River Kings Quotes
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An important part of the ceremony was that someone needed to accompany the dead chieftain into the afterlife. According to Ibn Fadlan’s account, a slave girl or concubine volunteered for the task and went through a long series of rituals as part of the event. Initially, she was treated relatively well, being given two attendants to look after her. She was described as merry and didn’t seem, at any point, to object to her treatment, in Fadlan’s description, in part probably because she was plied with alcohol and maybe drugs throughout the process.
Once it has formed during childhood, enamel remains unaltered and it’s even strong enough to stay intact in very poor conditions in the ground for thousands of years. For this reason, teeth are the bioarchaeologist’s best friend.
At that point a Christian civil servant named Ibn Sam’un, who lived in the town, intervened to help negotiate between the two sides. After some deliberation, the Rus’ agreed to a sum of twenty dirhams for each person’s ransom. Ibn Miskawayh reported that the more intelligent among the Muslims agreed, while others refused on the basis that this would imply they were worth the same as Christians.
Finally, having realised the money would not be forthcoming, Rus' resorted to a massacre. Nor did the women and boys get off lightly, being subjected to rape and enslavement.
In Scandinavia boats were typically rowed until sometime in the eighth century and it was only when sails were introduced that open sea crossings finally became practical on a grand scale.
Reportedly, the fortunes of the Rus’ whose first attack was so successful quickly turned: on their way back home they were caught in a storm and perished. As a consequence, an envoy was sent to Constantinople from one of the Rus’ian leaders requesting baptism, which the Byzantines were only too happy to help with.
At times the debates have been extreme, especially on the side of the Normanists, with Adolf Hitler infamously stating: ‘Unless other peoples, beginning with the Vikings, had imported some rudiments of organisation into Russian humanity, the Russians would still be living like rabbits.’ With statements like this, it’s not difficult to understand the opposition to Viking connections and the dilemma for Slavic scholars forced to choose between a view crediting a superior, foreign people with creating their entire nation or an alternative story that is at odds with the written sources.
According to Snorri Sturluson, Odin decreed that when someone died and travelled to Valhalla, he could take not just what he had with him on his funeral pyre, but also what he had hidden in the ground . In other words, if you were about to go into battle, burying all your silver in a hole in the ground didn’t just have the benefit of making sure it was there when you returned if you were successful, it would also let you bring it to the afterlife, should that be the outcome.
Just as with other elements like strontium, carbon has several isotopes, with a radioactive isotope, C14, being one of them. When we die, we stop accumulating new carbon while the carbon already in our bodies begins slowly and subtly to decay. So when we die, the clock starts ticking. Crucially, we know how fast it ticks; the rate at which this process takes place. This means that we can measure the radiocarbon remaining in a sample and work back to find out how long it has been since that organism died.
Rus’ were not allowed to buy silks that were worth more than fifty gold coins, known as solidi. Any silks purchased had to be shown to an imperial officer who would stamp them before they could be exported. This demonstrates clearly just how important silk was in Constantinople.
Most now believe that the name Rus’ derives from the Old Norse word róa , meaning ‘to row’. Eventually this was simplified via an Old Finnish version of the word, used by Finns to describe rowing crews, roðsmenn : migrant, boat-based Scandinavians whom they encountered in eastern territories.