Threads of Empire

A History of the World in Twelve Carpets

De: Dorothy Armstrong

Narrado por: Alix Dunmore

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 interweaving warps, wefts, and knots.

In this book, Dorothy 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 fifth 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.

©2025 Dorothy Armstrong (P)2025 Tantor Media

Everything I love

I recommended this book to at least a dozen people this week. It's perfect. Her storytelling and carefully chosen 12 chapters is transporting. A number of people I recommended this to are art historians who purport to only read this kind of history when they are working. Her ability to spin a yarn - please pardon the pun - is beyond history and so elegant. Thank you. The reader is also perfection!