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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

> On this site researchers have found detailed similarities between two graves that were built hundreds of years apart

Vikings may have been influenced by the Romans, but burials have followed remarkably similar patterns for thousands of years all over the world with no influence from outside:

The dead are often buried with items to help them in an afterlife - food, money or something to trade to help the journey.

With items that were significant to them or their role in their life - jewellery, weapons, tools.

And are often laid out straight in 'best' clothes, relatives hold vigil over the body until burial/cremation etc.

We also base burials on the burials we've seen - so is it strange that they build tombstones like the old (Roman) one? In the same way that Egyptian rulers wanted a pyramid like their predecessor?

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It's a tradition that was carried over from the vegetarian guard often recruited from the nords due to reaching their population limit early, they would often journey south to work in Roman controlled regions though it's different in how it was adapted just like how most groups take in traditions and beliefs from things they've seen elsewhere. It's not really indicative of anything really.

Although a vegetarian guard sounds intriguing (but not as cool as a Vegan Guard), probably this was the Varangian Guard.

Joys of autocorrect

Glad someone fixed that. I was picturing some wizened old man with a staff who can kick ass through some combination of experience, zeal, and healthy living :)

The Varangian guard were in Constantinople. So kinda sorta “Roman-controlled” but not exactly Rome.

Well not exactly it was throughout Roman controlled territories throughout hundreds of years not just a single place. Often times mercenaries and raider groups. In places like the France especially. Many settlements and colonies were established and in places like north Germany it's predominately still Scandinavian. And I don't mean Denmark but Hamburg. It's where Hitler got his whole rhetoric about the superior Nordic race and the inferior slavs even though he was from Austria and Germanic not Scandinavian.

How was it “kinda sorta”? They were the direct, unbroken, legal and institutional continuance of the Roman Empire.

No its exactly Rome. That is what they would have called themselves and they had the provenance to back it up.

Constantinople was part of the Roman Empire (as the name implies, it was 'founded' by the Roman emperor Constantine) and considered itself the Roman empire until it fell.

Sure. I just mean that if you didn’t know better, you might conclude from the parent comment that the Varangian guard were geographically based in Rome.

Quoth They Might Giants, "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)":

Istanbul was Constantinople

Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople

Been a long time gone, Constantinople

Why did Constantinople get the works?

That's nobody's business but the Turks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XlO39kCQ-8

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