Irish Child slaves America.... in next plantation were black slaves-... picking cotten
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Among the Norse Tribes
The Remarkable Account of Ibn Fadlan
Written by Judith Gabriel
Photographed by Eirik Irgens Johnsen
Photographed by Eirik Irgens Johnsen
More
than a millennium ago, as fleets of Viking raiders were striking fear into the
hearts of coast- and river-dwellers throughout western Europe, other Norsemen
of more mercantile inclination were making their way east. With no less
boldness and stamina, bearing luxurious furs and enticing nodules of amber,
they penetrated the vast steppes of what is today Ukraine, Belarus and Russia
and entered Central Asia. There they met Muslim traders who paid for Norse
wares with silver coins, which the Vikings themselves did not mint, and which
they coveted.
Their routes were
various, and by the ninth and 10th centuries, a regular trade network had grown
up. Some Norsemen traveled overland and by river, while others sailed over both
the Black and Caspian Seas, joined caravans and rode camelback as far as
Baghdad, which was then under Abbasid rule and populated by nearly a million
souls. There, the Scandinavian traders found an emporium beyond their wildest
dreams, for their fjord-rimmed homelands had only recently seen the emergence
of a few rudimentary towns.
To the Arabs of
Baghdad, the presence of the Norsemen probably did not come as much of a
surprise, for the Arabs were long accustomed to meeting people from different
cultures and civilizations. They were also keen and literate observers. Abbasid
historians and caliphal envoys put to paper eyewitness accounts of the roving
Scandinavians, leaving a historical legacy that is shedding new light both on
Viking history and on a little-known chapter of early Islamic history.
From the time of
the first Viking attacks on England in the late eighth century, the 300-year
epoch known as the Viking Age found the Scandinavians venturing farther afield
than any other Europeans. They colonized nearly the entire North Atlantic, even
establishing a short-lived settlement in North America about the turn of the
millennium. It was largely the Vikings from Norway and Denmark who made these
western voyages, but waves of so-called "Eastern Vikings,"
predominantly Swedes, headed southeast to establish trading centers at Kiev and
Novgorod, where the elite among them became princes and rulers. It was in these
lands that they were observed by several Muslim historians.
The Arab writers
did not call the tall, blond traders "Vikings," but by the ethnonymRus (pronounced "Roos"). The origin
of this term is obscure, and though some claim it stems from the West Finnic
name for Sweden, Ruotsi, there is little agreement. Yet
consistently, Byzantine and Arab writers referred to the Swedish traders and settlers,
as well as the local populations among whom they settled and intermarried, as
Rus, and this is the source of the modern name of Russia.
This name was
applied only in the East. In France and Sicily, the Vikings were known as
Normans. An elite guard of the Byzantine emperors, composed of eastern
Scandinavians, was known as Varangians, but that term never came into
widespread use outside the region. In al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain, they were
known as al-majus,or "fire-worshipers," a
pejorative reference to their paganism.
Besides the
Scandinavians themselves, only the British called the marauders
"Vikings," and this word may come from vik, or bay, and Viken, as Oslo Fjord was called, from which the
earliest Viking ships emerged. Other authorities maintain that the name came
from the Old Norse term i viking, which is the equivalent of
"a-raiding," as in "they went a-raiding down the Atlantic
coast." But "Viking" was never a blanket term for the whole
people of the region until it became a popular, modern misuse. "We can
refer to Viking-Age society, but not all Scandinavians were Vikings," says
Jesse Byock, who is professor of Old Norse literature at the University of
California at Los Angeles. "They themselves used the term to refer to raiders
from the region, but it certainly didn't describe the local farmers who were
back on the land."
In western Europe,
journal entries about Viking raids were often penned by monks and priests whose
interests lay in painting them in the darkest, most savage colors. But in the
East, the story was different. There the Rus were primarily explorers,
colonizers and tradesmen, and although they were well-armed, Muslim accounts
describe them as merchant-warriors whose primary business was trade. The Rus
were after the Abbasid-issued dirhams flooding the region, and though at times,
in the more remote regions, they procured these by exacting tribute, they
largely traded with Muslims who had themselves ventured north and west to find
opportunities for commerce.
