Among the Norse Tribes: The Remarkable Account of Ibn Fadlan (1999)
archive.aramcoworld.com
archive.aramcoworld.com
This book really torpedoed any romantic notions I had of those eras. Basically you just had a lot of motorcycle gangs running around in the forest - imagine Negen from TWD and you get an idea —- it would have sucked to have been alive then. Fascinating talk of the slaving “season”, and comparison of prices for buying a blonde-haired girl at various points along the river. Life was very cheap and might made right. No thanks, man. Not to offend anyone, but it also makes me appreciate the gradual changes that Christianity brought to those forests and to European peoples in time.
Luckily however the Norse, as boat travelers, were mainly limited to the Volga and other large rivers. Outsiders were also reluctant to approach indigenous communities due to the risk of being struck with poison arrows. So, the local peoples could simply move a couple of dozen kilometers from the big river and then never encounter a Norse party in their lives.
> it also makes me appreciate the gradual changes that Christianity brought
Among the indigenous peoples of the Middle Volga, one finds a strong undercurrent of resentment of Christianity. Not only did people not like losing their traditional religion (animism for the Mari and Chuvash, for example), but the Christianity that the Russians brought was not often kind or compassionate, and it went together with serfdom that was hardly different from slavery. Some have even looked back on the era of Muslim Tatar rule as preferable, because the Tatar Khanate did not practice forced conversions of most other peoples. The Tatars were content to let most of them stay non-Muslim and move freely about the forests, because these peoples could then be used as a very lucrative source of fur taxation.
To be fair, Christianity's position is that of chance, Europe could all just as well have been founded on Slavic Paganism, Islam (arguably it largely is and this is insufficiently recognized), Mongol pluralism or some similar belief system. Any nominally centralized society capable of a rule of law and literate record keeping would have had the same effect, if capable of gluing together society long enough to create a surplus and decrease the risks of increased specialization. See earlier civilizations, other parts of the world, etc.
Banderas sits up all night listening to them speak in another language. By morning they’re all speaking English. When he speaks to them fluently, they’re surprised and ask how he learned their language.
“I listened”
Quoting for memory, after Tarzan finds some books and newspapers as a result of someone’s previous tragedy in the jungle: “Tarzan, being of superior intellect by virtue of being born to English parents, was able to figure out the meaning of the symbols he found in the books and realized they were forming words and sentences,” from which he not only learned to read English but also devoured the books (textbooks?) and their content.
"Among the other books were a primer, some child's readers, numerous picture books, and a great dictionary. All of these he examined, but the pictures caught his fancy most, though the strange little bugs which covered the pages where there were no pictures excited his wonder and deepest thought."
"He did not accomplish it in a day, or in a week, or in a month, or in a year; but slowly, very slowly, he learned after he had grasped the possibilities which lay in those little bugs, so that by the time he was fifteen he knew the various combinations of letters which stood for every pictured figure in the little primer and in one or two of the picture books."
But "according to the most prevalent theory, the name 'Rus', like the Proto-Finnic name for Sweden (Ruotsi), is derived from an Old Norse term for "the men who row". (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people)
The ethonym is traceable in names such the eastern Swedish district of Roslagen (from where a lot of these norsemen presumably set sail), as well as 'Rus'sia.
Possibly some Norse genes in there?
What I found really interesting was that 10,000 BC, Britain was populated with blue-eyed people with dark skin. They got mostly replaced by Anatolians, who then built the Stone Henge and occupied Britain for a few thousand years. Anatolians were then replaced by continental Europeans (who by then had been breeding with the progeny of other Anatolians for thousands of years). At least while the Anatolians were around, the remaining dark-skinned natives, who were dwindling in number, resorted to inbreeding so as not to dilute their genes. Clearly they didn't care for lighter skin.
Ya, archaeogenetics is a real trip. The field can upend our already flimsy notions of race and the narratives that come with it. Modern sequencing technology is yielding huge new results on a frequent basis.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42939192
7,000-Year-Old Human Bones Suggest New Date for Light-Skin Gene
https://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-gatherer-g...
Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans
https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6639
Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans
Spread of genes for light skin into dark-skinned Europe: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-europeans-evo...
"Once the first farmers from the near East began to arrive in Europe, and who carried both genes for light skin, they began breeding with the “indigenous hunter gatherers”. One of the depigmentation genes became prominent throughout Europe to the point where central and southern Europeans developed lighter skin."
>The men, he observed, were tattooed with dark-green figures "from fingernails to neck.
I wonder what these tattoos represent and why they were so heavily tattooed.
As to being heavily tattooed, I'd imagine it implied an elite status proof-of-work. It takes several sessions with a cooperative artist to do a full body tattoo, and if one "doesn't deserve" the body art, that leaves a large window during which poseurs would be liable to retributive violence from the legit.
Then again, maybe they just enjoyed body art. For instance, I could easily imagine a Rus tattooing a new islamic dome (albeit in green instead of golden[2]) for every season they spent trading, far away from home.
Anyway for more things like this, there's Voices from the Past on youtube, which is a guy narrating travel logs, e.g. from the first Japanese visitors to the US. Really interesting bits in there, like how they recognize a horse and carriage for what it is but still disassociate and need to be told how to use it, or shock at how a hotel is fully carpeted, or funny bits where the guy doesn't recognize an ash tray and puts the ash in a bit of paper up his sleeve instead (consequences ensue).
cannot imagine Buliwyf without thinking on Kulich
For example:
- Roman empire, slavery, crucifixion, invasions ... where to start, perhaps 400,000 deaths in the Colosseum alone https://darkrome.com/blog/Rome/7-bloody-colosseum-facts,
- Celts - slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts#Society, human sacrifice https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/did-the-ancient-c...
- Spartans with their Helot's https://allthatsinteresting.com/krypteia-sparta
- Arab empires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade
- Ottoman's - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissary
- Mongol's, up to 40 million deaths https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-abou..., sack of Baghdad https://www.warhistoryonline.com/medieval/the-sack-of-baghda...
Are widely acceptable in our current society.
What is about societies like the Vikings (invaders, human sacrificers and slave traders https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/12/151228-vikin...) that means they don't get talked about in the same way that Germany's Nazi regime is? Is it politics? Or just time? But how come some groups statues and iconography are "acceptable" while others are not?
(sorry for the long post that's wandered off topic ;-) )
On the other hand, while people might have strong opinions about a "Molon Labe" bumper stick, there isn't anyone with Helot grandparents who raised them on stories about how terrible the Spartans were to their slaves.