http://www.history.com/news/why-are-these-viking-burial-clothes-inscribed-with-arabic-script
Why Are These Viking Burial Clothes Inscribed with Arabic Script?
Why Are These Viking Burial Clothes Inscribed with Arabic Script?
10 thoughts on “Why Are These Viking Burial Clothes Inscribed with Arabic Script?”
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That’s an easy one. The Vikings travelled all the way to Constantinople. Which is pretty much the doorway to the Middle East. It’s not much of a stretch that they could have encountered an Arabic society.
I was just drafting a couple of playbooks inspired by Ibn Fadlan, Varangians etc. a few weeks ago.
Also, this: irisharchaeology.ie – The Helgo Treasure: A Viking Age Buddha | Irish Archaeology
Phillip Ribbink true. But there’s a difference between encountering an Arabic society and being buried with clothes with a western viking style but arabic kufite inscriptions. It surely was a quite interesting and nuanced world and there’s so much yet to discover and analyze.
Gregor Vuga oh Varangians are kind of my thing: I did write my dissertation in Byzantine Philology about them.
Sadly, it’s in Italian 🙁
Nikitas Thlimmenos I’m sure I could read it well enough (if you want to send it my way)!
Sure, here it is
reenactmentsociety.org – http://www.reenactmentsociety.org/contents/varangi-e-bisanzio.pdf
Nikitas Thlimmenos Well it’s not as shocking as the article’s title makes it out to be. As someone whose done an extensive of the Viking Age (and World History in General) it doesn’t surprise me that much. Think about it Alexander the Great’s conquest stopped just outside the border of India. The birthplace of the Buddha (and possibly his philosophy), it’s not that big a leap that Europeans came in contact with the Eastern world since then. Before the age of Sail.
It’s not shocking. But it’s something that deserves to be addressed in a divulgative article. not meant for academia. I also don’t think the title is clickbaiting (it’s just a question).
Nikitas Thlimmenos Fair enough.
The problem is that claiming that those bands include Arabic lettering depends on extrapolating the pattern widthwise. Since we know how that kind of decorative band is woven, and we can see the edges where the turns happen, they can’t have been any wider than what we have. It’s not Arabic letters at all, just a geometric pattern.