Language Log

« previous post |

This post doesn't cite any Iranian language materials directly, but I dare say that Iranian speakers were involved in the transmission of this large hoard from western Central Asia more than a thousand miles distant and were present in the British Isles during the first millennium AD.

"Amazing’ Viking-age treasure travelled half the world to Scotland, analysis finds", by Dalya Alberge, The Guardian (Sun 1 Sep 2024)

Lidded vessel is star object in rich Galloway Hoard and came from silver mine in what is now Iran

It is a star object of the Galloway Hoard, the richest collection of Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland, buried in AD900 and unearthed in a field in Scotland. Now a lidded silver vessel has been identified as being of west Asian origin, transported halfway around the world more than 1,000 years ago.

When it emerged from the ground a decade ago, the vessel was still wrapped in its ancient textiles, whose survival is extremely rare. Its surface could be seen only through X-ray scans. Since then, the textiles have been partially removed and preserved and the vessel has had laser cleaning to remove green corrosion over much of its silver surface. It has also undergone scientific analysis.

Details of a “remarkable” design that includes crowns, fire altars and creatures including leopards and tigers can be seen for the first time.

The imagery is linked to the iconography of Zoroastrianism, the state religion of the Sasanian empire, the last Persian empire before the early Muslim conquests from AD632. Scientific analysis shows that the silver from which it was made came from a mine in modern-day Iran.

I know of at least one Iranian art historian who will be seeing the Galloway Hoard silver container up close and "in the flesh" next week.  I'm fairly certain that they will have some different opinions about the symbolism, form, decoration, how far distant to the east it originated (perhaps Bactria), whether it is Sasanian, and so forth.  Needless to say, this is an extremely exciting and important piece.

The hoard was discovered in 2014 by a metal-detecting enthusiast on what is now Church of Scotland land at Balmaghie, Kirkcudbrightshire. Described as one of the century’s most important UK archaeological finds, it contained more than 5kg of silver, gold and other materials, with objects ranging from a Christian pectoral cross to brooches.

It was allocated to the National Museums Scotland (NMS), which will announce its findings about the vessel this week before its first-ever display, on loan to the British Museum’s forthcoming Silk Roads exhibition.

Dr Martin Goldberg, the NMS principal curator of early medieval and Viking collections, told the Observer: “Seeing those tigers for the first time is really an amazing thing.

“Although the technology is so advanced, the 3D scans don’t give you the colour. They don’t really give you the response that you get from this newly emerging thing.”

Noting that they had suspected its origins in central or western Asia, he added: “I had some trepidation that we wouldn’t get the answers we needed from the lead isotope analysis, but then I was just blown away when we got the perfect results.

“The central icon is what they call a fire altar. This was a motif used on Sasanian imperial coinage. It’s central to their religious practice. But this has a crown emerging from the flames. That probably says this is an object intended for or used by royalty.”

Sasanian emperors were often shown hunting leopards and tigers.The vessel is about 14cm high. It contained many of the hoard’s unique curios, including a rock crystal jar. Goldberg believes that this was an heirloom filled with “the memories and the heritage of an incredibly high-status and well-connected family”.

This article appeared in The Guardian nearly three months ago, but I'm calling it to your attention now because some of the objects from the Galloway Hoard are currently on display in the pathbreaking exhibition on "Silk Roads" at the British Museum (9/26/24-2/23/25).  For more information, see the accompanying paperback.  There is also a two-day international conference on "Contacts and exchanges across Afro-Eurasia, AD 500–1000" (12/5/24-12/6/24), at which I will deliver the concluding remarks.

Aside from the Galloway Hoard, I will feast my eyes upon the little Buddha figurine found on the island of Helgö, Sweden in 1956 and has captivated me for more than half a century.  "Specialists in Buddhist iconography suggest that it was manufactured in northwest India perhaps sometime around the 6th century CE." (source)

 

Also in the Silk Roads exhibition are dozens of other objects that attest to the transmission of art, religion, technology, and other aspects of culture, including, yes, language, between East and West during the second half of the first millennium AD.

 

Selected readings

• "A Persian word in a Sinitic topolect" (3/10/20) — short post, but thought-provoking, one that raises an issue of potentially great importance
• "Sino-Iranica and Sino-Arabica" (3/20/24)
• "China and Rome" (2/24/19)
• "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)
• "The sound and sense of Tocharian" (5/4/20)
• "Headless men with face on chest" (9/28/20) — "Hic sunt…" topos
• "The foreign origins of the lion dance and words for 'lion' in Sinitic" (1/14/22)
• "'Lord of Heaven' in ancient Sino-Iranian" (5/28/24)
• “Zoroastrianism between Iranic and Sinitic” (11/18/22)
• "So spoke Zoroaster: camels and ancient Sinitic reconstructions" (1/13/21)
• "Zoroastrianism and Mazdaism: Evidence from Sogdian and Pahlavi" (1/15/21)
• "Indo-European religion, Scythian philosophy, and the date of Zoroaster: a linguistic quibble" (10/9/20)
• "Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)
• "Know your Ossetians" (2/17/20)
• "Blue-Green Iranian 'Danube'" (10/26/19)
• "Sword out of the stone" (8/9/08)
• "Bronze, iron, gold, silver" (1/29/21) — with a lengthy bibliography on cultural and linguistic interaction on the Silk Roads
• "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
• "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17)
• "Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19)
• "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstruction" (12/16/18)
• "Headless men with face on chest"
• "Tattoos as a means of communication" (9/1/12)
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics" (5/1/20)
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 2" (5/11/20)
• "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/09)
• "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
• "Indo-European 'cow' and Old Sinitic Reconstructions: awesome" (1/16/20)
• David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2007).
• C. Scott Littleton, "Were Some of the Xinjiang Mummies 'Epi-Scythians'? An Excursus in Trans-Eurasian Folklore and Mythology." In Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 746-766.
• Victor H. Mair, "Old Sinitic *Myag, Old Persian Maguš, and English Magician", Early China, 15 (1990), 27–47.

Special note on a classical study of Iranian influence on British culture:

C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail.  New York and London: Garland, 1994; rev. pb. 2000. In the British journal, Religion, 28.3 (July, 1998), 294-300, I [VHM] wrote a review in which I pointed out that the celebrated motif of a mighty arm rising up out of the water holding aloft the hero's sword can also be found in a medieval Chinese tale from Dunhuang. That review is available electronically from ScienceDirect, if your library subscribes to it. Otherwise, I think this version on the Web is a fairly faithful copy.  This book also shows how many common names in British legend come from Iranian sources.

[Thanks to Barbara Phillips Long and Judith Lerner]

December 4, 2024 @ 3:18 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and archeology, Language and art, Language and culture

Permalink