Photo courtesy National Carpet Museum of Tehran

n 1999, Charlie Kurzman, assistant professor of sociology, came across this carpet hanging in the National Carpet Museum of Iran, in Tehran. Kurzman was intrigued because the carpet, dated 1907, features images of leaders from so many different countries. At the top center is Muhammad Ali Shah, who had just come to the Iranian throne in 1907. He's surrounded by, among others, Queen Victoria of England, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and at the bottom, Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabel of Spain. The carpet was woven on orders of the governor of Kerman, an Iranian province, to celebrate Muhammad Ali's accession to the crown.

After a wide-ranging search, Kurzman found that the carpet depicts many images from the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, a world's fair held in Chicago and dedicated to the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America.

Why would an Iranian carpet feature images from an American celebration? Kurzman suggests that the carpet depicts a "tree of nations."

"Months before Muhammad Ali came to the throne, his father had promulgated the first ever constitution for the government of Iran," he says. "Iran was taking its place among the community of nations." Kurzman is obtaining guidebooks from the Chicago fair to help him identify some of the less-obvious images on the carpet.

back to contents