Hands on History: Rare Viking Treasure [36:53]

The Galloway Hoard opens an extraordinary window into the Viking Age, a time of upheaval in South-West Scotland where it was discovered, but also a time of long-distance trade and pilgrimage, revealed by its most precious objects.

Medieval historian Helen Carr joins the experts from National Museums Scotland to explore and understand this incredible group of objects. One in particular has never been seen in public before, a fascinating lidded silver vessel that is believed to have come all the way from what is now Iran to Galloway. Helen witnesses it being meticulously conserved for its first display...

The lidded silver vessel is on special display at the British Museum's Silk Roads exhibition.

Many Viking weapons appear to be inscribed with this mysterious phrase. See more in this scene from Season 6, Episode 4, "Mysteries of the Vikings."
The UnXplained:
Viking Swords Inscribed With MYSTERIOUS Phrase (Season 6) | 4:33
History | 15.1M subscribers | 442,297 views | November 5, 2023
YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai follows.

[Transcript]

[Shatner] Throughout Europe, there are numerous museums that house a countless number of ancient Viking artifacts, some of which are more than a thousand years old. Perhaps the most fascinating objects left behind by the Vikings are their swords. These extraordinary blades are an iconic symbol of the Viking Age. And not only were they formidable in battle, but they also featured detailed and exquisite craftsmanship. The thing about the Viking swords in particular is... you'll see on a lot of these hilts of the Viking era repeating geometric symbols. Oftentimes, these hilts were further decorated largely with silver, or perhaps copper or gold inlaid into the hilt. And some were incredibly advanced in their techniques, quite beautiful. And hard to produce even today in a modern shop.

[Shatner] The sophistication of Viking swords shows how important these blades were to their warrior culture. The god Odin is the supreme being of the Norse system. He had an unusual spear, the Gungnir. Now this is an incredible spear. It can travel. It's well-balanced, so it can go far with great accuracy. Odin has this spear that almost seems to be laser-guided. It finds its target regardless of how it's thrown. And then Thor, of course, as we all know, has his hammer, called Mjölnir. It creates thunder, but it also can, uh, create massive devastation.

[Thompson] Thor's hammer, Mjölnir, was associated with the skill of the blacksmith. Blacksmiths were often considered just by nature somewhat magic to be able to take this raw material and produce an incredible steel sword.

[Shatner] While the sagas speak of magical armaments, in reality, 170 special Viking swords have been recovered, which are so unparalleled in strength and craftsmanship that they are the real-life embodiment of mythical weapons celebrated in the sagas. To this day, no one knows how they were made. And curiously, many of them bear the mysterious inscription "Ulfberht."

[Furrer] The Ulfberht swords were made between about 800 and 1,000 A.D. So, right solid in the high Viking period when they were trading and raiding. Some Viking swords seem to be much better than others. And these were the so-called Ulfberht swords. It was assumed, without any evidence, that it was a swordsmith's name. But why the name "Ulfberht" was used is still a mystery.

[Furrer] What does "Ulfberht" mean? It's probably not a person. It was probably a word of power. Typically, "ulf" means "wolf" and "berht" is an adjective meaning "bright." So it might be "Bright Wolf."

[Shatner] Even more mysterious than their enigmatic inscription is the seemingly impossible strength of Ulfberht's swords. I've analyzed 40 or 50 Ulfberht swords. It's certainly interesting to find that many of them still have a sharp edge, which is certainly unexpected. These swords were made of a very high carbon steel. The chemistry's completely different to any other weapons found in Medieval Europe. It would be vastly superior to any other weapon in combat.

[Shatner] To forge these extraordinary swords, the Vikings would've had to generate extreme temperatures exceeding 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But incredibly, the technology to accomplish such a feat is not known to have existed until the Industrial Revolution nearly 800 years after the end of the Viking Age.

https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/41050281f0445b4a91d75e04edc10e38/whitney-s2-e8-space-invaders

Das what I’m talkin’ bout.

Viking Kitties owner?

Does he come from the land of ice and snow where the cold winds blow?

If he doesn’t, off with his head. Or at least his hair.

Can’t be the Lombardi Trophy.

Just WOW!

