
Viking ‘Allah’ textile actually doesn't have Allah on it - DanAndersen
https://twitter.com/stephenniem/status/919897406031978496
======
rdtsc
So someone made a guess, it was wrong, that happens. But why did end up being
spread around the news so much. So what, even if it said Allah? Vikings liked
to travel, they might have been buying or copying decorative elements from
various places.

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.

~~~
sampo
> But why did end up being spread around the news so much.

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.

~~~
thriftwy
It is kind of fun to see white supremacism discussed in the context of Sweden.

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.

~~~
vixen99
Slavery has been a characteristic of almost every human grouping at some time
or another. It seems you are not aware of the large number of Europeans and
Africans (and in East Asia) who were enslaved by Muslims in the 18th century.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Musl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Muslim_world)

~~~
vim_wannabe
We don't talk about that.

~~~
Brakenshire
Speak for yourself! I've had quite a few conversations about this in the last
year, about the Barbary slave trade in the late middle ages, or the treatment
of black slaves in the Arabic slave trade. I saw a European TV programme about
the latter. I also saw some artifacts related to it in a museum. If you're
hoping to get a reasonable coverage of history from reading newspapers or
watching tv news, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

------
jankotek
I dont get why this gets so much attention. Of course there was a contact.

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.

~~~
JPKab
People projecting their own value of multi-culturalism onto historical
artifacts and cultures. Multiculturalism and tolerance are valuable, wonderful
additions to our world, but we shouldn't desperately try to find evidence of
it where it isn't. It's desperate and embarrassing, and taints the
institutions doing it as simply being publicity seekers first, and scientists
second.

~~~
watwut
My country has quite a few castles which were destroyed by Turks. It is
written on welcoming billboards along with other important dates. Some
multiple times. Some castles were build specifically to defend against turks
and families who ruled them became "famous Turk killers".

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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Equating Turks (not sure if you mean that or Ottomans?) conquering armies with
"Islam conquering parts of Europe" (Greece?, Spain?) seems likely to be
problematic; the latter would suggest willful adoption _en masse_ of Islamic
religion, political structure, warring.

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?

~~~
thriftwy
Yes they did. That's how we've got Bosnians (and other Serbian-language people
of Muslim Nationality), and Albanians, and there's a subset of Bulgarians too
as far as I remember.

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.

------
dagw
Single page collection of the actual tweets for people who don't want to try
to read a massive tweet thread:
[https://tttthreads.com/thread/919897406031978496](https://tttthreads.com/thread/919897406031978496)

~~~
mattmanser
That site has coinhive on it and started maxing out one of my cores.

~~~
pavel_lishin
One of my many ad-blocking extensions blocked it.

Everyone who says ad-blocking is immoral is welcome to write me a check to
help offset my power bill.

~~~
maccard
And you’re welcome to write a check to the people who’s server resources
you’re using without supporting them too.

~~~
pedrocr
He's not using any server resources, he's accessing a service that people
willingly put up. There is no legal or moral contract that he then has to
execute all the crap code they happen to stuff into the HTTP response.

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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I am using server resources, but I don't buy into the premise that I must use
a particular javascript-enabled client to access an HTTP resource.

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.

------
INTPenis
Can't wait for the future when we'll have a blogging platform that everyone
can use with more than 140 characters.

~~~
roywiggins
Not to worry, Twitter2X doubles the number of characters so that ought to be
enough for anybody.

(They really are doubling to 280)

~~~
fermuch
Mastodon has per instance max length.

------
DanAndersen
Follow-up to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15454787](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15454787)
("Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat
graves").

~~~
imron
Called it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15455843](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15455843)

~~~
Brakenshire
They did say in the original article that the pattern was incorrect, and
likely to have been a third party copy of a design originating in some Muslim
area. That's disproven by the dating research presented here, but it wasn't
unreasonable.

------
justin66
In fairness to the original author who allegedly got it wrong, at least they
bothered to write a goddamn article, with paragraphs and everything.

------
have_faith
> haha - I wrote the whole thing out (in tweets) in a Word doc, counted them,
> added numbering back in, and cut & pasted into Twitter!

> 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.

~~~
dmschulman
Agreed, pith is the whole brand of Twitter. I can make an exception for a
tweet storm containing a handful of messages, but 60 is a dead horse thrice
beaten.

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?

~~~
Bartweiss
The best argument I can see for tweetstorms is that they're stretching the
upper bound of the format.

