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Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

bbc.com

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Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#111

Post by unkown-unknowns »

diminish wrote: post #85
rusk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That all sounds a bit far fetched if you ask me. A more likely explanation is trade and cultural exchange [EDIT] and expropriation. The Vikings roamed far and wide [0] [1], and Islam even made it as far as Spain at one stage [2] As far as they went though they probably never got as far as East Asia where they could have encountered Buddhism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings#Viking_Age [1] https://en.wikipedi…

Does "cultural exchange" include looting and pillage? It may seem hard to accept nationalistically for Scandinavians but most Vikings stuff in tombs are the result of not a production economy.

I don't think most people in Scandinavia has any problem accepting this. Pretty much everyone in the world who knows about Vikings know that raping and plundering is what they did for the most part when they set sail to distant shores.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#112

Post by [deleted] »

dagw wrote: post #108
Brakenshire wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloody Scandinavian political correctness, trying to avoid offending the Vikings! I've read that Vikings were kind of half traders, half raiders. It was a culture of 'bringing back the spoils', I think the word was leader was actually something equivalent to 'ring-giver', and the bond of allegiance was made on that basis. So I suppose you could accomplish that goal in a variety of ways, depending on the circumstances…

I've read Vikings were kind of half traders, half raiders, Also worth remembering the "the vikings" where not some homogeneous society. The term covers a large number of different groups from different countries and different periods of history. Some traded, some looted, some went west, some went east etc.

[deleted]

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#113

Post by pbhjpbhj »

qw wrote: post #48
AmIFirstToThink wrote: post #25

Occam's razor: Viking raided silk traders travelling far, or raided people who had access to those traders, traders who were either wearing or selling the silk cloth with pattern.

Why assume raids? Vikings were also traders and travelled far. They might as well have bought the cloth in Byzantium.

IIRC viking is an action akin to "raiding", maybe that's why? People groups who vikinged also traded.

As to why make the assumption, unless there's evidence of Scandinavian goods in Byzantium it's a good assumption.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#114

Post by RickJWagner »

mentallimits wrote: post #93
jpatokal wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not perfect and generally on the "liberal" side of the spectrum, the BBC is remarkably apolitical by US standards and I very much doubt they have any (Viking) axes to grind when it comes to Swedish politics. Disclaimer: I used to work at a BBC company, although nowhere near the news department.

The BBC has a strong left wing bias. This doesn't come through so much in how they report mainstream political news but in the stories they choose to run on their website. A good example is the choice of stories for the "Society" section.

Yes, exactly.

Big media has several tools available:

- Choose which stories to run - Choose which stories not to run - Choose which stories to allow discussion boards on - More obvious mechanisms, like slanted coverage

Used together, they make an impressive suite of persuasion tools.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#115

Post by majewsky »

jlebrech wrote: post #70
eponeponepon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so swift to cast this as political? All this suggests - at most- is that individuals might have decided they wanted to be muslims, or more likely just liked the iconography. Whichever way you slice it, islam is a part, however small, of Sweden's history, on account of its symbolism being found on Swedish historical artifacts.

it's by the BBC

Name any news/media organization that is not biased in some way.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#116

Post by PakG1 »

asymmetric wrote: post #52
PakG1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a funny modern example, check out Kenyon Martin, former NBA all-star, having Chinese character tattoos. I never really thought about this until social media apparently all told him to back off when he said current Brooklyn Nets point guard Jeremy Lin shouldn't have dreadlocks in his hair because that was a black culture thing, and then Lin (politely) pointed out that Martin had Chinese character tattoos. I imagine…

I would be really interested in that article about t-shirt slogans!

Sad to say I can't find it. But it had interviews of top sellers of t-shirts. These people would literally type random English letters into online search engines (obviously not Google) and see what got auto-suggested. Then they'd choose the auto-suggestions that literally looked the prettiest or coolest to them. Maybe change a letter here or there to make it look even more cool. Then off to the t-shirt printers.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#117

Post by Brakenshire »

dithering wrote: post #101
Brakenshire wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBC is also accused of having a right wing bias by the left. The 'Society' section appears to just be a view on the homepage with a few articles at a time, one of the things you can add or remove from the customizable homepage, not a cohesive category. These are the three articles on there at the moment: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/item/63ca22ff-b580-4fe7-8796-b... http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/item/5d33c36d-cd…

BBC is biased towards the status quo. Very, very broadly it's position is economic-right social-left, which is pretty much Official Government Worldview, whatever the government, these days.

Yes, although there are a lot of diversions from that, for instance Farage and UKIP (who are anti establishment social conservatives) got substantially more coverage than was reflected in their polling. There are a lot of social conservative voices given a lot of coverage, and in positions of power (within a British context, more defense of the British Empire, Euroscepticism and than evangelical Christianity) like Paxman, Andrew Neil, Humphreys, Melanie Philips etc.

Also, I'd say their economics coverage is reactive, it's framed around the Budget, major speeches from prominent politicians, research or press releases from the OBR, IFS, the IMF or similar organizations. It reports those positions, then goes to opposition parties or other figures to ask for comment. The problem for left wing parties is that doesn't give much space to get across a completely different narrative, but that is frankly not the BBC's role.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#118

Post by demonshalo »

Brakenshire wrote: post #105
demonshalo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Swede I can tell you that whatever research comes out of these institutions will be biased. These institutions suffer to a large degree of self-hatred due to some nasty shit that they've contributed to over the years. For that reason, they try to always publish crap like in order to champion diversity and deny their vicious history. It's basically like how Germans react to their history with Hitler. Merkel had n…

What is there to be credible or otherwise about? It's a geometric pattern which symbolizes Ali (of Shia) and the Islamic god, in a piece of fabric traded to the Vikings. The research even says it was likely an incorrect copy done by a second party of the original design from the Islamic world. That is interesting in the context of trade and cultural links, but is in itself exceptionally uncontroversial.

> That is interesting in the context of trade and cultural links, but is in itself exceptionally uncontroversial.

Exactly. It is more than likely that something like this is the result of trade. However, the way the narrative is built around "findings" like these by professors in the departments of said universities is something completely different.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#119

Post by aedron »

rspeer wrote: post #36
anovikov wrote: post #26

Well, why don't they think that Vikings simply seen these as a decoration, not understanding what they mean? That happens in much much more recent times. Late Russian ex-foreign minister, and ex-prime minister Primakov, who is Arab states specialist and reads Arabic scripts very well, once saw a garment with 'No god except Allah...' on Patriarch of Russia Alexy II, shocking him because similar ritual garments were us…

Is it actually shocking? Isn't it just a statement the Orthodox church would agree with ("there is no god except God") written in Arabic?

It's literally the first commandment.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#120

Post by empath75 »

irrational wrote: post #38
anovikov wrote: post #26

Well, why don't they think that Vikings simply seen these as a decoration, not understanding what they mean? That happens in much much more recent times. Late Russian ex-foreign minister, and ex-prime minister Primakov, who is Arab states specialist and reads Arabic scripts very well, once saw a garment with 'No god except Allah...' on Patriarch of Russia Alexy II, shocking him because similar ritual garments were us…

But Allah is a cognate of El/Elohim. You could translate it as There is no god except El/Elohim. Just because it uses Arabic characters doesn't mean it can't be translated into English (or Russian) as something other than Allah.

It’s a specifically Muslim formulation of the idea, though.
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