Viking burial clothes woven with 'Allah' discovered in Sweden

[HAB911]

A Swedish university has discovered Arabic characters for “Allah” and “Ali” woven into Viking burial clothes. Researchers at Uppsala University describe the finding of the geometric Kufic characters in silver on woven bands of silk as “staggering”.

The researchers at Uppsala, Sweden’s oldest university, were re-examining clothes that had been in storage for some time. They had originally been found at Viking burial sites in Birka and Gamla Uppsala in Sweden. Textile archaeology researcher Annika Larsson told the BBC that at first she could not make sense of the symbols, but then, “I remembered where I had seen similar designs: in Spain, on Moorish textiles.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/13/viking-burial-clothes-woven-with-allah-unveiled-by-swedish-university?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

[Baitball Blogger]

1. Amazing!

I wonder how much of the Christian movement had to do with erasing the achievements of other religions.

[Igel]

3. This may have been trade. Or plunder.

Or personal contact. Hard to know, to be honest.

Might have reflected belief. Might have been a nifty design. Might just have been a design in a nifty garment, rather like non-Greeks wear garments with Greek motif, or those who don't believe in Xianity wear things with crosses in the design. Or those before 1942 who weren't Hindus and who had swastikas in their jewelry.

Heck, ankhs were popular in the '70s. Many had no idea what an ankh was besides being trendy.

By this time the Vikings had run into Xianity in the British Isles and in N. France. Judaism, too, to be honest. But they weren't probably Xianized any more than they were Islamicized.

There are memoirs written by traders who went up the Volga and other rivers to Scandinavia. There's amber from the Baltic in the Middle East from Dark Age and medieval times. (Heck, there's Baltic amber in Italy from Roman times.) It's evidence of contact, direct or indirect. In the same way that there's evidence in Slavic of contact with Scythians as well as Greeks back at a point in their history when it wasn't likely that many Slavs lived down in the Balkans to run into Greeks.

It's easy to overlook important information; it's easy to let goal-oriented thinking get in the way of properly evaluating things. It's esp. hard when all you have to go on is isolated tokens of physical culture, things that can pass from hand to hand.

[underpants]

2. No no no that was Allan the Viking

Come on. Everyone knows about Allan.

[trotsky]

4. Nearly as famous as Percival the Red. n/t