We would in fact
know little about these Rus, these Norsemen in the East, were it not for Muslim
chroniclers, Ibn Fadlan, whose ninth-century Risala (Letter) is the richest account of all, kept a
journal that details his encounters with the Rus along the Volga, as well as
with many other peoples. A century later, al-Tartushi, a merchant from Córdoba,
described a Danish market town, passing down to us a rare glimpse of the
Norsemen in their domestic setting. Other accounts, such as al-Mas'udi's Meadows of Gold, written in 943, and al-Mukaddasi's The Best Organization of
Knowledge of the Regions, composed after 985, were briefer in their
mentions of the Rus, but collectively they were all trailblazers in what was
then the flourishing field of Islamic geography, a response to the thirst for
knowledge about the vast Islamic world and the regions beyond it.
Unlike Europeans,
Arab chroniclers bore no grudge against the Rus, and thus the Arab reports are
more detached and, in the eyes of many scholars today, more credible. Most
experts acknowledge that the Vikings were, in general, victims of a medieval
"bad press," for the military excursions of Charlemagne and other
Europeans of the time were no less ruthless than theirs. Yet the Norsemen had
only a runic alphabet, suited for no more than inscribing grave-stones and
place-markers, and were hardly in a position to set the record straight
themselves. Their oral sagas of heroes and gods would not be written down until
the 12th century.
Many of the Muslim
accounts have been translated into European languages over the past two
centuries, and they are proving valuable in interpreting archeological evidence
that continues to emerge. Hundreds of Viking Age graves and buried hoards, it
turns out, contain caches of still-gleaming Arab dirhams, "the coin that
helped fuel the Viking Age," according to Thomas S. Noonan of the
University of Minnesota. Noonan is one of the world's leading experts on
medieval Scandinavian ties with the Muslim world, and a specialist in Viking
numismatic history.
It was largely the
dirham that had lured the Scandinavians eastward in the first place, says
Noonan. Silver had become their favored medium of exchange, but with no
indigenous sources of the precious metal in the northern forests, they went in
pursuit of it far and wide. Arab merchants had started circulating silver coins
in the Volga region in the late eighth century, and Scandinavian traders,
intent on finding the source of the lucre, set a course across the Baltic in
their shallow-draft longboats.
In Russia, they
braved the uncharted river systems, portaging from one tributary to another,
shooting rapids and fending off hostile nomads until they reached the first
eastern trade centers, those of the Turkic Khazars. The Khazars had become the
dominant power in the Caucasian steppe by the middle of the seventh century,
and they played a major role in trade between the region and the Islamic world
for the next 300 years. Here, in the network of trading stations along the
mighty rivers, the Swedes would have carried on active commerce with Arabs,
Persians and Greeks. From there, some of the Scandinavians sailed down to the
Black Sea, toward the regions they called "Sarkland," a name that may
refer either to the lands of the Saracens (today Azerbaijan and northern Iran);
to the Khazar fortress of Sarkel, at the mouth of the Don on the Black Sea
coast; or to serk, the Norse word for silk, which was widely
traded in the region at the time.
The earliest
reference by Muslim writers to the roving Norsemen was made at the beginning of
the ninth century by Ibn Khurradadhbih, a Khurasani bon-vivant who headed
Caliph al-Mu'tamid's postal and intelligence-gathering service. In 844 he wrote
about the travels of the saqalibah, a term generally used for fair-haired,
ruddy-complexioned Europeans. They came in their boats, he wrote,
"bringing beaver-skins, and skins of black foxes, and swords, from the
furthest part of the Slav lands down to the Black Sea." Rus traders, he
wrote, transported their wares by camel from Jurjan, a town at the southeastern
end of the Caspian Sea, to Baghdad, where saqalibahservants, who had learned Arabic, acted as
interpreters.
Baghdad, then a
circular city about 19 kilometers (12 mi) in diameter, was lavishly embellished
with parks, marble palaces, gardens, promenades and finely built mosques. The
Arabian Gulf trader, geographer and encyclopedist Yakut al-Rumi describes how
both sides of the river were fronted by the palaces, kiosks, gardens and parks
of the nobles, with marble steps leading down to the water's edge, where
thousands of gondolas festooned with little flags sailed by.
