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Comment by engineer_22 | Hacker News Reader

Vikings famously defended the Roman Emperor in Byzantium, known as the Varangian Guard. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard

Edit: Oh, the article actually mentions the same. I find it endlessly fascinating how interconnected the ancient worlds really were.

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Yes, the Arabs knew about the Vikings. Similarly old Sanskrit grammar texts in India refer to the Greeks. St. Thomas Aquinas extensively refers to Arab scholars like Avicenna and Averroes. The ancient world was more connected than we realise.

Ibn Fadlan’s writings about his encounters with Vikings are a fun read : https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Saint_Mary's_College_(N...

Greek art heavily influenced Buddhist art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

And there were Buddhists in the Roman empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarmanochegas

This is actually one of my favorite historical facts. Buddha images are everywhere in modern Thailand and it’s fascinating to me that this likely would not be the case if it weren’t for Greeks in Central Asia

Thailand (and most of SE Asia) is Theravada and received Buddhism directly from India while the Greek Buddhists were Mahayana and spread that thru the Silk Road into East Asia.

I recently saw a documentary about how Anglo-Saxons invaded the west of England but Cornwal remained celtic and because of its tin-mining kept a strong connection to the Mediterranean. I don't have a link to the documentary but I think this is about the same thing:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/groundbreaking-study-ancient-t...

That is also a reason why northen Portugal and Spain also kept their celtic culture due to those connections.

I wonder how much cod food culture has to do with this?!

Might be, until recently I was unware that the Greeks and Turks also have the same salted cod culture as we have in Portugal, even if they lack 365 + 1 recipes for it. :)

Speaking of Celtic connections - the origin legends of the Scots claim that they came here via Spain and Ireland:

"They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous."

https://www.historyfiles.co.uk/FeaturesBritain/Medieval_Text...

Of course, this is a bit bizarre - but a good story!

Thomas Aquinas lived in the middle ages, he was closer to our day than the "ancient world".

> I find it endlessly fascinating how interconnected the ancient worlds really were.

And it's amazing to me how much work we need to do to understand the past. Though it seems like not all past cultures had it so difficult - those with e.g. strong oral traditions. Some Australian Aboriginal oral traditions recount accurately geographic features from thousands of years before.

The hard part isn't the recounting, it's distinguishing recount from improv.

This is funny, as I just finished a novel that had this as a large plot point. Talk about Synchronicity. It's Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland's "The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O". It's a pretty entertaining read, from the point of view of several characters.

I'm waiting for the sequel in the mail, "Master of the Revels: A Return to Neal Stephenson's D.O.D.O." by Nicole Galland herself. It appears Neal dropped off.

> I find it endlessly fascinating how interconnected the ancient worlds really were.

Necessarily so - bronze required materials from different parts of the world.

I've read somewhere that the Varangian Guard was mostly Finns. No proper source at hand tho.

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