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Long before the broomstick became popular with witches in medieval Europe, the flying carpet was being used by thieves and madmen in the Orient. Factual evidence for what was a long-standing myth has now been found by a French explorer, Henri Baq, in Iran. Baq has discovered scrolls of well-preserved manuscripts in underground cellars of an old Assassin castle at Alamut, near the Caspian Sea. Written in the early thirteenth century by a Jewish scholar named Isaac Ben Sherira,1 these lost manuscripts shed new light on the real story behind the flying carpet of the Arabian Nights.
The discovery of these artifacts has thrown the scientific world into the most outrageous strife. Following their translation from Persian into English by Professor CGD Septimus, the renowned linguist, a hastily organised conference of eminent scholars from all over the world was called at the London School of Oriental and African Studies. Baq's discovery came under flak from many historians who insisted that the manuscripts were forgeries. M. Baq, who could not attend the conference because of the birth of his child, was defended by Professor Septimus, who argued that the new findings should be properly investigated. The manuscripts are now being carbon-dated at the Istituto Leonardo da Vinci, Trieste.2
According to Ben Sherira, Muslim rulers used to consider flying carpets as devil-inspired contraptions. Their existence was denied, their science suppressed, their manufacturers persecuted, and any evidence about incidents involving them systematically erased. Although flying carpets were woven and sold till the late thirteenth century, the clientele for them was chiefly at the fringe of respectable society. Ben Sherira writes that flying carpets received a favourable nod from the establishment around 12,13 AD, when a Toranian prince demonstrated their use in attacking an enemy castle by positioning a squadron of archers atop them, so as to form a kind of airborne cavalry; the art otherwise floundered, and eventually perished in the onslaught of the Mongols.
The earliest mention of the flying carpet, according to Ben Sherira's chronicle, was made in two ancient texts. The first of these is a book of ancient dialogues compiled by one Josephus, and the other is a book of proverbs collected by Shamsha-Ad, a minister of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Neither of these...