The Rise and Fall of the Viking “Allah” Textile

It seemed like something from an episode of the last season of History’s show Vikings: a 10th- century, tablet-woven textile fragment found in a Viking boat grave was said to bear the words “Allah” and “Ali.” The textile, an image of which had been published in 1938 following excavation, was rediscovered by Swedish textile archaeologist Dr. Annika Larsson when working on an exhibition on the finds from Viking-age Birka and Gamla Uppsala, in what is now Sweden.

Patterns on the textiles, said Dr. Larsson, reminded her of styles of Arabic script found on mausolea and tombs from Central Asia as well as on medieval Spanish “ribbons” (presumably meaning tablet woven bands). Based on her findings, Uppsala University, Sweden’s most venerable institution of higher learning, issued a press release including quotes from Larsson deeming the finding “staggering.” Within days, dozens of newspapers, from the New York Times, to The Guardian, to the BBC had reported the story, calling it a “breakthrough,” and the story had gone viral on the internet. Some reports were more measured than others, but the hype extended to headlines asking “Were Vikings Muslim?”

The truth is, the Viking textile from Birka has no Arabic on it at all. Evidence for contact between the Vikings and the Islamic world is abundant and uncontested, but this particular textile fragment cannot be counted among that evidence. What the rapid rise and fall of this story reveals is perhaps more telling about this particular moment in our accelerated media world than it is about Vikings and Muslims. I first laid out the evidence for my claim earlier this month in a 60-tweet-long thread on Twitter.

As an Islamic art historian and archaeologist, I was immediately suspicious about the style of Arabic epigraphy in Larsson’s reconstruction drawing. The primary issue, it appears, is a serious problem of dating. The Birka Viking textile dates to the 10th century, while the style of epigraphy in Larsson’s reconstruction drawing dates to the 15th century, 500 years later. It’s a style called Square Kufic, which is distinguished from other, earlier forms of Kufic in being constrained by a set geometric grid, usually a square (hence the name).


https://hyperallergic.com/407746/refuting-viking-allah-textiles-meaning/


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