Danish Archaeologists In Search Of Vikings In Iran

Payvand ^ | 1-20-2005

[blam]

1/20/05

Danish Archaeologists in Search of Vikings in Iran

Tehran, Jan. 20 (Iranian Cultural Heritage News Agency) – Researchers from the Copenhagen Museum in Denmark have traveled to the coasts of the Caspian Sea, northern Iran, in search of clues of relationships between Iranians and Vikings.

A few years ago, a researcher from the Copenhagen Museum, Nadia Haupt, discovered more than one thousand coins and relics that did not belong to the Danish or other Scandinavian cultures, and therefore set to find out more about the historical roots of the Danish civilization.

The ancient items that took the attention of experts included more than one hundred thousand coins that are not part of the Danish history, Viking shipwrecks that Haupt believes their style of construction and the kind of trade they used to undertake differentiate them from those of their ancestors, clothes and accessories used today in some Scandinavian cities and villages, and red and blue colors included in the clothes of the residents under study.

The findings prompted archeologists and anthropology enthusiasts to find out more about their ancestral roots, and where these items have originally come from. The first hypothesis that these items originated from southwestern Europe such as Spain was overruled with more studies.

The next hypothesis focused on the northeastern countries in Europe, or more specifically Russia. Relics found in the excavations of the area have confirmed the existence of trade relationships between Denmark and Russia, but Haupt intends to get to the main roots.

She has followed her leads in Russia and has now come to the Iranian side of the Caspian Sea, hoping to prove that Eastern cultures had influenced the Scandinavian countries, such as Denmark.

Director of the research center of the Cultural Heritage Department, Mazandaran province, Ali Mahforouzi, told CHN that Haupt’s field work will continue for 2 weeks, after which she would go back to Denmark to hopefully announce the results of her studies in 3 months.

Mahforouzi believes that further excavations in European countries may show that old Asian civilizations, especially Iran, have had a more important role in the booming of the European cultures.

If her hypothesis is proved, Mahforouzi said, a great project concerning the relations between the Iranian and residents of the coastal areas of the Adriatic Sea will be triggered. According to him, such discoveries can help attract many scholar-tourists to Iran.

The Cultural Heritage & Tourism Department in the northern province of Mazandaran has some plans to prepare the residents in this region for hosting foreign tourists and has started some archeology classes and exhibitions of their heritage.

[Verginius Rufus]

I wouldn't agree that Indo-European and Semitic are "closely related." Heck, within the Indo-European family there are languages which are only remotely related...and the "Afro-Asiatic" family which includes the Semitic and Hamitic languages has members which are only distantly related to each other. There are some linguists who claim to have found evidence of a relationship between the Indo-European and Semitic families, but I don't think their views have won wide acceptance--the evidence is just too meager because the relationship (if it exists) is so far back in time.

[Ciexyz]

I remember well the master epic "The Vikings" starring Kirk Douglas. Played on TV in the 60's and was my main introduction to all things Viking.

[muawiyah]

Just went through the most frequently accessed "language family" sites on the net and now see what you are referring to.

My touch-stone is whether or not a site has the relationships between and among Sa'ami, Sumerian, Dravidian languages, and one American Indian language straight, or does it rely on an older technique of analysis.

If the site fails to note that vast body of research (which concerns the origin of writing, and includes the petroglyphs in Finland) that means it's incomplete.

At one point there was much made of the "agglutinative" structure, so philogists simply dumped all the agglutinative languages in the same bag. At the same time they prohibited any claim of a relationship between an agglutinative and a non-agglutinative language.

The most popular sites tossed up by Google still follow the older standards.

So, what we have are two people talking about the same thing but using different bodies of research.

[muawiyah]

None of which means I cannot make spelling errors. Philogist = Philologist.

[Verginius Rufus]

Maybe you coined a new word. A philogist is someone is someone who is happy just getting the gist of something--just reading the headlines, or reading a 50-word abstract rather than the entire article.

I believe "Nostratic" is the name given to the supposed super-language family that some researchers claim to have reconstructed, going back thousands of years earlier than the stage of Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Afro-Asiatic.

[muawiyah]

http://www.sumerian.org/prot-sum.htm provides some interesting reading. Everything here is from the viewpoint of a Sumerian language scholar looking "out", and not just that of a scholar of languages looking "in".

[Verginius Rufus]

I don't know what John Halloran's background is or much about the Sumerian language, other than that it is completely unrelated to the languages which were its immediate neighbors in ancient Mesopotamia, Akkadian and Elamite. Akkadian was a Semitic language. As far as I know they have never found any language which is related to Sumerian...obviously there could have been some which died out before they were ever reduced to writing.

[SunkenCiv]

The Vikings keyword will show just a few topics about the groovy teeth, I guess it's about four? Anyway, here's something else perhaps of interest, if you like Vikings. :')

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[traumer]

US Special Forces In Search Of Vikings In Iran...

[SunkenCiv]

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