Franský kupec Samo a sásánovský zábor Arábie

Title:

Franský kupec Samo a sásánovský zábor Arábie
Samo, the Frankish merchant, and the Sasanian conquest of Arabia

Creator:

Charvát, Petr

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:88c5c4d7-6e7e-749b-9b13-86de2f5c5fbe
uuid:88c5c4d7-6e7e-749b-9b13-86de2f5c5fbe

Type:

article and TEXT

Description:

Investigations of the „colourful“ or „coloured“ style of jewellery characteristic of the Migration period of European history (5th–7th century AD) over a considerable area beginning with Ciscaucasian steppes and ending in Gaul have brought to light two sources of the red precious and semiprecious stones frequently used in decoration of similar items. Between about 450 and 600, the stones, predominantly of the almandine series, came from India and Sri Lanka. On the contrary, jewellers working, by and large, between 600 and 700 had to be content with smaller, garnet– or pyrop–family stones mined somewhere in Bohemia. This presumably happened because in 570, the army of Sasanian Iran occupied the Arabian peninsula and closed the channel between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean for Indian supplies going to the Mediterranean. This induced the Merovingian jewellers to seek an alternative source of the stones which was ultimately found in Bohemia. This hypothesis would constitute an excellent explanation of what wares did the Frankish merchant Samo, wheeling and dealing in Bohemia or Moravia roughly between the years 623 and 658, first as a merchant and then as a paramount ruler elected in view of his valour in fighting the Avars who pretended to hold sway over the Slavs of these border regions of their khanate, come to procure. It was known for some time that he is not very likely to have come to purchase slaves and he might have come in search of such precious materials as Bohemian garnets. The author then tries to identify possible archaeological testimonies of intercourse between the Bohemians and Moravians of the 6th–7th centuries and population groups from Western Europe. Such indications do exist, though they are fragmentary, scanty and not very clear. Evidence for contacts has come from northern and southern Moravia, as well as from central and northwestern Bohemia. Bavarians, Alamans, Franks and especially Lombards or Longobards might be suspected as partners for the local nobility and entrepreneurs. The author points out that surprising as these results may seem to us, they may reflect not faulty knowledge but rather a wrong manner of asking questions from the archaeological sources. At any rate, both Bohemian regions in which pottery– and metal items heeding west have turned up in the 6th–8th centuries do include pyrop–bearing mineral resources. and Diskuse

Language:

Czech

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

Source:

Archeologické rozhledy | 2002 Volume:54 | Number:4

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false