and the progeny of Abu Hanifa II)
owned camel farms, and enjoyed a total monopoly on the supply of camels in the
whole of the Islamic empire. None of these old families wanted their privileges
usurped by a small group of poor artisans who could potentially wreck their
markets by making flying carpets popular. Thus they were undermined. Thanks to
the mullahs' propaganda, the Muslim middle class was beginning to shun flying
carpets by the mid-eighth century. The market for Arabian horses flourished
instead. Camels were also fetching high prices. Ben Sherira notes that a
curious incident, which happened around this time, damaged the reputation of
the flying carpet beyond salvation:
On a bright Friday afternoon in Baghdad, when the white disc
of the sun blazed in the third quarter of middle heaven, and the bazaar bustled
with people buying fruits and cloth and watching an auction of fair-skinned
slaves, there appeared across the sun the shimmering wraith of a turbaned man
gliding towards the highest minaret of the Royal Palace.
The devil was no other than a poor soldier who had once
served in the palace. He had been caught holding the youngest princess's hand,
and was thrown out by the eunuchs, disgraced and defeated. When news about this
affair reached the caliph, he was furious. He had the princess locked up in a
tower, and to humiliate her, decided to marry her off to his royal executioner,
a towering black slave from Zanzibar.
The soldier, a Kurdish youth by the name of Mustafa, now returned. He glided up
to the minaret and helped a girl climb out of the window. Then in full view of
the public below, he glided away. The bazaaris cheered. As the young lovers
eloped on their carpet, a battery of the elite guard, mounted on black Arabian
stallions, charged out of the palace and gave chase. But the flying carpet
disappeared in the clouds above.
The establishment retaliated by hunting down everyone even
remotely involved with the business of flying carpets. Thirty artisans were
rounded up with their families in a public square. A paid audience was
assembled. The men were accused of being libertines, and their heads rolled in
the dust, all chopped off by the black executioner from Zanzibar.
Next, the caliph sent his spies to every corner of his empire ordering them to
bring back every remaining flying carpet and artisan to Baghdad.
The small community of artisans, who had lived near the Tigris
for several centuries, packed their possessions and, with only three male
survivors, fled.
After wandering for many months through the moon-like wastes
of Iranian marshlands, they reached, ragged and near death, the shining city of
Bukhara, where the emir, who did not take orders from Baghdad,
gave them refuge. This exodus, Isaac notes, happened in AD 776, a decade before
the celebrated reign of Harun ur
Rashid, when The Thousand and One Nights was written. Isaac believes that the
inspiration for at least one of the tales in the Arabian Nights comes from the
incident of the eloping lovers on that bright Friday afternoon in Baghdad.
Ben Sherira describes the genealogy of the artisans in great
detail. Some of these families later migrated to Afghanistan
and established themselves in the Kingdom
of Ghor. The most renowned family
of carpet weavers, the Halevis, settled in the town of Merv,
where they began to introduce patterns into their carpets. The mandala in the
centre was a trademark of the master, Jacob Yahud Halevi — the same Jacob who
appears in history as the teacher of Avicenna. Artisans also wandered (or flew)
into Europe, where their recipes were subsequently
employed by a feminist secret society, that of the witches. Their persecution,
meted out by the church, was equally swift. Ben Sherira claims that the
witches' trademark, the broomstick, with its phallic symbolism, was developed
because of their lack of male company.
In Transoxiana, the flying carpet enjoyed a brief
renaissance before being erased forever by the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan.
Two incidents are worthy of mention here. In 1213, Prince Behroz of the state
of Khorasan in eastern Persia,
took to heart a young Jewess, Ashirah. Her father was an accomplished
carpet-maker. Behroz married Ashirah against the wishes of his family, and
requested his father-in-law to weave two dozen flying carpets using the best
wool and the best clay, specially wound on a bamboo frame to make them more
robust. Next he had forty-eight of his handpicked archers trained by a Japanese
master by the name of Ryu Taro Koike (1153-1240?).
