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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 4597737, member: 93416&quot;]I have Pritzak on my desk - but for Noonan I have to rely upon memory - its quite a long time since I read him.</p><p><br /></p><p>Noonan looked at the massive flow of silver dirhems out of Islam much of which ended up in Scandinavia. Seems this silver went along the Radanite trade route apparently called “Behind Rome” - a little of it went all the way to Ireland, but much dropped off earlier – amongst the Khazars etc.</p><p><br /></p><p>In what I read Noonan explained this by focusing upon Viking demand for silver, within a society that had only recently discovered free trade. That seems correct but only half the story. At the same time Islam seems to be abandoning cash payment and moving towards slave owning selfdoms run by military elites. Islam was dumping silver overseas – probably largely in return for slaves. This was missing from Noonan&#039;s writings that I found. (Right back in the 1980’s I met an old man in Oxford who had given a paper in Sweden giving a more accurate account of these matters. In old age he was very disappointed at the way his work was just ignored or even scoffed at.)</p><p><br /></p><p>Asking questions about such matters leads us to further little noticed facts. For instance, during the Viking period thousands of souterrains were built in Ireland. The only really convincing explanation of those structures is as &#039;slave raid shelters&#039;. I do not ever recall seeing that matter linked into these discussions – yet the implications seem both obvious and plausible.</p><p><br /></p><p>A second problem with Noonan is he spends a lot of time on a matter of so called “North African” dirhems weighing c. 2.73g. Now, about half the specialist academic numismatic community seem to correctly see that the intentional weight of the canonical dirhem was c. 2.93g. This conflicts with the 2.97g that many seem to think is rooted in Sharia law. It also conflicts with the alternative idea that dirhems had no weight standard – or that it varied wildly from 2.75g to 3.00g.</p><p><br /></p><p>This big academic gulf here seems to be between</p><p><br /></p><p>1) those who get their ideas from actually looking carefully at the coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>2) those who choose to accept what they are told - in accordance with various dogmatic positions</p><p><br /></p><p>So the problem was already bad enough without Noonan inventing a ‘2.73g North African’ red herring and throwing it into the mix - without any proper explanation.</p><p><br /></p><p>Behind all these matters – what interests me at present is the clear possibility&nbsp; that (for instance) Russia’s official weight system derived rather exactly for one created by Herod. It would be nice to discuss that strange possibility, both the evidence and the implications. But people seem instead often driven by agendas which hardly seem rooted in scholarly curiosity at all.</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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