This was a far cry
from the settlements occupied by the Rus. Astronomer and geographer Ibn Rustah,
writing between 903 and 913, noted that "they have no villages, no
cultivated fields." Ibn Rustah described the Rus as sporting excellent
swords, and wearing baggy trousers that were tight below the knee—a style which
reflected the Eastern influence in their wardrobes. They were, in his
estimation, heroic men who displayed great loyalty to each other. But their
primary interest in the region was acquisitive: "Their only occupation is
trading in sable and squirrel and other kinds of skins, which they sell to
those who will buy from them," he observed. "In payment, they take
coins, which they keep in their belts."
The Vikings paid
little attention to the face value of the coins; rather, they used an Arab
system of weights to measure the silver on portable balance scales. When it
suited them, the coins were hewn into smaller pieces, melted down into ingots
or fashioned into arm-rings for subsequent "hack-silver"
transactions. The amount of Islamic silver reaching the region increased
dramatically in the 10th century, when vast silver deposits were discovered in
the Hindu Kush. This enabled the Khurasan-based Samanid dynasty to mint large
numbers of coins and to become, numismatic evidence shows, the main supplier of
dirhams.
The Arabs, for
their part, were eager to have caps and coats made of black fox, the most
valued of all the furs, according to al-Mas'udi. Al-Mukaddasi noted that from
the Rus one could obtain furs of sable, Siberian squirrel, ermine, marten,
weasel, mink, fox and colored hare.
Other wares traded
by the Rus, as inventoried by several Muslim observers, included wax and birch bark,
fish teeth, honey, goat skins and horse hides, falcons, acorns, hazelnuts,
cattle, swords and armor. Amber, the reddish-gold fossilized tree resin found
along the Baltic shoreline, was highly prized in the East and became a mainstay
of Scandinavian trade. Also valued in the East were the slaves that the Rus
captured from among the Eastern European peoples—Slavs, from which English has
derived the word slave. According to the itinerant geographer Ibn
Hawkal, writing in 977, the Rus slave trade ran "from Spain to
Egypt."
But the most
important eyewitness account of the Rus is of Ahmed ibn Fadlan, a writer about
whom little is known, but whose Risala has been translated into several
languages. Key segments of it are universally cited in modern books about
Vikings. It was his account that inspired author Michael Crichton's 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead, the basis of this year's film The Thirteenth Warrior by Touchstone/Disney. "Ibn Fadlan was
unique of all the sources," says Noonan. "He was there, and you can
trace his exact path. He describes how the caravans traveled, how they would
cross a river. He tells you about the flora and fauna along the way. He shows
us exactly how the trade functions. There is nothing else like it."
Ibn Fadlan was a faqih, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, who
served as secretary of a delegation sent by Caliph al-Muqtadir in 921 to the
king of the Bulgars, who had requested help building a fort and a mosque, as
well as personal instruction in the teachings of Islam. The Bulgars were a
Turkic-speaking branch of the people whom the Khazars had split in the seventh
century. One group migrated west, where they assimilated with Slavs and founded
what became modern Bulgaria, west of the Black Sea; the others turned north
toward the middle Volga region, where they continued to chafe under the rule of
the Khazars, whose domination of the north Caucasus and Caspian region marked
the northern limits of Abbasid power. In seeking assistance from Baghdad, the
king of the Bulgars was seeking an alliance against the Khazars.
Presumably in
order to avoid Khazar lands, the caliph's delegation took a lengthy and
circuitous route to the Bulgar capital, passing east of the Caspian Sea. Once
there, it was Ibn Fadlan who gave religious instruction to the Bulgar king, so
impressing him that the king gave him the kunya, or nickname, "al-Siddiq,"
"the truthful"—the samekunya that had once been earned by Abu Bakr, the
first caliph of Islam.
All told, the
delegation covered some 4000 kilometers (2500 mi). In his Risala, Ibn Fadlan described the numerous peoples
he encountered, and roughly one-fifth of his account is devoted to the Rus.
