Flying Rug Anyone?

In the late 19th century, a rather unknown French explorer named Henri Baq, found Iranian manuscripts which, he believed, proved the existence of Flying Carpets. A misnomer really, “Carpet” should be replaced by “Rug”; with the rug being the smaller of the two textiles. The manuscripts tell stories of real flying rugs, supposedly used by thieves, though even the Queen of Sheba is recorded as having sent one of these rugs to King Solomon as a gift. The green wool bamboo rugs for sale should conjure up a similar image of the rug that the queen sent to Solomon, at least in color. The Queen’s rug was made of green Iranian Silk and was big enough for Solomon and his entire entourage.

What about other rugs for sale? What were these flying carpets/rugs like, if they were an actuality at some point? Unmistakably, they weren’t like Mohawk, Aztec or Navajo rugs that you see on sale; these are really more like thin throw rugs or even blankets. What about the jute rugs? Geographically, flying rugs certainly could have been made from the course celluloid material of the jute plant. The plant is rampant from Eastern Europe to the Eastern seaboard.

How about the nice Aubusson rugs for sale? Most likely, no, since the Aubusson rug comes from a very distinct area of France in the department of Creuse. Back to the braided rugs for sale; could these lovely rugs be like the ones that carried Arabian and Persian thieves? Probably not, but we have forgotten one very important rug on the showroom sales floor: the oriental rugs for sale. What we call today, “oriental rugs”, come from a wide array of cultures and places. Oriental rugs range from Caucasus in the North to India in the South and from China and Vietnam in the East to Turkey and Iran in the West. Unlike braided rugs or hooked rugs, the Oriental rug is woven.

These days, if an oriental rug is woven by machine or anything other than by hand, it is not considered authentic, or “Oriental” at all. The Iranian rug makers who crafted flying rugs used a certain kind of clay that they soaked their thread in before weaving the rug. According to very loose speculation, this clay must have had magnetic properties and when laid out in the rug shape, took on a magnetically repellent nature and “hovered” over the ground, repelled by the Earth’s magnetic core…a thing of legend now, nonetheless. So now that you know what you are looking for, the next time you go shopping for rugs for sale, perhaps you can find your very own flying rug.