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 Jєωιѕн scholar named Isaac Ben Sherira,' these manuscripts shed new light on the real story behind the flying carpet of the Arabian Nights.

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 proverbs collected by Shamsha-Ad, a minister of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, and the other is a book of ancient dialogues compiled by one Josephus. None of these works survives today; however, with their aid, Ben Sherira compiled a story relating to the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon that is not found elsewhere. Located at the southern tip of Arabia, the land of Sheba occupied the area of present-day Yemen, although some geographers claim that Ethiopia or ancient Abyssinia was also part of its territory. This country was ruled by a beautiful and powerful queen who is remembered in history as the Sheba of the Bible, the Saba or Makeda of the Ethiopian epic Kebra Negast, and the Bilqis of Islam

In the Ben Sherira chronicle, certain passages describe the workings of a flying carpet. Unfortunately, much of the vocabulary used in these parts is indecipherable, so little has been understood about their method of propulsion. What is understood is that a flying carpet was spun on a loom like an ordinary carpet; the difference lay in the dyeing process. Here, the artisans had discovered a certain clay, 'procured from mountain springs and untouched by human hand', which, when superheated at 'temperatures that exceeded those of the seventh ring of hell' in a cauldron of boiling Grecian oil, acquired anti-magnetic properties. Now the Earth itself is a magnet, and has trillions of magnetic lines crossing it from the North to the South Pole. The scientists prepared this clay and dyed the wool in it before weaving it on a loom. So, when the carpet was finally ready, it pulled itself away from the Earth and, depending on the concentration of clay used, hovered a few feet or several hundred feet above the ground. Propulsion went along the magnetic lines, which acted like aerial rails. Although they were known to the Druids in England and the Incas in South America, only recently are physicists beginning to rediscover the special properties of these so-called 'fey-lines'.

Ben Sherira writes that the great library of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy I, kept a large stock of flying carpets for its readers. They could borrow these carpets in exchange for their slippers, to glide back and forth, up and down, among the shelves of papyrus manuscripts and of course hundreds of people visited the library just for the magic carpet ride.