Viking ‘Allah’ textile actually doesn't have Allah on it
twitter.com
twitter.com
I saw in the tweet she tagged Guardian, BBC, NatGeo and NYTimes. Was there just a slow news day that they all picked up that one claim and ran with it.
She explains it towards the end of her story:
Why does brouhaha over Arabic on Viking textile matter? Three reasons
One, context: story likely went viral because of recent events. Charlottesville revealed to all what has long been known among medievalists: that white supremacy uses medieval imagery & symbolism. At Charlottesville we saw medieval banners & chants with Crusader phrases like Deus Vult.
So the Viking Allah textile exhibits what Stephen Colbert once called ‘truthiness’ but is not supported by scholarship. But ‘truthiness’ cannot be enough for news media, especially in this age of accusations of Fake News.
And when medieval & particularly Viking age is used as ideological weapon by white supremacists & scholars are risking careers to fight white supremacist appropriation & not just white supremacists use medieval to further contemporary agendas: same tactic used by ISIS, alQaeda who kill thousands. Then it matters that we get this right. Media can report on diversity of Global Middle Ages w/out trumped-up scholarship. But we need news media to be our allies, consult experts, and get facts right.
Sweden is historically inhabited by europeans who happened to settle there over the course of centuries, and then to their amazement later discovered they are "white". They probably just thought they were people back then.
I haven't heard about Swedes participating in slave trade (vikings aside) and there was nobody else for them to oppress (vikings aside), so it's kind of strange idea that Swedes now has to make up for centuries of white supremacism ("people supremacism"?)
A lot of things which make sense in context of history of USA (when european colonists overran the land and then imported black people agains their will to exploit them) doesn't extend on Northern Europe.
The comment that brought up Dublin was in response to a comment about Sweden.
What if medieval times more often than not were full of racists, irrational crazy beliefs, brutality, killing, hate, all kinds of xenophobia, sexism, and other stuff we find despicable today. Trying to paint that time as a happy period, where everyone was integrated, and they lived together peacefully will backfire unless there is solid evidence to prove it.
> Then it matters that we get this right. Media can report on diversity of Global Middle Ages w/out trumped-up scholarship.
Exactly. I think there were areas at the intersection of trade routes where cities had multiple nationalities and faiths living together. One distinct feature was that it was tied to economic prosperity. As long as everyone was not starving and had a place to live, and trade was flourishing, living together worked well. I think picking one of those example might have worked better in this context. But in general if the audience was white supremacists, it's better to just ignore them and not engage, it's waste of time debating with crazy people.
Dubai is pretty diverse today.
The question, what happens when wealth runs out?
I guess here the idea wast to politicize this "discovery". It backfired, now the crazies will say "See, these scientists have to make up facts,what else are they lying about!"
So I thought, if politicizing and PR was the main purpose, there are better example out there to pick from than Vikings as an example of a peace loving integrated society.
Not quite. What happens is that people pose hypotheses, based on available evididence, that are later strengthened or weakened by new evidence. What happened here was that the authour had the same evidence that we have, they just took the liberty to add data that wasn’t actually there, and drew conclusions based on that.
Vikings conquered Sicily, south Italy and other meditarinian locations since 8th century. There was a slave trade. At some point Islam conquered 20% of Europe.
A lot of people don't realise that the high points of Islamic European expansion were Poitiers & Vienna — less than 800 miles apart.
So you know, Islam conquering parts of Europe happened.
And Vikings did attacked north of Europe and I think they ruled Russia basically at one point.
So I still don't know whether there are details that makes their meeting impossible or whether you just chalked away possibility of Turks and Islam attacking Europe in the past impossible without studying it.
Downvoting it for political reasons that have zero to do with history being discussed, because some unrelated discussions about tolerance something is textbook suppressing of historical truth for political reasons.
They were neighbours because they conquered Sicily and Spain
"Cultural exchange" in past happened mostly thanks to slave trade. Teachers were mostly foreign slaves, who converted young elite to their culture. For example Greek culture spread in city of Rome mainly by this.
Did the conquerors instigate Sharia, did they do the Mohammedean standard "pay jizya, convert, or die" offer to the populous? Did the conquered people convert and then seek to forcibly "convert" others?
They tried to convert people everywhere, there was resistance. Not in the ISIS style, I have to admit. But by hindering Christians and giving preferences to Muslim converts.
You think they were spreading atheism or christianity? Of course not, they pushed for their own religion.
The idea presented in the original article was that a Viking was buried with a piece of fabric carrying an Islamic design, which had been incorrectly copied by a third party. They in fact said a Muslim Viking "could not absolutely be ruled out" but was unlikely. How you go from this to "Viking-Islamic multiculturalism projected into the past" is beyond me.
Edit: Just googled around and did find a Guardian article with the subheading "University researchers’ ‘staggering’ claim appears to contradict theories that Islamic objects in Viking graves are result of plunder", although that wasn't replicated in the BBC article which was posted to HN.
I understand that the limitations of twitter make it a difficult format to express it, but like most mediums with major limitations, these limitations can breed creativity and greatness.
There's a reason why a Facebook post goes viral on Facebook a lot easier than anywhere else. Same reason why twitter-chains are successful.
I'm sure blogger posts are popular on blogger though.