😂🏈

[Transcript]

In 2014, an extraordinary discovery was made in the fields of Galloway, Southwest Scotland. It would reshape our understanding of Viking Age history in this region and far beyond. Treasure made of silver and gold emerged from the ground. Most significantly, almost right away, you could see the underside of that cross. Intricate containers were unearthed, covered in ancient fabric. This hold, in particular, was quite challenging for you as a conservator. The textile was very important, and we wanted to preserve that. Some of the most precious objects are now revealing their secrets. The lettering is almost manuscript, and it reads from the top: “HIGD.” This spectacular ward gives a unique glimpse into a world where cultures converged. It became known as the Galloway Horde. Join us as we journey into the past, piecing together the story of a treasure that lay hidden for over a thousand years.

[Music]

I’ve come to the collection center of the National Museum of Scotland, where the fascinating Galloway Horde has been cleaned, conserved, and researched to introduce me to the discovery is researcher Dr. Adrien Malardo. Adrian, this is extraordinary! I mean, it must have been an incredible find at the time. When was it discovered, and where was it found?

So, in 2014, a group of metal detectors were working around the village of Balige in what’s now Southwest Scotland, D Galloway. It has been laid out so beautifully. Is there a method to that? Is there a reason that you’ve got these three sections?

Yeah, that’s right. We’ve sort of laid it out very nicely. This was found—the cross was found tucked in amongst these bars and arm rings of silver. But the bar shape and the stamp of those arm rings, the decorations on those arm rings, are something that jumps out to anybody who knows a little bit about early medieval archaeology in Britain. It jumps out to you as specifically Viking Age objects, and where you find those in hordes, you can date them to the 9th or the 10th centuries, more or less. So we’re probably looking at the Viking Age, but around the year 900. Now, this one was already a standout because of this rare and unique cross that was wedged within it. In 900 AD, Galloway stood on a crossroads between cultures from Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia. It’s believed Galloway’s name is derived from the Gaelic “Gale” or “stranger,” reflecting a people of mixed Gaelic and Norse descent who came here in the 10th century. Around the time of the horde, largely pagan Vikings had settled nearby in Cumbria and the Isle of Man, but Christianity was flourishing too.

This is quite a rare and unique object. It’s a cross, a Christian object; you can tell right away. But there’s something different about it. It has its chain, the way that it would have been suspended around one’s neck. Wrapped around it, you could almost see it being taken off of somebody’s neck and being placed in the ground. The detail on that chain is—I mean, obviously, there’s a huge amount of detail here, which we’ll talk about—but the detail on the chain, I didn’t think that it actually might be original. That chain itself is almost unique in this time period. There’s almost nothing else like it. It’s a fine silver wire that’s been wound around a core of organic material, and we’ve since done proteomic analysis, and we’ve narrowed it down to cattle material. So we think it’s cattle gut. Oh my goodness, the inside of that! But yeah, the outside is silver wire. Wow! And obviously tells the story of various Christian icons as well. Can you explain who is on each of these four corners of the cross?

If you look closely at the iconography, the human symbol with a halo around his head, the winged lion, the eagle, and the ox—these are the symbols of the four evangelists: Luke, Mark, Matthew, and John. It’s almost complete; it’s almost undamaged, except there’s this empty bit in the middle. That central setting may have symbolized Christ himself, and the core of it is silver inlaid with gold, making it a very costly object as well. So it may have belonged to a bishop, an abbot, or an abbess.

The beautiful cross, silver bars, and arm rings were found near the surface of the ground, grouped in a single layer. But the Galloway Horde had only just begun to reveal its secrets. The archaeologists dug down, working their way meticulously through the top layer, but this was just the tip of the archaeological iceberg. A huge surprise lay beneath. And so you do the responsible thing: let’s see if we’ve missed something, and you wave the sort of metal detecting wand around one more time just to make sure you’ve got it all. And what they got was a huge booming signal. It was still kind of there; there was still something there, even though they thought they had finished digging. And so the archaeologist goes back and clears out the gravel that he thought was a sort of natural gravel, and sure enough, underneath that, there was another layer of silver. And that’s what we’ve laid out here. And so what we found was that this was just the upper deposit of a much larger lower deposit of silver.

Wow! As they dug the second layer, three incredible hidden packages were revealed. As the earth was cleared, they could see a vessel and yet more silver bars and arm rings. The bulk of this horde, in terms of its weight, is bound up in these silver bars. These are objects that we call ingots. They’re just a handy way of melting down your silver into nice portable bars. You can see kind of at a glance how much money you have. This is personal wealth, it looks like it. Yes, like having bank notes in your wallet. This is the equivalent in the Viking Age. That’s right, but these would be some pretty good bank notes. You know, you’re not talking about a couple of pounds here; 50 and 100 lb notes.

