The Vikings and the Maritime Silk Roads

Neil Price1*, Sophie Bønding2, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson1, and John Ljungkvist1

The Indo-Pacific is not a region readily associated with the Vikings, the generic (and somewhat problematic) term for the Scandinavians of the period c.750-1050 CE. While it has long been known that the Norse maintained extensive trading links and physical presence in many regions of Western and Central Asia, their activities further east and south have hitherto remained largely unexplored. This is puzzling, in that many thousands of imported Asian objects have been excavated from burials and settlements in Scandinavia, with origins as far east as India, Pakistan and Tang China. These have their counterparts in Nordic material found in Asia, such as Baltic amber from elite tombs in China and Korea. Moreover, textual records of the Abbasid Caliphate’s intelligence service specifically describe Norse traders travelling to East Asia by land and sea. Discoveries such as the Belitung, Phanom Surin, Cirebon and Intan ships demonstrate the maritime realities of this milieu, linking the so-called Silk Roads with the Norse networks in western Asia. This paper introduces the new national Swedish Centre of Excellence for The World in the Viking Age and its lead project 'The Vikings in Asia', both set up to investigate new frontiers of the Norse diaspora, with a view to exploring greater scholarly connections and contacts in the Indo-Pacific maritime world.