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My friends know that, in RL, I am a historian. And while I dare say that a lot of you would be interested in bing told about Rome where I am now, I have to make a record of a stunning piece of historical news I got purely by chance. According to the Norwegian news agency Nettavisen, last October, archeologists excavating at a secret location in the country discovered a treasure estimated to be from some time between year 600 and 700: 11 miniature reliefs in gold. The location has not been revealed yet because the archeologists believe that there may be more items. The homestead where the reliefs were found is estimated to be from the Merovingian period (about 600 to 800), the period followed by the Viking age.
No wonder the archaeologists are over the moon. «This is an incredible rare and sensational find that an archeologist only does once in a lifetime,» said Professor Heid Gjøstein Resi at Kulturhistorisk Museum in Oslo. And it bloody well is. The "treasure" is tiny; to judge by the description, the gold involved is probably only a few dozen grams. But if you can appreciate the issues involved, it is more important than the treasure of Tutankhamen; for a very simple reason - that we know that Pharaos were buried with huge caches of treasure, but to find any gold in Norway at this time is unusual. This is before the Viking period, as the news item quite rightly points out; the gold is unlikely to be the result of any raid, at least outside Scandinavia. And it is from a time when the whole of Western Europe suffered from a chronic shortage of gold, the terms of trade being such that gold always tended to flow to Byzantium and the Arab East - a situation that did not change until the rise of the Italian naval powers in the tenth and eleventh centuries, which altered the balance of power in the Mediterranean. (It is for this reason, too, that European coinage through most of the Dark and Middle Ages was silver-based - a pound coin, for instance, being originally the gold equivalent of the value of a pound of silver.) To find gold in Norway is of extraordinary interest, in terms of the trading and cultural contacts in North-Western Europe in the years that led up to the Viking age.
The news item did not say where the gold reliefs might have originated. I do not want to teach the Norwegian archaeologists their business, but it should be possible to identify where the gold was mined by trace elements in the metal, and where it was worked, by the style of workmanship. And if something like that can be done, a substantial bit of history may well be added to our knowledge of our past.
No wonder the archaeologists are over the moon. «This is an incredible rare and sensational find that an archeologist only does once in a lifetime,» said Professor Heid Gjøstein Resi at Kulturhistorisk Museum in Oslo. And it bloody well is. The "treasure" is tiny; to judge by the description, the gold involved is probably only a few dozen grams. But if you can appreciate the issues involved, it is more important than the treasure of Tutankhamen; for a very simple reason - that we know that Pharaos were buried with huge caches of treasure, but to find any gold in Norway at this time is unusual. This is before the Viking period, as the news item quite rightly points out; the gold is unlikely to be the result of any raid, at least outside Scandinavia. And it is from a time when the whole of Western Europe suffered from a chronic shortage of gold, the terms of trade being such that gold always tended to flow to Byzantium and the Arab East - a situation that did not change until the rise of the Italian naval powers in the tenth and eleventh centuries, which altered the balance of power in the Mediterranean. (It is for this reason, too, that European coinage through most of the Dark and Middle Ages was silver-based - a pound coin, for instance, being originally the gold equivalent of the value of a pound of silver.) To find gold in Norway is of extraordinary interest, in terms of the trading and cultural contacts in North-Western Europe in the years that led up to the Viking age.
The news item did not say where the gold reliefs might have originated. I do not want to teach the Norwegian archaeologists their business, but it should be possible to identify where the gold was mined by trace elements in the metal, and where it was worked, by the style of workmanship. And if something like that can be done, a substantial bit of history may well be added to our knowledge of our past.