"I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms,
blond and ruddy," he wrote. "Each man has an axe, a sword, and a
knife and keeps each by him at all times." The men, he observed, were
tattooed with dark-green figures "from fingernails to neck."
Viking arts of
jewelry and bodily ornamentation were well-developed, and Ibn Fadlan described
the Rus women as wearing neck rings of gold and silver, "one for each
10,000 dirhams which her husband is worth; some women have many. Their most
prized ornaments are green glass beads of clay, which are found on the ships.
They trade beads among themselves and pay a dirham for a bead. They string them
as necklaces...." They also wore festoons of colored beads, large oval
brooches from which dangled such items as knives, keys and combs, and what Ibn
Fadlan described as "breast-boxes made out of gold, silver and wood."
He had harsh
words, however, for Rus hygiene: "They are the filthiest of God's
creatures," he observed, and although he acknowledged that they washed
their hands, faces and heads every day, he was appalled that they did so
"in the dirtiest and filthiest fashion possible" in a communal basin
of water, an ancient Germanic custom that caused understandable revulsion in a
Muslim who typically performed ablutions only in poured or running water. (In
the same year, Ibn Rustah, however, commended the Rus he observed as being
"clean in their dress and kind to their slaves.")
Their contact with
Islam led some among the Rus to embrace the religion, though Ibn Fadlan astutely
noted that old habits still had their pull: "They are very fond of pork
and many of them who have assumed the path of Islam miss it very much."
The Rus had also relished nabith, a fermented drink Ibn Fadlan often
mentioned as part of their daily fare.
Yet most of the
Rus continued to observe their own religious practices, which included the
offering of sacrifices. Ibn Rustah makes mention of a professional priesthood
of Rus shamans (whom he calls attibah) who enjoyed very high status, and who had
the power to select as a sacrifice to their gods whichever men, women or cattle
they fancied.
Witnessing a band
of Rus merchants celebrating the safe completion of a Volga voyage in 922, Ibn
Fadlan described how they prayed to their gods and offered sacrifices to wooden
figures stuck into the ground, and they begged their deities to send merchants
with plentiful silver coins to buy what they had to sell.
He also witnessed,
along the Volga, the dramatic funeral of a chieftain who was cremated with his
ship. His oft-quoted description of this rite is one of the most remarkable
documents of the Viking Age, filled as it is with grim details of the dead
leader laid out in his boat amid a treasury of expensive items, rich foods and
strong drink, as well as a dog, horses, oxen, and poultry, and accompanied by
the body of a slave girl who had volunteered for the honor of being slain and
burned with her master.
Beyond this, Ibn
Fadlan was privy to scenes of drunkenness and lewd behavior that were clearly
shocking to a pious, erudite scholar from Baghdad. But he was no moralizer:
After making note of the conduct, he moved on in his narrative without
condescension.
Other Muslim
writers found some Rus traits praiseworthy, particularly their prowess in
battle. The philosopher and historian Miskawayh described them as men with
"vast frames and great courage" who carried an impressive arsenal of
weapons, including swords, spears, shields, daggers, axes and hammers. He noted
that their swords "are in great demand to this day for their sharpness and
excellence."
While the usual
relationship of the Rus with Baghdad, Khazaria and other Muslim lands was one
of peaceable trade, this was not always so. Along the shores of the Caspian
Sea, Rus tribes turned their prized weapons against Muslims twice in the 10th
century, once attacking Abaskun on the eastern Caspian in 910, and then
penetrating the oil country around Baku in 912, taking rich spoils and killing
thousands. Of this latter campaign, al-Mas'udi wrote that when the people of
the Khazar state heard of this, about 150,000 of them were joined by Christians
from the town of Itil, and this joint force marched to the Volga, where the Rus
fleet had returned, and decimated it. The few Rus who escaped were later
finished off by Bulgars and others.
Ibn Hawkal tells
how in 943 another large Rus armada reached the prosperous trading town of
Bardha'a on the Caspian's south shore, where the Rus slaughtered 5000
inhabitants. But their occupation of the town broke down within months,
apparently as the result of a dysentery epidemic induced among them by a secret
"cup of death" offered to them by the women of the city.
