On October 11 the Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum held the lecture An Early History – Taklamakan and Central Asian Carpets 700 BCE - 700 AD.

The lecture was held in English by Dr. He Zhang, Professor of Art History at William Paterson University (USA), Fulbright Scholar. The lecture delivered interesting facts about carpets depicted in manuscript books and cave paintings of Xinjiang and Central Asia dating back to the 7th-13th centuries and focused on ancient carpets found in the Takla Makan desert (Xinjiang, Chinese autonomous region) and Afghanistan. On top of that, the lecture covered the influence of carpets traded through the Silk Road on other cultures, and how they distributed the artistic ideas.