When the archers were ready and the carpets delivered, he
assembled his men and gave each man his weapons: twenty steel-pointed arrows
tipped with rattlesnake venom, longbows made of layers of deodar and catgut,
and Armenian daggers. Two men were assigned to each carpet: one fore, one aft.
Some carried fireballs. Behroz thus conceived four squadrons of the first
airborne cavalry of the world, which went into action when his father waged a
war against the neighboring Khwarzem Shah. The archers led the assault: they
attacked the castle, dived in and flew out, felled the defenders and threw
fireballs inside its compound, setting it ablaze. The Toranian military brass
were awed. They sensed that the prince could become a threat to their
oligarchy, and with his father's consent, blinded him. The prince's wife, heavy
with child, and her ailing father were banished from the kingdom. Around this
time, the Abbasids no longer wielded the same power as in the days of Harun ur
Rashid. Many local kings and emirs were taking matters into their own hands. As
the grip of the empire on its states weakened, a cult of the flying carpet
flourished. Young dissidents, political refugees, hermits and agnostics went
airborne for their escapades. Merchants also began to see the advantages of the
flying carpet. The flying carpet was not only a much speedier form of transport
than the camel but also a safer one since bandits would not waylay a flying
trade caravan — unless they themselves were on a fleet of flying carpets.
Artisans began to weave bigger carpets, but with more people
on board these became sluggish and lost height. But there is one episode,
witnessed by many people on the ground, where a party of turbaned men flew from
Samarkand to Isfahan
at whirlwind speed. This incident is corroborated in the facsimile of another
rare text, produced in the seventeenth century, in which one witness is quoted
as saying 'We saw a strange whirling disc in the sky, which flew over our
village [Nishapur], trailing fire and sulphur', and another: 'A band of djinn
appeared over our caravan, heading towards the Straits of Ormuz.'[sup5] (The
thirteenth-century original of this text is impossible to find.) The next
incident, before the terrible invasion from the steppes, was the last straw in
the ill-fated history of the flying carpet. In 1223, a dragoman of Georgia
arrived in Bukhara with his harem
to shop for Chinese silk. Ben Sherira's source, the guardian of Minareh Kalyan,
describes what eventuated:
On a pleasant evening, when the suk was bustling with
people, and the veiled ladies from Georgia had just disembarked from their
litters and were being escorted to the silk merchant, a madman appeared from
behind a dome and swooped down at them. The flier was a giant of a man with a
magnificent black beard and long hair trailing in the wind behind him. He was
wearing a loincloth, his eyes were a luminous green, an eagle was flying by his
side, and he was laughing madly. The women saw this apparition heading towards
them and froze with terror as he tore away his loincloth and started urinating
in their upturned faces.
This man was the mathematician-royal of Samarkand,
Karim Beg Isfahani. Betrayed by his Georgian mistress, he had drunk a goblet of
fermented grapes and gone insane. The incident caused pandemonium. A spear was
launched that caught him in the chest, and he fell, dead, into a palm tree. But
the outrage caused in Bukhara was
understandable. Fearing another massacre, the artisans burnt their
laboratories, left their possessions, and fled in all directions. Ben Sherira
writes that on that fateful day they swore never again to weave together a
flying carpet.
The story almost ends here. In 1226 Genghis Khan laid waste
most of the cities in Central Asia. Their inhabitants
were massacred; their treasures plundered. The towers of skulls outside Herat,
Balkh and Bukhara
— so vast that the whole countryside reeked with their stench — included the
skulls of the artisans. In their loot, the Mongols found flying carpets. When a
prisoner told them that these contraptions were more agile than the steppes
pony (a blasphemy to Mongol ears, if ever there was one), the great Khan
beheaded him and had his skull made into a drinking mug. He ordered all flying
carpets in his vast empire confiscated.
Posted by Mercury Ali at 11:26 PM
http://delawaresufi.blogspot.com/2008/08/secret-history-of-flying-carpet.html