Other than Ibn
Fadlan, few if any Muslims from the Middle East or Central Asia made the trek
to the Norsemen's distant homelands. However, Muslims in al-Andalus, in the
southern two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula, could travel to Scandinavia
relatively easily by sea, and several appear to have done just that, probably
to trade. In the mid-l0th century, a Córdoban merchant named al-Tartushi
visited the Danish market town of Hedeby. He was none too impressed, for
although, at 24 hectares (60 acres) in area, Hedeby was the largest
Scandinavian town of the time, al-Tartushi found it a far cry from the
elegance, organization and comfort of Córdoba. Hedeby was noisy and filthy, he
wrote, with the pagan inhabitants hanging animal sacrifices on poles in front
of their houses. The people of Hedeby subsisted chiefly on fish, "for
there was so much of it." He noted that Norse women enjoyed the right to
divorce: "They part with their husbands whenever they like." Men and
women alike, he found, used "an artificial make-up for the eyes; when they
use it their beauty never fades, but increases."
But such scant
contact did not do much to help bridge vast cultural gaps. Toledo jurist Sa'id
reasoned that the pagan Norsemen were affected by their wintry origins:
"Because the sun does not shed its rays directly over their heads, their
climate is cold and the atmosphere cloudy. Consequently their temperaments have
become cold and their humors rude, while their bodies have grown large, their
complexions light and their hair long."
From the early
years of the Viking Age, the Arabs of al-Andalus had referred to the
Scandinavians as al-majus, a word which meant "fire-worshiping
pagans" and was usually directed at Zoroastrians. That these two groups
were lumped into the same term leads some modern scholars to speculate on early
contacts among Norse traders and Zoroastrians in Persia and Mesopotamia.
Andalusia was not spared
the Viking attacks that the rest of Europe had experienced. Historian Ahmad
al-Ya'qubi, writing in 843-844, tells of the attack on Ishbiliyya (Seville) by
"the Majus who are called Rus." Ibn Qutiya, a 10th-century Córdoban
historian, wrote that the attackers were probably; Danish pirates who had
sailed up the Guadalquivir River. They were repelled by the Andalusian forces,
who used catapults to hurl flaming balls of naphtha that sank 30 ships. Amir
'Abd al-Rah-man II then managed to arrange a truce. The following year,
legend has it, he dispatched as envoy to the king of al-majus a handsome poet, Yahya ibn Hakam al-Bakri,
known as al-Ghazal ("the gazelle") for the grace of his appearance
and his verse, who carried a gift for the king and his wife, Queen Noud. The
voyage supposedly took al-Ghazal either to Ireland or Denmark, where he wrote
that the queen "stays the sun of beauty from darkening." In fact,
al-Ghazal's mission was not to the Norsemen at all, but to the Byzantine
emperor, and the survival of the legend to this day indicates how large the
Vikings loomed in the popular imagination of the time.
Despite the truce,
the Danes returned to attack Spain again in 859 under the command of Hastein
and Bjorn Ironsides, two of the most famous Viking leaders. But their 62 dragon
ships were no match for the Umayyad forces. After the rout, the survivors
slipped through the Straits of Gibraltar to raid along the Moroccan coast,
which prompted another Muslim observer to record that "al-Majus—may God
curse them!—invaded the little Moroccan state of Nakur and pillaged it. They
took into captivity all the inhabitants with the exception of those who saved
their lives by flight." The marauding fleet then went on to harry the
south of France and Italy, where they sacked the town of Luna on the northwest
coast, believing it to be Rome. Some Arab sources say they reached Greece and
even Egypt. When they returned to the Iberian coast two years after their first
attack, they were defeated again, and Vikings never returned to the
Mediterranean.
So it was also in
the East. The Viking Age, so dependent on Arab silver, did not survive the
dwindling of the stream of dirhams in the late 10th century as the Samanid
state collapsed, its silver mines near exhaustion. Noonan points out that the
silver coins were increasingly debased as time went on: "A silver content of approximately 90
percent in the year 1000 had declined to a silver content of about five percent
half a century later. Understandably, Rus merchants no longer wanted such
coins."
The silver-seeking
Rus retreated west. Those who had not fully established their lives among the
local populations of Russia sailed home, where their crystallizing nations
became today's Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.
