Western Asia

The Caliphate of the Abbasids covered a vast territory, stretching at its height from Arabia and Mesopotamia to North Africa and Afghanistan. The contemporaneous Samanid Empire, first under Abbasid influence and later independent, centred on Persia and parts of central Asia. More than a million artefacts from this Islamic world have been found in Viking-Age Scandinavian contexts. This number sounds highly unlikely, until one remembers that the majority of them are coins, the silver dirhams that flowed westwards in exchange for northern commodities such as amber, furs, falcons, and the terrible collateral of the viking raids: enslaved people. Norse contacts with western Asia were extensive, and we know that the Rus’ saw the Caliphate as a counterpart to the empire of the Byzantines. They navigated the Volga to access the Caspian Sea, and continued overland to Baghdad and beyond (Ibn Khurradādhbih describes them riding camels, using interpreters, and pretending to be Christians so they received better trading terms). The dirham finds represent a tiny fraction of the original quantities, most of which were melted down and recast, but there are also many other Islamic objects in Scandinavia. Fashions too, and the ideas behind them, travelled in both directions. Despite this mass of data, the real nature of Norse-Islamic contact is poorly understood – a situation that the WIVA Centre aims to address.