Dorothy Armstrong

Threads of Empire (eBook, ePUB)

A History of the World in Twelve Carpets

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots.

In Threads of Empire, 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 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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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Orion
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Februar 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781399614252
• Artikelnr.: 70090191

Autorenporträt

Dr. DOROTHY ARMSTRONG is a historian of the material culture of South, Central and West Asia, and for the last decade has tried to penetrate the mysteries of Asian rugs. She has published, podcast and lectured widely on carpets. She was tutor at the Royal College of Art and Edinburgh College of Art, and from 2021 has been the Beattie Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. She is an avid collector of carpets and is as a result also an expert on clothes moths.