Solomon's Flying Carpet
The carpet of Solomon, woven of silk and green stuff, said in Islamic tradition to be large enough to bear the king, his throne, and his whole court, carried through the air by the wind at his command and shaded from the sun by a flock of birds overhead. The Quran records the wind as made subject to Solomon, so that it carried his vessel at his bidding, and later commentators and storytellers, among them al-Tabari, al-Kisa'i, and the Thousand and One Nights, expanded this into the famous flying carpet. The details, its size, its crew of men and jinn, and the birds that formed its canopy, grow