Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escripre, pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme
“It’s better to write about laughter than tears, because laughter is what humans do”
Rabelais, Gargantua
(Well there might be a few serious bits)
I wonder how many people quite realise the number of remarkable archaeological finds that have been made in Orkney over the last 150 years. Many of them are not on display in Orkney museum and can easily be overlooked. In fact many of them are apparently not on display in the National Museum in Edinburgh either, although that is where they are kept (see their collections database). Some are objects of national significance, and some are there because Orkney Museum didn’t open until 1968 and it didn’t have a full-time curator until 1976. There was nowhere to safely store or display finds in the islands. The Treasure Trove laws also come into it, and they are different in Scotland from those in England. Among these special finds from Orkney is a group of silver dirhams, Arab coins found with a hoard of Viking silver.
Silver dirhams were coins used throughout the Islamic world at that time. They are a fascinating reminder of how far Viking contacts reached in the 10th century. Vikings traded from Scandinavia to the Irish Sea, where the ircity of Dublin was probably the richest port in Western Britain at that time. They travelled to Russia and as far as Constantinople to the east and south, to Iceland and Greenland to the west. And Orkney lay in the middle of these, ruled by a Viking earl.
Several hoards of precious metal from this period have been found in Orkney. The Skaill hoard, which weighed 8kg, was found in March 1858 in sand dunes near St Peters Kirk at the Bay of Skaill. It was buried in a stone cist and contained not only hack-silver (chopped –up silver objects intended for recycling), but brooches, arm- and neck-rings, ingots, three Anglo-Saxon coins, and twenty-one Arab dirhams. Only one of the Arab coins is complete. The dates of the coins suggest that the hoard was buried in the 10th century CE: the latest of the dirhams was struck at Bagdad in 945CE, and the latest Anglo-Saxon coin was dated to c.925.
The hoard contained a number of silver brooches of probably Irish or Manx origin which have attracted much more attention. They are beautiful. But somehow I find these coins with their graceful writing even more beautiful, and coming from so much farther away, more exotic.