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Viking ‘Allah’ textile actually doesn't have Allah on it
- DanAndersen 9y agoFollow-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 9y agoCalled it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15455843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15455843
- hprotagonist 9y agoscholars disagree? how else do you expect anyone to get a PhD... :)
- Brakenshire 9y agoThey 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.
- arbitrage 9y agoPerhaps something easier to read than 60 tweets strung together might help get the point across a little more clearly.
- b3lvedere 9y agoTwitter is on it. In the future you will only need to read 30 tweets :)
- have_faith 9y ago> 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 9y agoAgreed, 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 9y agoThe 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.
- logfromblammo 9y agoHell, might as well post it as greentext on a 'chan. It's not like any of the media sites already mentioned are all that reputable as channels for transmission of reliable facts, anyway.
- delecti 9y agoUsed 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.
- dagw 9y agoSingle 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
- pedrocr 9y agoWow, write a damn blog post and tweet that. 1/60, really?
- criley2 9y agoThere's a real reason why tweet-chains like this work, and a big part of it is that blogs are separate from social networks and you have to use a mediocre link to attract views, while twitter-chains are inherently integrated into the network, so you're not linking to the content, you're directly sharing it. I understand that the limitations of twitter make it a difficult format to express it, but like most mediums with major limitations, these limitations can breed creativity and greatness. There's a reason why a Facebook post goes viral on Facebook a lot easier than anywhere else. Same reason why twitter-chains are successful. I'm sure blogger posts are popular on blogger though.
- __david__ 9y agoExcept it didn't actually work—when I read it the messages stopped at about 31/60, then twitter started showing replies and I could never find #32 an later. Blogs don't have that problem. Twitter is pretty useless for real communication.
- criley2 9y agoYou should realize that I wasn't saying "thing works for you individually" and rather was saying "thing works generally and is succeeding" I'm sorry you had a bad user experience. However your anecdote does not invalidate the reality that tweet chains are far more popular than blogs for spreading analysis of news today. They are extremely popular and successful, even if you have personally failed to use them as you would like. This, IMO, is like someone experiencing motion sickness while using an Oculus Rift and then boldly proclaiming all of VR to be a complete failure.
- Sharlin 9y agoIf 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 9y agoYou’re a madman.
- NedIsakoff 9y ago280?
- projectramo 9y agoPlease 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.
- ReverseCold 9y agoThat comment was 219 characters, how?!?
- projectramo 9y agoOh, you have to use Rust or Haskell to really get performance out of the character space. It's all about the language you use.
- INTPenis 9y agoCan't wait for the future when we'll have a blogging platform that everyone can use with more than 140 characters.
- roywiggins 9y agoNot to worry, Twitter2X doubles the number of characters so that ought to be enough for anybody. (They really are doubling to 280)
- fermuch 9y agoMastodon has per instance max length.
- unicornporn 9y agoWhy do you need another "platform" for this? Blogs work quite well in this regard.
- stephengillie 9y agohttp://thats.the.joke http://thats.the.joke
- dwighttk 9y ago^ broken link
- unicornporn 9y agoBroken joke.
- jankotek 9y agoI 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.
- watwut 9y agoI kinda wish people argued against instead of down-voting this one.
- eadmund 9y ago> At some point Islam conquered 20% of Europe. A lot of people don't realise that the high points of Islamic European expansion were Poitiers & Vienna — less than 800 miles apart.
- cyberattacknow 9y agoThe same is happening again, but this time due to mass immigration and high birth rate, rather than military invasion.
- JPKab 9y agoPeople 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.
- criley2 9y agoQuestion: why is this on Hacker News? Seriously. Allah, Viking textiles... Hacker News? When does Hacker News get subreddits....err subhackers....
- slim 9y agoIt's a rebuttal of a claim made by an historian from another historian. Science that is. That's why
- Xylakant 9y agoOr, shorter: sufficient people found it interesting.
- criley2 9y agoFirst 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.
- notatoad 9y agoIt's a correction to a story that was popular on HN last week. If we're going to upvote fake news, the least we can do is upvote the corrections or rebuttals to it.
- bobwaycott 9y agoThere 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.
- slim 9y agoI'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
- Boothroid 9y agoI note the BBC seemed well pleased to publish this obvious nonsense.
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago>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 9y ago> 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 9y agoFor 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 9y agoWell, 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.
- dmead 9y agolooks like the comments on the other thread doubting this were right? where are their internet points back?
- ori_b 9y agoFlagged for unreadability.
- yipopov 9y agoSo much for WE WUZ VIKINZ N SHIEET
- sctb 9y agoPlease don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- floatingatoll 9y agoTo 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.
- Jaruzel 9y agoYou must be new here. /s
- yellowapple 9y ago"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.
- digi_owl 9y agoIs Reddit leaking?
- roadbeats 9y agotl;dr she claims it's written "llah" not "Allah".
- makomk 9y agoNot 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.
- rdtsc 9y agoSo 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 9y ago> 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 9y agoIt 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yyzhero 9y agoI see swastikas, Vikings were definitely Jain
- singularity2001 9y agoMaybe not related here, but is there no chance that some Kufic was some kind of an arabic dialect?
- justin66 9y agoIn fairness to the original author who allegedly got it wrong, at least they bothered to write a goddamn article, with paragraphs and everything.
- AmIFirstToThink 9y agoWhat should be the consequences of this fiasco for BBC? How are they different than someone with a blog on the internet? Why should anyone pay any attention to BBC's cries of losing authoritative take on dependable news? If anything, I am celebrating losing the "argument from authority" bias in the media.
- arkona 9y agoIs publishing this on Twatter supposed to make some ironic point? I don’t get it...
- imposterer 9y agoIt’s cool how half of these fucking replies are about Twitter.
- rosstex 9y agoTwitter was not made for blog posts.
- shufflelinks 9y agoHere 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/