River Kings: A New Historical past of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Highway by Cat Jarman
My score: 4 of 5 stars
River Kings is a non-fiction investigation as to how a carnelian bead, in all probability made in India, might probably have discovered its option to a Viking grave in Repton, England.
Earlier than studying this e-book I didn’t know a lot about carnelian and its worth as a semi-precious stone. Writer Cat Jarman units out to observe the attainable reverse journey of the bead, throughout the North Sea to Scandinavia, then by the Baltic sea and south utilizing the river networks to Constantinople, Baghdad and past.
The Vikings had been extra than simply raiders, they had been travellers and merchants, taking their furs and swords and returning with silver, spices, silk and extra. They discovered the Silk Highway networks and traded, typically raided and a few may additionally have settled in these jap areas.
This can be a good e-book you probably have an curiosity in Viking buying and selling historical past or for analysis previous to fictional writing. It has taken me some time to learn, selecting it up between different books, as it’s fairly an intense e-book; nevertheless, I’m happy that I completed it.
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An excellent new historical past that dramatically reassesses how far the Viking world prolonged.
Dr Cat Jarman exposes the sudden routes that Viking journey and commerce took – and the way these kings of the river had been frequent travellers of the Center East and the Silk Highway.
One June day late within the eighth century, Norse seafarers arrived on the English island of Lindisfarne. They waged a savage assault on its unsuspecting abbey, and with this, the Age of the Vikings was born. These roving pillagers spent the subsequent few hundred years raiding and buying and selling a path throughout Northern and Western Europe. Besides, that’s not fairly true. It’s only a handy place to begin the story – a narrative that has seen radical new discoveries over the previous few years.
Dr Cat Jarman works on the chopping fringe of bioarchaeology, utilizing forensic methods to analysis the paths of Vikings who got here to relaxation in British soil. By inspecting tooth that are actually over one thousand years previous, she will decide childhood food regimen, and thereby the place a specimen was probably born. With radiocarbon relationship, she will verify a demise date right down to the vary of some years.
In 2012, a carnelian bead got here into her short-term possession. River Kings sees her hint its path again to eighth-century Baghdad, discovering alongside the way in which that the Vikings’ route was way more assorted than we’d assume, that with them got here individuals from the Center East, not simply Scandinavia, and that the explanation for all this sudden integration between the Japanese and Western worlds could properly have been a slave commerce working by the Silk Highway, and all the way in which to Britain.
River Kings is a serious reassessment of the Vikings, and of the medieval world as we all know it.
