Date: 09 Mar 2000
Time: 11:44:25
Remote Name: 156.29.145.175
TEHRAN TIMES ECONOMIC DESK TEHRAN A 400-year-old Persian carpet with a five million dollar price tag has grabbed visitors at this year's Dubai Festival. The hand-woven camel-hair carpet, bearing an image of the Queen of Sheba surrounded by 12 servants, was put on sale by the Lebanese owner of the carpet Yasser Abdel Karim Raad. "I'm asking five million because this carpet is priceless," the 34-year-old businessman said. The 1.4 meter carpet in its margins has got calligraphed Persian poems. According to Raad the carpet was produced in the workshop of Iranian craftsman Mohammad Taqi Baqi in the city of Qom. He said that his father and an Iranian businessman, bought the carpet in Lebanon 60 years ago for the equivalent of one million dollars from an Iranian doctor who intended to travel to London to put it on sale. "I have received offers of one million dollars but I won't accept anything less than five," Raad insisted. He said a similar carpet bearing the image of the Biblical King Solomon, who tradition says married the Queen of Sheba, was made by the same craftsman, but it disappeared from the Shah's collection following the 1979 revolution in Iran. A total of 100,000 carpets from Iraq and Turkey as well as Iran were on sale at this year's festival in a huge marquee dubbed the Oasis of the Carpet.