The blueness of them was puzzling. The Bronze Age Danish did not have the technology to make blue glass. This was a tribal, agricultural society of small settlements with no written language. When she asked her colleagues about the beads, they suggested they may have originated in Switzerland or the Mediterranean, but it was pure conjecture. The published literature (such that there was; there was no dedicated study of the blue beads), claimed that the beads were made of clay that had been colored blue using oxidized copper. Varberg knew that didn’t apply to her beads because they were translucent.
The technology used to discover this is incredible.
A laser pointed at the bead melts a microscopic hole in the surface and creates an air bubble. Plasma-spectrometry is used to analyze the chemical makeup of the air bubble. The results are then run through a database of bead findings all over southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East to see if there are any comparable ones. The chemical fingerprint of an artifact is so precise it can be traced to a specific ancient workshop. The Mesopotamian beads were made from melted quartz sand and ash from Tigris river grass. One of the oldest came from Nippur, an ancient Sumerian city in what is today Iraq, The two Egyptian beads were made from desert cobalt in Amarna, the same workshop where Tutankhamun’s famous death mask was made around the same time (ca 1,330 B.C.) as the burial in Denmark.
Drawing of the Olby grave, where some of the beads were found.
It’s the first Egyptian cobalt glass found outside of the Mediterranean, and given the dates, that little bead traveled far north in a relatively short time. That suggests active trade between Bronze Age Denmark and New Kingdom Eygpt. Most of the burials where the blue glass beads were found also included amber beads. It seems likely that the rich trade in Nordic amber, well established even in the Bronze Age, is connected to the presence of Egyptian and Mesopotamian beads in Nordic graves. Amber was making its way down south while blue glass made its way up north.
Just fascinating.
I don't know where the TV series, "Vikings" will go, but the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok opened up the Med to trade and the grandsons settled in Normandy. The great grandsons raided Paris.
ReplyDeleteConsiderable legend exists for trade with Constantinople and along the Levant, possibly as far as Egypt. This provides proof of that.
Very cool.
The rulers of Constantinople had a personal guard made up Norse warriors. The Norse who became the Rus sailed the rivers down to the black sea and traded with the Arabs and could have made it to ancient Baghdad. I also read that the Aztecs told stories about blond giant from the sea.
ReplyDeleteThe Phoenicians traded as far north as Jutland @ 1000 B.C. For amber, slaves, and furs. We know this because approximately 10% of the words in old Germanic have Semitic roots. For example "madchen" meaning a young girl is Semitic. The Phoenicians had a trading post in what is now Denmark, and we're sufficiently a presence that their trade pidgin heavily influenced the Teutonic tongues.
ReplyDelete