Viking Burial Clothes Woven with ‘Allah’ Discovered in Sweden
Uppsala University, Sweden’s oldest university, just discovered Arabic characters for “Allah” and “Ali” woven into Viking burial clothes.
Their researchers describe the findings of the geometric Kufic characters as staggering. They also added that they’ve stumbled upon this discovery while re-examining clothes that had been in storage.
Annika Larsson, a textile archeology researcher, told the BBC that she couldn’t make sense of the symbols, but then she remembered that she had seen similar designs in Spain, on Moorish textiles. This led to the identification of the name “Ali” in the text and, when looked at in a mirror, the word “Allah” in reverse was revealed.
The Viking’s contact with the Islamic world is a well-established fact. There have been finds of more than 100,000 Islamic silver coins known as dirhams in Viking-age Scandinavia. DNA analysis of Viking graves has also shown that some of them contain people who originated in Persia.