So the other objects that you have displayed here, aside from those bars, those ingots, are these beautiful stamped arm rings. And so these are arm rings of a type that we do find in the Viking Age around the area of the Irish Sea. Okay, they’re probably made in Ireland, but we find lots of them in northern England, in the parts of the world that eventually come to be known as the Danelaw under Scandinavian control. But there was never a deposit of this kind of silver as big as this in Scotland. Have you been able to identify any of them as to potentially who they might have belonged to?

So that’s one of the most amazing and unique things about this horde. Some of these were actually marked, and those markings are things that we can recognize. Those are runic characters. What do the runes say exactly?

So this is the interesting bit. This is the Viking Age, and we assume this is maybe deposited by Vikings themselves. We know this is the kind of object that they like to carry around and bury in these great treasures. But those runes, when we took them to our sort of runologist colleagues, they were recognized right away—not as Viking runes or Scandinavian runes, but as Anglo-Saxon runes. It’s a very similar alphabet, but it’s one that’s used on this side of the North Sea. So you’ve got a fusion of both Viking and Anglo-Saxon already; it’s what it’s looking like. Yeah, and so these are Anglo-Saxon runic characters, and where we can read them, they do contain Old English words. And so whoever is behind this, there’s at least somebody involved who is literate and an Old English speaker, and maybe more than one. So as far as we can tell, three of those arm rings contain elements that are in Old English and could be abbreviations of personal names in Southwest Scotland around the year 900.

We’re in a really interesting period where the records that we have, the historical documents that we have, kind of slow down and blink out of existence for a small period of time. And so we know that Galloway in Southwest Scotland is part of the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon Kingdom, but there are also British speakers in the Kingdom of Strathclyde, which is recently formed further north, and they’re now starting to dominate in the southwest as well. There’s also Gaelic speakers from Ireland already present in Galloway, and so you have a multiplicity of languages already. And then you throw in these Viking raiders as one aspect of it as well. So people living within these communities are from various different cultures. That lived experience is going to be demonstrated in their cultural output, like what we see here in this horde.

Absolutely! So in the year 900, we are really at a historical turning point for the region that we now call Galloway. From that period of Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon control to a period where we actually don’t know a lot about who is in charge, and this horde falls right under that little hiatus. And so what we can tell about the Viking Age in Galloway is coming in large part, apart from archaeological excavations and finds like these. We don’t know why these precious treasures were placed in the ground, but it’s tempting to think they were hidden there for safekeeping during this turbulent time of change around 900 AD, and the owners didn’t return to claim them. So they remained buried and forgotten for 1,100 years.

But as the archaeologists painstakingly excavated the finds, they discovered ever more extraordinary objects, including this tangled group of silver deposited next to this parcel of silver that you see here. Was this phenomenal and really quite unique object?

Wow! So this turns out to be a stack of very elaborate versions of those silver arm rings. These look like the finished version; they are in that complete annular form, which means that they could be worn around the wrist. Unlike most of those arm rings, which had been flattened or bent and folded, those four armbands are bigger, heavier, and more complicated in terms of ornament, and they’re all tied together with a smaller fifth arm band. Would that have meant they would have been worn by one person, or do you think they were tied together as a form of preservation?

If you look in detail at these, you can see that some of them are really quite worn, and some of them look like they were cast and decorated just before they were deposited. So, actually, I think these rings belong to a group of people coming together. The fact that there are four arm rings is interesting because we have the four runic inscriptions in the lower part of the horde as well. So, you’re beginning maybe to build up a picture of who these people were and why they came together.

One more interesting thing about this bundle of arm rings is that tucked inside of it were these three gold objects: there’s a finger ring and another ingot, another bar of gold. So, that’s pretty typical; you could find those in Viking hordes as well, although gold is a lot rarer. But this bird pin is a complete one-off; there are very few examples that look anything like it, and this would have been a very personal item. Whoever wore this would have been remembered by that object, and if you saw the object on its own, you would think of one particular person. It’s very beautiful.

But the finds kept coming. Next to the arm rings was another object: a vessel with a lid. Inside the vessel, during the excavation in laboratory conditions, the team gradually uncovered what proved to be some of the most fascinating artifacts of all. These objects are very rare in Viking Age hordes; there are very few of these disc-shaped brooches, and none have been found in Scotland before this. There are some objects that are completely unique to the Galloway horde so far. These quadrate led brooches—I love them! They’ve got these extraordinary little faces on them. They almost remind me of church corals and gargoyles; it’s always meant to be quite humorous. Absolutely, and they’re instantly iconic, aren’t they? Is this gold inlaid inside these clasps as well? That’s right; these are silver objects with gold inlaid, and these objects here are decorated in a distinctive form that’s called the ‘true huddle’ style. That’s important because this is a kind of art that is used in Anglo-Saxon England around the time of the Viking Age. So again, another fusion of this Anglo-Saxon Viking detail within the whole horde.