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.

~~~
delecti
Used to be that a tweet storm was okay because you knew it'd only be like 15,
and not absurdly long like 60. This is definitely a slippery slope we've
already slid down.

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.

------
shufflelinks
Here is some links to info on one interaction between Vikings and
Arabs/Islamicate civilisation in this case the 10th Century Traveler Ibn
Fadlan:

"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](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](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/](https://nyupress.org/books/9781479803507/)

------
arbitrage
Perhaps something easier to read than 60 tweets strung together might help get
the point across a little more clearly.

~~~
b3lvedere
Twitter is on it. In the future you will only need to read 30 tweets :)

------
singularity2001
Maybe not related here, but is there no chance that some Kufic was some kind
of an arabic dialect?

------
floatingatoll
To all the folks harping on an academic for writing and releasing a work in
their field in a week, and for having no shame about releasing it on Twitter:

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.

~~~
yellowapple
"She wanted to post it on Twitter, not a blog"

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.

------
arkona
Is publishing this on Twatter supposed to make some ironic point? I don’t get
it...

------
yyzhero
I see swastikas, Vikings were definitely Jain

------
rosstex
Twitter was not made for blog posts.

------
roadbeats
tl;dr she claims it's written "llah" not "Allah".

~~~
makomk
Not just that, but in order for it to even read as any kind of Arabic it would
supposedly have to be in a style of writing that wouldn't yet exist for over a
century at the time it was woven.

------
Sharlin
If only we had some sort of a system for publishing longer articles on the
Internet without having to cut them into 140 character pieces...

~~~
sqldba
You’re a madman.

~~~
NedIsakoff
280?

~~~
projectramo
Please look up this thing called "Moore's Law"

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.

~~~
agumonkey
That would require 7nm technology. Besides nobody will need more than 420
characters. Ever.

~~~
lostboys67
640 Charcters surly :-)

------
dmead
looks like the comments on the other thread doubting this were right? where
are their internet points back?

------
imposterer
It’s cool how half of these fucking replies are about Twitter.

------
criley2
Question: why is this on Hacker News?

Seriously. Allah, Viking textiles... Hacker News?

When does Hacker News get subreddits....err subhackers....

~~~
slim
It's a rebuttal of a claim made by an historian from another historian.
Science that is. That's why

~~~
criley2
First off, history isn't really science, it's history. It's a liberal art,
most people get a B.A. in history not a B.S. Historians may use science, but a
geologist dates rocks, not a historian. Historians don't learn or practice the
scientific method, nor do they report their results in scientific journal
format.

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.

~~~
bobwaycott
There most certainly are B.S. degrees in history. There are also > 0
historians here, > 0 experts here, be they degree- or tenure-holding. Some of
us don’t practice because we turned our history degrees into tech careers.
Some of us have other interests outside history. Some of us think history
includes tech. Some of us have interests outside tech, and that includes
history.

~~~
Chris2048
That's a lot of unquantified weasels.

------
digi_owl
Is Reddit leaking?

------
slim
I've seen immediately that there was no "Allah" in that picture. But I
dismissed the article as click bait not scam.

It's Bait Blindness. I claim the novelty of the naming

------
drzaiusapelord
>It should go without saying that a single scholar’s un-peer-reviewed claim
does not truth make.

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.

~~~
sampo
> Not sure who the authority here is

Original claim: Annika Larsson, researcher at Department of Archaeology and
Ancient History, Uppsala University
[http://katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N1-483](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](https://art.utexas.edu/about/people/stephennie-mulder)

~~~
panzagl
For all the bashing about twitter, in the not-too-distant past this exchange
would have played out over a year or so, assuming the original claim didn't
just languish in some obscure journal somewhere.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Well, that's the big issue isn't it? Pre-twitter, pre-out of control social
media, etc a claim from a Jr level person like this would have been met with
skepticism and gone through an academic filter that would has squashed it.
Nowadays its all over the world before there's a sane response to it. Sadly,
many who have memorized this little factoid will never see the rebuttal.

~~~
panzagl
It's hard to tell how much filter was applied since the BBC article only cites
the team themselves- I don't see any indication that Larsson is a 'Jr level
person' in their field. This could have easily have been published in a
specialized journal and not have been refuted until someone with the right
background came across it.

~~~
sampo
I guess in American universities, "researcher" is only an early career
position. Later, you either get a professorship, or they kick you out. But
this case is about a Swedish university, and there people can be "researchers"
their whole careers.