A millennium
later, scholars would turn to Ibn Fadlan, al-Tartushi, al-Mas'udi and the
other Arab writers to trace their sojourns and to seek out in burial hoards and
mounds the dirhams the Norsemen had carried home. According to Noonan, some
100,000 dirham coins, most deposited between the years 900 and 1030, have been
unearthed to date in Sweden alone, and there are more than a thousand recorded
individual hoards of five or more coins recorded throughout Scandinavia, the
Baltic countries and Russia. In addition to inscriptions, the Muslim coins bear
the year and place of minting—vital details for modern numismatists and
archeologists. One excellent find in Uppland, Sweden contained a mixture of
coins minted in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Isfahan and Tashkent.
Soon more of this
knowledge will be widely available. Noonan's catalogue of dirham hoards from
throughout western Eurasia will be published by the Numismatics Institute of
the University of Stockholm. His first book on the subject, a collection of
articles titled The Islamic World, Russia and
the Vikings, 750-900: The Numismatic Evidence, was published by Ashgate in 1998 (ISBN
0-86078-657-9).
Similarly, in
Norway, former University of Tehran archeologist and numismatist Houshang
Khazaei has completed an English-language catalogue of Kufic silver coins found
in Norway, many of which are currently on display at the University Museum of
Cultural Heritage in Oslo. "We are beginning to see new interest in this
subject," says Khazaei, whose work will soon be published. Other relics of
Viking-Arab trade have been found in Scandinavia as well: fine beads of rock
crystal or carnelian, Persian glass, silks, vessels and ornaments. In addition,
the trade with Arabs left its mark on Nordic languages, with cognate words such
as kaffe, arsenal, kattun (cotton), alkove, sofa and kalfatre (asphalt, used for boat caulking). One
historian even suggests that the inspiration for the sails of Viking ships came
from the Arab dhows that the Norse traders first observed on the Black
Sea.
But the greatest
debt Scandinavians owe the Muslims lies in the time-worn pages of the
manuscripts. There, long-silent voices rise to help historians, archeologists
and linguists clarify a much-maligned past. Haakon Stang, in his 1996
University of Oslo dissertation The Naming of Russia, thanked the Arabs who "on their way,
let us hear and see and sense what once happened—and was past, otherwise
irretrievably lost."
Judith Gabriel is a Norwegian-American
journalist who writes about the Middle East as well as Scandinavia. She is a
contributing editor of both the Los Angeles quarterlyAl Jadid and the New York weekly Norway Times.
This article appeared on pages 36-42 of the
November/December 1999 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.
-----------
APRIL 2016
NEWFOUNDLAND- beautiful dirty Vikings ...the Persians called
them - VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY
789AD Vikings begin their attacks on England
840AD Viking settlers found the city of Dublin in Ireland
844AD Vikings raid Seville but are repulsed
860AD Rus Vikings attack Constantinople
866AD York is captured by a Viking army
870AD Vikings colonise Iceland
981AD Erik the Red discovers Greenland
986AD Bjarni Herjolfsson sights North America after being
blown off course
1002AD Leif Ericsson, son of Erik the Red, explores the
coast of North America, named them Karland, Helluland and Vinland
1492AD Italian explorer Christopher Columbus lands in the
New World when he stumbles across the islands now known as The Bahamas
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
-----------
BLOG:
Canada
Military News:Handsome and dirty Vikings (Old Arabic texts)/ Which countries in
the Middle East hate each other and why?/Who is an Arab? /Who is Persian/Turkey
is traitor to all imho /Women will bring down ISIS -just watch sssssssh and
listen
Viking
Answer Lady Webpage - Risala: Ibn Fadlan's ...
www.vikinganswerlady.com/ibn_fdln.shtml
1.
2.
No
standard measure is known in the land; they buy and sell by dry measure. ... The Rus are a great
host, all of them red haired; they are big men with white bodies. ... Note: The preceeding two
paragraphs are from the 16th century C.E. Persian ... With them are pretty slave girls destines for sale to merchants: a man
will ...
Saudi Aramco World : Among
the Norse Tribes: The ...
archive.aramcoworld.com/.../among.the.norse.tribes-the.remarkable.acco...
