It is told that King Solomon was given a gift of a magickal flying carpet from the Queen of Sheba. The carpet is described as being meticulously woven from beautiful green silk and adorned with gold thread.

 

It is said that the city of Tadmur, in the region of Ash-Sham was the headquarters for Prophet Solomon’s kingdom. It was cited that the jinn had built that city for him from great stones, with long pillars of yellow and white marble. One morning, Prophet Solomon headed out from Tadmur in the direction of Istakhr, one of the biggest cities of Persia. In Istakhr there was a mosque known as Solomon’s Mosque.

 

It would usually take a month to reach Istakhr from Tadmur, but Prophet Solomon reached it by noon. He rested a bit in the mosque, and then he headed towards Kabul in present-day Afghanistan, which also usually took a month to reach. Prophet Solomon reached there by nightfall, slept there, and headed back towards Tadmur the next morning, reaching it by noon.

 

Among the proofs for these trips is what was found in a house near the Tigris River. In that house, a board was found. On this board, one of the companions of Prophet Solomon, either from the humans or the jinn, had written, “We stayed in this house. We did not build it; rather it was already built. We reached Istakhr at noon and the next day returned to Ash-Sham.”

 

The beautiful queen of Sheba was a 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.

 

Long before the broomstick became popular with witches in medieval Europe, the flying carpet was being used by thieves and magicians and Kings in the Orient. Factual evidence for what was a long-standing myth has now been found by a French explorer, Henri Baq, in Iran.

 

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'.

 

It is told to the Wizard 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. The library was housed in a ziggurat that contained forty thousand scrolls of such antiquity that they had been transcribed by three hundred generations of scribes, many of whom did not understand the dead alphabet that they bore. The ceiling of this building was so high that readers often preferred to read while hovering in the air. The manuscripts were so numerous that it was said that not even a thousand men reading them day and night for fifty years could read them all. Although the library had been damaged in the civil war under the Roman emperor Aurelian, its final destruction is attributed to a Muslim general. He burnt the papyrus to heat the six hundred baths of Alexandria, and the carpets, which frightened the wits out of his Bedouin Arabs.

 

Special endowments that it is said God bestowed on Solomon are that he taught Solomon the speech of the birds and the beasts. The plants would speak to Prophet Solomon and tell him about their benefits. In the assembly of Prophet Solomon, there were six hundred seats. Both humans and jinn would sit there.

 

God made Solomon able to subjugate the devils. Although they did not become Muslim, they worked for Solomon. They greatly feared Solomon and none of them dared not to do the work that Solomon ordered them to do. The devil that did disobey Solomon would have a great torture befall him. This is why none of them dared to disobey Solomon. They built high, strong buildings for him, and large containers. They brought jewels and pearls from the sea. God made copper come out of the Earth, already melted for Prophet Solomon. From that copper, magnificent things were made.

 

King Solomon is credited for much. It is told that He could turn lead into gold, conjure demons and become invisible. The Wizard is told the Jamaicans even credit him with discovering marijuana.  

 

According to the Talmud, written around 500 A.D., Solomon cut a deal with the devil to build the great temple of Jerusalem – with disastrous consequences.

"In order to build the temple, there were secrets he could only learn by capturing a demon. The demon excapes and does terrible things to Solomon," explained Stanford Jewish studies scholar Steven Weitzman, author of Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom (Yale University Press).

 

King Solomon was also said to have possessed much wealth. It was Solomon's supposed wealth that drove Christopher Columbus toward America. Looking for the wellspring of Solomon's golden treasure in the biblical Tarshish and Ophir, Columbus decided to take a shortcut to the East, circumventing all the intractable political problems in the Middle East.

 

What few many know is that Solomon died in divine disfavor – and that comes straight from the Book of Kings. Talmudic legend has him ending as a beggar.

 

“Humans need limits. "If no secret or power is beyond their reach, they go too far."

 

"Knowing everything takes Solomon nowhere in the end, and if he reaches any kind of ultimate conclusion, it is only that his quest for wisdom and understanding was all a kind of delusion; he really understood nothing of value, life remained an impenetrable mystery, and even his desire for understanding was itself rooted in misunderstanding," Weitzman writes.
 

As Solomon himself put it, "a chasing after the wind."

 

This information has been acquired in the Wizards wanderings, and the Wizard forgets now where, though all things come from somewhere, for as King Solomon once wisely said: “There is nothing new under the Sun”.