Some Famous Carpets

The oldest known rug in existence is the Pazyryk Rug, found on the Mongolian steppes in the icy tomb of a Scythian prince in 1949, after 2500 years in the ground. Woven with 278 Turkish knots per square inch and colored with dyes from plants and insects indigenous to the steppes, this exquisite piece of work was preserved when grave-robbers broke into the tomb and exposed it to leakage, causing it to fill with water and then freeze, preserving the contents by shielding them from air and light.

More: http://www.themagiccarpet.biz/PazyrykRug.htm

In a Chinese folk tale recently retold by author Demi, a woman weaves the most beautiful tapestry in the world, which is carried away by the wind. Only one of her sons accepts the dangerous mission to retrieve it.

More: http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Tapestry-Chinese-Folktale/dp/0805028102

Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian and Slavic lore, supplies Ivan the Fool with a magical carpet to help him on his quest.

Cleopatra, according to legend, made one of her great political and romantic conquests by rolling herself up inside an exquisite rug and having it delivered to Caesar, setting the stage for one of the greatest royal couplings of all time. They remained lovers for three years, during which time she bore him a son, Caesarion (Ptolemy XV).

There are many legends of magical carpets, made popular in Western culture by the story of Prince Hussain’s Carpet in One Thousand and One Nights. King Solomon’s carpet, for example, was sixty miles long by sixty miles wide. It traveled so quickly, it was said, that the king could breakfast in Damascus and take his supper in Media, hundreds of miles away.  When Solomon lost his humility the carpet, to punish him, shook off thousands of his subjects, sending them plummeting to their deaths.

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A Nostalgic Look Back at Carpet-cleaning

Humanity has had rugs in some form or another for a long time; dirt, however, has been around much longer than that, so for as long as we’ve had carpet, we’ve had to do the best we could to clean them.

For hundreds of years, that mostly meant rolling the thing up, hauling it outside, draping it over something and beating it with something until you collapsed from exertion. As you can imagine, that method had only limited success, and was much more effective in promoting the cardiovascular health and upper-body strength of upstairs maids than in making any sort of headway against carpet-soil.

Throughout the years homemakers and housekeepers have employed a vast array of methods and concoctions from the mundane to the bizarre to remove stains and odors from carpet. One recommendation from the mid-19th-century called for a mixture of water and bull’s gall , which contains oxalic acid, used today in furniture refinishing and rust removal (and you thought washing dishes was hard on your hands). Another more popular method was to cake your carpet in clay and let it harden overnight, drawing out oils and other stain- and odor-makers; then, in the morning, again with the beating. Chloroform was also occasionally used, but that didn’t go very far, for obvious reasons (“Does this rug smell like…” *thud*). At some point just after the turn of the last century the state-of-the-art carpet-cleaning machine was a huge roaring thing drawn by a team of horses and stationed outside the building.

So, the next time you have to break out the foaming carpet cleanser or hear yourself saying “This vacuum cleaner sucks!” just remember that it could be a lot worse. At least now when you have your rugs professionally done you don’t have to clean up manure.

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