1.
The Vikings' network
of arduous riverine trade routes connected settlements from ... and other kinds
of skins, which they sell to those
who will buy from them," he observed. ... Ibn Hawkal, writing in 977, the
Rus slave trade ran
"from Spain to Egypt. .... Hedeby was noisy and filthy, he
wrote, with the pagan inhabitants hanging ...
Missing: white
--------------
Beautiful Dirty Vikings- history defines us- Discovery Could Rewrite History of Vikings in New World http://on.natgeo.com/1Vcm8UB via @NatGeo
---------------
Blogged:
CANADA HISTORY OF WHITE SLAVERY/Europe-
WHITE SERVITUDE (Indentured Servant)...Iran's vicious cruelty (SHAME ON USA)
against citizen.... NEDAS..... black Muslim slavery/ Jon Stewart's Rosewater
and why it matters... AND THEN THEY CAME 4 ME.....Baha'i-To Light A Candle- and
Education is NOT a Crime....#1BRising- why we are still here- Zahra Kazemi,
Canadian Iranian Journalist raped, tortured beaten 2 death 4 taking pictures of
Evin Prison/#Free Rafi- Saudi Arabia / Mohamed Nadel Fahmy- Canadian Egyptian
(bring him home 2 Canada now/ so tired of global politicans (all) selling
humanity's soul at the cost of our troops and everyday folks 4 UN $$$greed and
war/EDWARD SNOWDEN WINS AN OSCAR
http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2016/01/white-slavery-from-dirty-beautiful.html
--------------
2016- nothing has changed at United Nations has it...
BLOGSPOT: july 10-2013
UNITED NATIONS- $4billionyr Unhuman Rights Council- where even
USA refuses to sign WOMEN R EQUAL and children matter -LOOK AT THE MONSTERS
$4billion a yr UN does 2 women and kids
------------------
See... in Europe and Britain- white slavery was called
servitude.... that’s how my mother’s German/Dutch family arrived.... always the
prettiest girls and the strongest, most able boys.... ie.... 7 years white
slavery (servitude) working for the landowner and they were to b rewarded with
their own land and trimmings after... only it always turned in2 longer and
promises NOT kept..... and so far from home... in a wilderness called
Canada.... horribly hard...
NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC- Kinder, Gentler Vikings? Not According to Their Slaves
New
clues suggest slaves were vital to the Viking way of life—and argue against
attempts to soften the raiders’ brutish reputation.
Photo:
A bare-chested Viking offers a
slave girl to a Persian merchant in an artist’s rendering of a scene from
Bulgar, a trading town on the Volga River.
ILLUSTRATION BY TOM LOVELL, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
The
ancient reputation of Vikings as bloodthirsty raiders on cold northern seas has
undergone a radical change in recent decades. A kinder, gentler, and more
fashionable Viking emerged. (See “Did Vikings Get a Bum Rap?”)
But our view
of the Norse may be about to alter course again as scholars turn their gaze to
a segment of Viking society that has long remained in the shadows.
Archaeologists are using recent
finds and analyses of previous discoveries—from iron collars in Ireland to
possible plantation houses in Sweden—to illuminate the role of slavery in
creating and maintaining the Viking way of life.
“This was a slave economy,” said Neil Price, an
archaeologist at Sweden’s Uppsala University who spoke at a recent meeting that
brought together archaeologists who study slavery and colonization. “Slavery
has received hardly any attention in the past 30 years, but now we have
opportunities using archaeological tools to change this.”
Small
houses surround a great hall at a Viking site in Sweden called Sanda. Some
archaeologists believe this may have been a Viking plantation with slaves as
the labor force.
Scandinavian slavery still echoes in the
English language today. The expression “to be held in thrall,” meaning to be
under someone’s power, traces back to the Old Norse term for a slave: thrall.
Slavery in the region long predates the
Vikings. There is evidence of vast economic disparity as early as the first
century A.D., with some people living with animals in barns while others live
nearby in large, prosperous homes. In 2009, archaeologist Frands Herschend at
Uppsala detailed a burnt structure from this early era in which people and
animals were immolated. The human bodies were left in the ruins rather than
retrieved for burial.
