Weapons were very much a part of everyday life in the Viking age. Virtually every free man owned and carried a weapon and was familiar with its use. The right to carry and use weapons was one of the fundamental traditional rights of free men in Viking society.

Viking poems of advice warn that a man should be prepared to fight at any moment, day or night. Hávamál (verse 38) says you should never step more than one pace away from your weapon because you don’t know for certain when you might need it. Verse 41 says that friends should exchange weapons as gifts. Weapons were given names. Grettir carried the sax Kársnautr, Bolli carried the sword Fótbítr, and Gísli borrowed the sword Grásíða for a duel. Weapons were an integral part of the society. Read the rest of this entry »

The history of African art is as rich as it is complex. Traditional African art creations include everything from beadwork and paintings to ceramic art and tribal masks.

Reflecting rich cultural influences and regional beliefs, as well as the presence of colonial cultural forces, contemporary African art - and African ceramic art in particular - draws heavily on the continent`s historic roots.

The history of African art, per se, is a bit of a theoretical misnomer, given Africa`s diversity of cultures, languages and colonial influences. As such, a collective history of African art would be extremely problematic, if at all possible to construct.

The fact that the documentation of history in Africa relied almost solely on an oral tradition prior to colonisation, means that much of the history of African countries, and specifically the history and origins of their artistic creations, remains largely inaccessible to Western intellectuals. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Viking age, fighting men used large, round, wooden shields gripped in the center from behind an iron boss. A reproduction shield is shown to the left, and a historical shield from the Oseberg ship to the right.
Shields represent one of several instances where the literary sources and archaeological sources do not agree on how Viking weapons were constructed.

The Norwegian Gulaþing laws specify the construction of a shield. The shield should be made of wood with three iron bands and a handle fastened to the back side by iron nails. A later revision of the law says that the shield should be made of a double layer of boards (tvibyrðr), and the front should be painted red and white.

A few shields have survived from the Viking age, notably the shields from the Gokstad ship, which date from the 10th century. The ship was equipped with 32 shields, several of which survive intact. They were made from a single layer of planks butted together, with no iron bands, and the fronts were painted black and yellow. Read the rest of this entry »

The most fanciful images of the weaver’s art across the centuries: upon thrones, altars, in royal bed chambers, bourgeois drawing rooms and the ateliers of great couturiers; it is velvet which has marked entire eras. Guiseppe Verdi demanded only the finest velvets for the outfits for the characters in his operas, and the same was true for Rossini and Donzietti. From Caruso to Galeffi to Giuditta Pasta, one and all lavished maniacal attention to the velvety spectacle of the costumes of their operas. And what shall we say then for the long list designers, from Courreges, Cardin, Rabanne, Marucelli, and De Barentzen?

Velvet, however, has been first and foremost an economic phenomenon, which has generated enormous wealth, enough to pay armies, create banks, and radically shift the array of international economies. A powerful lever in the great trade of the Renaissance, velvet made the fortunes of the bankers and merchants of city-states such as Lucca, Florence, and the maritime republics of Genoa and Venice. For centuries, these cities dominated the textile markets of the entire world, with their velvets influencing the prices of raw materials, commercial treaties, fashions, technology, and new discoveries. Read the rest of this entry »

Although Indian accounts to a large extent ignored Alexander the Great’s Indus campaign in 326 B.C., Greek writers recorded their impressions of the general conditions prevailing in South Asia during this period. Thus, the year 326 B.C. provides the first clear and historically verifiable date in Indian history. A two-way cultural fusion between several Indo-Greek elements–especially in art, architecture, and coinage–occurred in the next several hundred years. North India’s political landscape was transformed by the emergence of Magadha in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain. In 322 B.C., Magadha, under the rule of Chandragupta Maurya, began to assert its hegemony over neighboring areas. Chandragupta, who ruled from 324 to 301 B.C., was the architect of the first Indian imperial power–the Mauryan Empire (326-184 B.C.)–whose capital was Pataliputra, near modern-day Patna, in Bihar. Read the rest of this entry »

From their original settlements in the Punjab region, the Aryans gradually began to penetrate eastward, clearing dense forests and establishing “tribal” settlements along the Ganga & Yamuna ( Jamuna ) plains between 1500 and ca. 800 B.C. By around 500 B.C., most of northern India was inhabited and had been brought under cultivation, facilitating the increasing knowledge of the use of iron implements, including ox-drawn plows, and spurred by the growing population that provided voluntary and forced labor.