Altogether, the more you look at the contents of that lidded silver vessel—yes, there’s gold, yes, there’s silver—but then there are materials as well that you wouldn’t necessarily call precious. There are glass objects and some of these beads. You can see that some of them are really very heavily worn; these are bashed-up kind of old objects. And so, you begin to think, why would these be stored amongst the other gold and silver treasure? I think it means that this has to have some other kind of value, an intangible kind of value to whoever buried it—emotional value, it has to be. I think this must have been heirlooms, if they’re anything. These are family heirlooms that have been passed down through the generations. This is tangible human connection; that’s extraordinary.

So, what was found inside this carefully preserved vessel is very different from what we were looking at over here. What does that tell you when examining it? It’s almost like a little time capsule, a little snapshot of the world as seen from the perspective of someone in Galloway around the year 900. This is a glimpse of the Viking Age that is not exclusively about Scandinavian warlords.

These objects were all contained within this very unusual vessel, wrapped in fabric. Opening and investigating it has been a fascinating challenge for the conservation team of the National Museum of Scotland. Dr. Mary Davis has carried out much of this painstaking work, literally unwrapping the Galloway horde and preparing the vessel to go on public display for the very first time to mark the 10th anniversary of its original discovery.

I’m getting a sneak preview! Mary, this is fascinating what you’re doing. I hope you don’t mind that I’m peering in over your shoulder and watching, but I’m absolutely fascinated with the level of detail that you’re taking and the attention to cleaning the lid of this vessel.

Yeah, we do try and do most of the cleaning of archaeological material using tools. It gives us much more control, and when you work under a microscope, you can see the detail of what you need to take off and how much you need to take off. So, I have a variety of implements that I use. This hold, in particular, was quite challenging for you as a conservator, wasn’t it? What was it particularly about the vessel that proved so problematic?

Well, the vessel has several layers of interest and problems. The first is that it was completely wrapped up in textile; you can see the linen sticking there, and there was also some wool which had been mineralized onto the surface of the object. The textile had also caused the copper within the silver to corrode, and this had come out as a green layer all over the surface of the object. The green corrosion crust was actually harder than the silver and the gilding lying underneath, which makes it very difficult to remove. We also wanted to remove that layer to show the original surface but preserve the textiles because the textiles are such an integral part of the object and quite rare in archaeological discoveries.

Yeah, and they can tell you so much! I mean, do you know exactly what sort of textile this was wrapped in? Well, it seems to have been wrapped, bundled up in a piece of linen that was tied at the top and then almost like a woven overcoat over the top of that. So, it had two layers of textile preserving it. This looks remarkable since it came out of the ground. How did you get to this point in your conservation process?

Well, we thought a lot about what we needed to do and how much we could show. The difficulties were that the textile was very important, and we wanted to preserve that. The silver was covered in the green corrosion, which was harder than the underlying substrate, and we wanted to be able to show some of the gold and silver, and that would be really difficult to do mechanically. So, we chose to try and clean it using a laser. We did this for the majority, going around it. Laser cleaning helped both to preserve the remaining cloth and reveal details of the beautiful silver-gilt vessel. Remarkably, the corrosion of the copper had actually helped to preserve the organic cloth as it killed the microorganisms within the fabric. Some of the cloth is really highly mineralized, and it’s all covered in green copper corrosion, but some of it is quite well preserved, and you can see its original color. You can work out what fibers they were, for instance, whether it’s wool or linen. Yes, and you can send some of these to have dye analysis to see if there were any colorants. You can also do radiocarbon analysis to find out a date. So, the preservation of organics is really important.

So exciting! Over a thousand years ago, this remarkable vessel was wrapped in linen and wool and buried upside down with its lid on. It created a microenvironment that water couldn’t percolate into, meaning it stayed relatively untouched in the ground. Inside, the archaeologists could see an incredible cache of objects, some of which I looked at earlier with Adrien in laboratory conditions. Two wrapped packages were carefully excavated from within the vessel, with glimpses of gorgeous artifacts inside. They have been conserved, and I’m getting to see them up close with Dr. Martin Goldberg.

So, Martin, these beautiful objects were separated from the original hordes. Why is that?