Ancient
chronicles long mentioned that people, as well as precious objects, were a
target of the Viking raids that began in 793 A.D. at the Scottish monastery ofLindisfarne.
The Annals of Ulster record “a great booty of women” taken
in a raid near Dublin in 821 A.D., while the same account contends that 3,000
people were captured in a single attack a century later.
Ibn Hawqal, an Arab geographer,
described a Viking slave trade in 977 A.D. that extended across the
Mediterranean from Spain to Egypt. Others recorded that slaves from northern
Europe were funneled from Scandinavia through Russia to Byzantium and Baghdad.
Shortage of Women and Workers
Price suspects that “slavery was a
very significant motivator in raiding.” One key factor may have been a dire
need for women.
Some scholars believe that the Vikings were a
polygamous society that made it hard for non-elites to find brides. That may have
driven the raids and ambitious exploration voyages for which Vikings are best
known. Some genetic studies, for example, suggest that a majority of Icelandic
women are related to Scottish and Irish ancestors who likely were raid booty.
As Viking fleets expanded, so did the need
for wool to produce the sails necessary to power the ships. This also may have
driven the need for slaves. “There was a significant shift in agriculture,”
said Price. The pressing need for wool production likely led to a plantation-like
economy, a topic now being studied by researchers.
Slavery was a very
significant motivator in raiding.
Neil Price Archaeologist
For example, at a Swedish site called Sanda,
researchers in the 1990s found a great hall surrounded by small houses. Some
Swedish archaeologists now believe this could have been a Viking plantation
with slaves as the labor force.
“What you likely have is a slave-driven
production of textiles,” said Price. “We can’t really know who is making the
cloth, but the implications are clear.”
William
Fitzhugh, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution, added that “female
slaves were concubines, cooks, and domestic workers.” Male thralls likely were
involved in cutting trees, building ships, and rowing those vessels for their
Viking masters.
Human Sacrifices
Other studies suggest that Viking
slaves were sometimes sacrificed when their masters died, and they ate more
poorly during their lives.
Elise Naumann, an
archaeologist at the University of Oslo, recently discovered that decapitated
bodies found in several Viking tombs likely were not related to the other
remains. This lack of kinship, combined with signs of mistreatment, make it
likely that they were slaves sacrificed at the death of their masters, a
practice mentioned in Viking sagas and Arab chronicles.
The bones also revealed a diet
based heavily on fish, while their masters dined more heartily on meat and
dairy products.
The harsh
treatment accorded slaves is amply recorded both in the archaeological and
historical record.
The harsh treatment accorded slaves is amply
recorded both in the archaeological and historical record. On the Isle of Man
in the Irish Sea, a wealthy male Viking’s tomb includes the remains of a young
female killed by a ferocious blow to the top of her head and mixed in with the
ashes of cremated animals. Other such examples can be found across northern
Europe.
Life for thralls was clearly harsh. A
14th-century poem—the original likely dates from the end of the Viking
era—gives an idea of how Vikings saw their slaves. Among their names were
Bastard, Sluggard, Stumpy, Stinker, and Lout.
Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, an Arab lawyer and diplomat
from Baghdad who encountered the men of Scandinavia in his travels, wrote that
Vikings treated their female chattel as sex slaves. If a slave died, he added,
“they leave him there as food for the dogs and the birds.”
But one
recent discovery challenges ideas about the status of slaves. In recent years,
researchers have identified nearly 80 Viking skeletons that feature deep
grooves across their upper front teeth. Some speculate that these may have been
a mark of a warrior class, since the skeletons were all male.
Anna Kjellstrom at
Stockholm University, noted that the remains of two men in central Sweden that
appear to be buried as slaves include the teeth grooves.
“This
is not the same as saying that modified teeth is a feature only found in
slaves,” Kjellstrom added. But it is forcing scholars to rethink the idea that
it was solely for warriors, as well as the place of slaves in Viking society.
Nevertheless,
as scholars focus on the Norse need for human chattel, the kinder and gentler
aura surrounding Vikings today may begin to diminish.
Follow Andrew Lawler at www.andrewlawler.com.
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