CARPETS: THE PAST BENEATH OUR FEET

Wed 3 Dec 2025, 2–3pm

At the Museum and Online

This event takes place in-person in the Headley Lecture Theatre and online via Zoom

Booking is essential. £8 in person & online.

Tickets will be available to book soon

With Dorothy Armstrong, Honorary Research Fellow, and Francesca Leoni, Curator of Islamic Art

This event will include a talk and in-conversation based on Dorothy Armstrong's book Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets, which focuses on the extraordinary stories in the biographies of carpets as they pass through time.

The talk will include an explosive scandal in the carpet world, when Mrs Beattie and John Paul Getty warred over the authenticity of one of the tycoon’s carpets.

Other carpets discussed will include a Persian carpet transformed into the war vest of 16th century Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Taiko of the successful TV series Shogun, and a series of embarrassing fakes of a 17th-century carpet sold to great European museums in the early twentieth century.

Dorothy Armstrong and a colleague examine an 18th century kilim from Ottoman Anatolia, from the Collection of Georgie Wolton, now in the Ashmolean

Image: Suke Wolton

The victors of World War II, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Peace Conference in 1945, their feet planted on a pale Persian-style carpet as they carve up the world between them

Image: Army Signal Corps Collection, US National Archives/Alamy