I'm sorry you had a bad user experience.
However your anecdote does not invalidate the reality that tweet chains are far more popular than blogs for spreading analysis of news today. They are extremely popular and successful, even if you have personally failed to use them as you would like.
This, IMO, is like someone experiencing motion sickness while using an Oculus Rift and then boldly proclaiming all of VR to be a complete failure.
Everyone who says ad-blocking is immoral is welcome to write me a check to help offset my power bill.
This also misses the main point. People try to argue, like you're doing here, that publishers need to survive and so you shouldn't ad block. I used to do that with reddit, until I started noticing page loads that wouldn't end and continuous network usage. Reactivating the ad blocker solved that. The reality of the situation is that ad networks are malicious actors and need to be handled as such.
If you want me to pay you, tell me to pay you, don't just reach into my pocket and start plucking out loose change.
Edit: To be clear, if it was opt-in, whereby you got to choose if you would rather pay money, view ads, or offer cpu cycles in order to view a site, I could see it catching on.
(They really are doubling to 280)
> It took a week to do the research and two days to write, which is basically like lightning speed in the academic world.
The effort is greatly appreciated, but having to then digest the content on Twitter really lets the content down.
That being said, where else would this kind of content have worked where the everyreader wouldn't have given up after the third or fourth paragraph of dense medieval historic record?
A Medium post or something would be more natural for this length of text, but it also deters people with the possibility of a ten-page story. 60 tweets might be absurdly long, but at least you know it's not going be 200. So the format is dumb, but I think you're right - it offers a guarantee to readers who don't want denser pieces.
I can look at the scroll bar on an article and decide if I want to continue after a couple paragraphs, I can't tell from a tweet that starts "5/" if it'll go to 8 or 60.
The 'benefit' though is that people automatically believe whatever they read on Twitter. You could copy and paste the exact same text into a Google doc, and the number of people who believe what this guy is saying would probably fall by 90%.
There's a reason why whenever there is a hoax about Justin Bieber or whoever having died, it's always Twitter where these things spread.
Woman. Her name is Stephennie Mulder.
Absolutely. And casts doubt on the quality of the research behind it, as well.
"In this episode we explore the how Rurik might have been buried through the accounts of the Arab diplomat and adventurer Ibn Fadlan.. . . " https://history-podcasts.com/the-real-middle-ages/116269
Secondly is The Volga Vikings BBC In Our Times Podcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vrx8g Which includes the Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic James Montgomery also speaking about Ibn Fadlan.
He also wrote a translation for the Library of Arabic Literature for NYU Press https://nyupress.org/books/9781479803507/
You’re not being very inclusive, folks. She wanted to post it on Twitter, not a blog. She did. Don’t waste all this thread time discussing Twitter. Discuss her work. Discuss her points. But please, stop wasting time and energy on the “meta” of her chosen communication platform in a thread about Viking textiles.
Therein lies the problem. Good research deserves good presentation, and 60 tweets where a Medium or Blogger or whatever post would've sufficed ain't exactly it.
Likewise, it's hard to discuss her work when the presentation is sufficiently distracting to preclude actually viewing said work in a reasonable manner.
As I understand it, every two years, the length of characters we can tweet will double indefinitely.
In a few more years you will be writing entire paragraphs on the web.
Seriously. Allah, Viking textiles... Hacker News?
When does Hacker News get subreddits....err subhackers....
Second off, viking history is Hacker News?
Because reddit.com/r/history is a very appropriate place for this, and reddit.com/r/askhistorians would be a great place to talk to experts about this.
But Hackers News? 0 historians, 0 experts, wrong subject matter. It's just weird. It devalues this place greatly when it imitates reddit because it cannot out-reddit reddit.
Again, the reddification of hacker news is its demise.
You will always get better history discussion on reddit.com/r/askhistorians, a community full of verified historians, than Hacker News, a community of mainly programmers and those involved with modern tech industry. Specialization works. Diluting this website will destroy it, just as it destroyed reddit prior to subreddits.
Once in a while there's even a story about software and technology that makes it through...
Oh wait :X
oh wait!
Lowest-common-denominator democracy driving content into the gutter of popularity.
Oh well, I complain because I've been here for nearly a decade across accounts. This... isn't what it used to be like.
I complain because I remember a better time.
Oh well, really, oh well.
The NY Times and a few other press pieces really ran with this story and took some pretty out there liberties.
It's Bait Blindness. I claim the novelty of the naming
What about a single scholar's un-peer reviewed rebuttal? One of the fun things of social media is that something like this goes viral and everyone says "see I knew it" and the skeptics get shot down for "you're not an academic" but then another academic is skeptical and then we're back to "see, see I knew it." I don't see a solution here buts an amusing pattern.
Not sure who the authority here is, if anyone. I imagine this is the kind of thing that will need to be debated and 'solved' at a later time, regardless if Prof Mulder's skepticism is correct. There could be more to this story that she doesn't know, for example, but I'm personally leaning towards her thesis, but I'm naturally skeptical so I'm fairly biased.
Original claim: Annika Larsson, researcher at Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University http://katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N1-483
This rebuttal: Stephennie Mulder, Associate Professor, Art History (Islamic Art and Architecture), University of Texas at Austin https://art.utexas.edu/about/people/stephennie-mulder