So when I lived and worked in the Caucasus and the Middle East, the thing to do in those parts of the world was to buy carpets.

A lot of my friends had these amazing carpets from places like Turkey, Iran, Morocco, Azerbaijan.

But I was always intimidated. Like, am I getting a real carpet here? Is this

authentic? Where did this carpet actually come from? And now there's someone who has helped me

understand carpets a lot better. Her name is Dorothy Armstrong. She's a historian of material

culture and she has written a book about carpets.

It actually tells the story of 12 iconic carpets from many different eras and many different regions.

And each one has its own origin story that spans the centuries and connects the villages where expert weavers make the

carpets to the empires that bought them.

I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

And today I'm talking to Dorothy Armstrong about her book, Threads of Empire,

A History of the World in Twelve Carpets. Dorothy, welcome. Thank you. Lovely to be here.

You write that you are known in academic circles as the carpet woman.

Yep. I'm wondering what was your field before and how did you come to be fascinated by carpet

and devote so much time to them?

So I had a completely different career until about 15 years ago.

And I was a management consultant.

I worked in banking.

I lived through a lot of very exciting times in banking, rise and fall of the Royal Bank of

Scotland, for instance. And a point came when all my children had gone off to university and I

thought, I can do whatever I like. And what I wanted to do was understand more about the carpets

...