As riverine and inland trade flourished, many towns along the Ganga became centers of trade, culture, and luxurious living. Increasing population and surplus production provided the bases for the emergence of independent states with fluid territorial boundaries over which disputes frequently arose. Read the rest of this entry »

India has a diverse and rich textile tradition. The origin of Indian textiles can be traced to the Indus valley civilization. The people of this civilization used homespun cotton for weaving their garments. Excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, have unearthed household items like needles made of bone and spindles made of wood, amply suggesting that homespun cotton was used to make garments. Fragments of woven cotton have also been found from these sites.

The first literary information about textiles in India can be found in the Rig-Veda, which refers to weaving. The ancient Indian epics-Ramayana and Mahabharata also speak of a variety of fabrics of those times. The Ramayana refers to the rich styles worn by the aristocracy on one hand and the simple clothes worn by the commoners and ascetics. Ample evidence on the ancient textiles of India can also be obtained from the various sculptures belonging to Mauryan and Gupta age as well as from ancient Buddhist scripts and murals (Ajanta caves). Legend has it that when Amrapali, a courtesan from the kingdom of Vaishali met Gautama Buddha, she wore a richly woven semi transparent sari, which speaks volumes of the technical achievement of the ancient Indian weaver. Read the rest of this entry »

This was delivered as a speech at a Students Against War teach-in in Duluth, Minnesota (USA)
The story of Afghanistan is in so many ways a very tragic one. Afghanistan is one of the most impoverished nations of the world. It is one of the most war-torn, most ravaged, and most beleaguered of nations. It is a nation that has been beset by invasion, external pressure and internal upheaval since before the time of Alexander the Great. Its people are a people who have endured more than most of us can ever imagine. In fact, for many Afghanis, all that has changed in the last one thousand years are the weapons which have been used against so many of them. It is therefore with great sadness and respect that I tell the story of Afghanistan.

First of all, who are the Afghanis? Afghanistan has historically been the link between Central Asia, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. It is therefore a nation made up of many different nationalities – the result of innumerable invasions and migrations. Within its current borders there are at least a dozen major ethnic groups – Baluch, Chahar Aimak, Turkmen, Hazara, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Nuristani, Arab, Kirghiz, Pashai and Persian. Read the rest of this entry »

The earliest civilization in Europe appeared on the coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea. This body of water is a branch of the Mediterranean Sea. It is bounded by the Greek mainland on the west, Asia Minor (now Turkey) on the east, and the island of Crete on the south. Here, while the rest of Europe was still in the Stone Age, the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples achieved a highly organized Bronze Age culture.

Two different civilizations flourished in this region from about 3000 BC to 1000 BC. The earliest is known as Minoan, because its center at Knossos (also spelled Cnossus) on the island of Crete was the legendary home of King Minos, who was (according to mythology) the son of the god Zeus and Europa, a Phoenician princess. The later culture is called Mycenaean, after Mycenae, a city on the Greek peninsula named the Peloponnesus. Mycenae was the capital of the region ruled by King Agamemnon, the Achaean leader in the Trojan War. Read the rest of this entry »

Merchants or robbers?
he name “Viking” was first used by foreign authors in the 11th century AD. Its origin is probably the Swedish word for bay, “vik”. This shows the close connection between the people and the sea, of which they were totally dependent for their livelihood. They had a mythology of their own. Their gods were called “asar”, The Vikings are often considered wild, drunken, merciless robbers. In fact, their main occupation was farming and trade. The Viking expeditions were mostly trade expeditions that sometimes degenerated to looting. But to be honest, there were also expeditions whose main purpose was to loot foreign coastal regions. Read the rest of this entry »