Well, each one of these was a separate bundle. These objects were hidden from us; they had been carefully wrapped by their original owners and carefully packed inside the lidded vessel. All of that organic material that surrounded them was sort of our ultimate challenge, particularly in conservation terms, but also amazing opportunities to learn a lot more about the people that had owned these and the places that they had come from. They’re incredible and so detailed and so bright as well. I mean, they look incredibly rich and expensive to me. Now, I can only imagine what they would have meant to somebody a thousand years ago. Can I ask you just to explain what they are?

Yeah, I mean, I’m going to begin with this one here. This is beautiful; it looks as if it’s maybe a pendant. So, there is a hole at the top, and in that was a piece of silk cord. The silk cord interconnected this whole group of objects, and so that would have been worn as a pendant. It’s got this amazing gold filigree and granulation framework around it, but the stone that’s inside it isn’t what you would expect to be treated in this way with all of this lavish gold decoration. It’s a very common type of stone called a schist. It’s a metamorphic stone, so it’s very widely available. But what we think that was used for was a touchstone, so it gives you a surface that you can test the quality of gold against. When Mary analyzed this object, she picked up the traces of gold streaks on the surface. So, this is somebody who has the ability to test gold, to handle gold; they’re perhaps trading in gold. They want the finest quality material, and obviously, what it’s buried with is the finest quality gold work that is available at the time.

Right, so this had a functional purpose. It did originally have a functional purpose, but then it’s almost like it’s being treated like a relic itself. So, there is a pyramid cap on the end of it that is shaped to the original shape of that stone, but there are small clasps. Technically, that black stone could be slid out and could be used for the purpose that it was intended for, but we think that it’s something older than the material that it’s found with, and it looks like it has been treated as something special, as something older that needs protecting and also that needs celebrating, you know, with that amount of gold lavished on it. It would have been worn with these ornaments attached to it.

Yeah, can you explain what these are? They look like little animal heads, perhaps a tiger and some crocodiles. But do you think in this period that it’s more just bestial, whatever it is? Well, everybody sees what they have in their own imagination, but what they’re trying to do is give the impression of a creature. Whether that is a real creature or a creature that was in their imagination, we don’t really know. But this would have been worn as a set, and so these long sockets are actually the functional bit, and that’s what the silk cord was sort of clamped inside. Then the silk cord ran through the four shorter sockets of this central one and presumably looped and took in this pendant in some way. So, this is a set of dress items—very, very high-status dress items. Like much of the material in the horde, these objects are normally found in England. This is the first time that there’s a group of them in Scotland, but this group can help us understand all of the rest of them because they’re a complete set together. Another object in the group is an absolutely stunning carved crystal with overlaid gold detailing and a shape that seems to allude to classical design.

This one reminds me of it’s as if it’s an upside down Corinthian capital from Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece. Yes, there is the decoration on the surface of the rock crystal. If you turn it, it’s very, very like the capital of a column. But what has happened to this is it has then been transformed into a jar, and so the spout is at the top, and there is a hollow in the middle that that spout connects to. But on the base is an inscription, and the inscription reads from this top left corner where there is a little Christian cross, and you can trace the letters in the gold filigree and granulation all the way around the square base. It reads from the top: Hial. So it’s another Old English name; it’s a name that we know from Northumbrian sources, but it’s then describing who this person was. So it’s EPs episcopus, and it’s Bop Bishop. Bishop Higold had this made or made this, and so we’ve got a commissioner’s name, which is just amazing. The lettering is almost manuscript as well. The little tiny granulation balls of gold are almost forming the serifs in the letters. It’s really cleverly done. Historians couldn’t find any other references to Bishop Higold, but it’s a tantalizing glimpse of the powerful man, probably Northumbrian, who commissioned this beautiful object that ended up in the Galloway Horde. X-ray images reveal its intricate construction, gorgeous gold designs worked around the transparent core. And this looks like raw material. Is it a crystal or glass? It is—no, it’s rock crystal. It’s a very pure form of crystal. They would have been seeking out sources of crystal with beautiful clarity. The carved surface—there’s a lot of technological expertise needed to carve that particular hardness of stone into that shape because this horde was buried around, we think, around 900 AD. The comparisons for a type of object like that would normally be in the Islamic world, where in the 10th century there’s a sort of boom in production of rock crystal objects. And so that was where we started off looking. But the way that that surface is carved, and like you said, like a Corinthian column capital, eventually we sort of tracked back, and the Vatican collection has a series of rock crystal columns of the same size with the same drilled hole through the middle that allows you to connect the pieces of the columns together. That is by far the closest comparison that we’ve been able to find. The fact that it’s got a Christian name on the base helps us make that association. But again, it’s a relic; that object was probably five, six, or seven hundred years old at the point where it was then covered in gold and made into a jar. I mean, it is extraordinary in the detail and the binding. It’s been so carefully put together.

But there’s something else here that is unique in its opposite attraction. What are these two obscure little balls that we have next to you? Well, these are my favorites. These two balls of dirt are in such contrast to those luxury materials, and yet they presumably had some sort of similar value. What do you think makes this so important, important enough to be contained inside the vessel with these objects? There are theories that we have to work with, but you need some evidence for those theories. And so when Mary started her analysis of the material inside the vessel, she picked up very, very microscopic traces of gold on the surface of these dirt balls. So we got them CT scanned in partnership with the British Museum, and that demonstrated that the gold is throughout the dirt. And so these were rolled. You can almost see, you know, like how children would with plasticine. They look almost man-made, actually, in that respect. So you can almost see the hands that would have formed these rolled into sort of sausage shape and then connected and rolled into a ball. And in the process of doing that, whatever environment they’re in, they have picked up traces of gilding, traces of bone. There are bits of organic material in there, what looks like grass. And so these are all clues for us about where these might have been formed. And so you have to imagine an environment with gilding in it. For me, this sort of gave me the clues that I needed to pursue a particular theory, which is that pilgrims would visit holy places, and one of the things that you could bring back from those holy places, almost like an essence of those sacred places, was local dirt rolled in the environment and then brought back almost like a souvenir.

I was looking for comparisons, and in the Vatican in Rome, again like the rock crystal, there is a collection of earth relics, and they used to have little labels on them. The labels would say where they had come from, and the paleography of the writing tells you that they were collected between 650 and 900 AD. So, right in the period that this collection is coming together. But the places that they’re interested in are places in the Holy Land, so their labels say Bethlehem, the banks of the River Jordan, the Temple of the Holy Sepher. And so the Temple of the Holy Seiler has loads of gildings inside it, and you could imagine an environment like that would be the type of place that these would be formed like souvenirs. Possibly that whoever acquired them paid for these might have been commercial products of the vicinity that they were created in order to sell to pilgrims. But the value is really the spiritual value. Exactly, you know, that’s what gives them meaning, and that’s what creates the value that means they are important parts of this collection, perhaps as important as anything else, and perhaps to commemorate the journey in itself because that’s an extraordinary journey to undergo in this period. It’s long, and it’s extensive, and often dangerous. Yeah, and those are the types of stories that all of these objects carry with them.

So a picture is emerging that connects a location in Rome or the Holy Land, perhaps in Jerusalem, with pilgrims traveling across Europe, bringing objects, even balls of dirt, all the way back to distant Galloway. But in terms of it, a journey, the thing that we have learned most recently about this vessel is that it probably traveled the greatest distance of any of the material in this horde. The iconography of it was always slightly curious. So there are other vessels that have been used as treasure containers in Viking Age hordes, but this one stands out. There are leopards and tigers on it; there’s something that looks like a fire alarm with a crown emerging from the flames, and these are unusual things to find, especially in Christian Europe at this point. And so we’ve been working again on a theory that this is an object that has traveled a great distance from Persia, from what is modern-day Iran. And we’ve recently had confirmation through scientific analysis of the silver and the yellow decoration that this object is again a relic of an ancient empire, the Sasanian Empire, that was based in modern-day Iran. The Sasanian Empire thrived in Western Asia in the sixth and seventh centuries and spread their cultural influence across the globe. It is incredible to imagine how the silver-gilt vessel could have made its journey halfway around the world from Iran to a distant corner of Southwest Scotland. You know, the journeys that some of these objects have been on are just incredible, and that adds to scholarship to demonstrate that the Early Middle Ages were not periods of infighting and darkness, but actually a huge amount of shared culture, experience, and travel.

Yeah, well, there are always those other elements to it. There’s always truth to the stereotype; there is an established historical narrative for all of that. But what a find like this does is give you new aspects, new stories, new material, and sometimes things that people have never thought of before. You know, that people could be going to the Holy Land and collecting earth relics at this point. That a Sasanian vessel could travel thousands of miles to be the container for what looks like a family’s history, you know, a family’s heritage. These are things that, before this horde was discovered, I don’t think people would have really considered as part of that narrative that we have of Britain and Ireland in the earliest Viking Age.

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