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Salt Trade (History)
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Mick Harper
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I very much like sold = salt. In The Megalithic Empire it is claimed that (basically) salt kicked the whole trade business off. Also Jerusalem having a salt component is new to me (or have I been missing things?) though now obvious enough.

Of course the Baltic is a virtually salt-free ocean so it makes sense that the Mediterranean is a salty one by comparison but this makes no sense if the Scandis are where they are now since they would regard the North Sea and the Atlantic as salty-seas and would have no specially salty-view of the Mediterranean. However, if the Scandis are salt-folk emanating from the salt mines of Saxony and Poland, then alles klaar since the Med/Black Sea would be the second port of call after the Baltic.
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Hatty
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Constantinople was called Miklagard, so the Norse seems to have separated these between these cities. Rome, was Romaborg or Romaborgir (plural or borg), so this was not Miklagard at the time the Norse came in contact with it.

Any relation to Michael (Archangel) 'guarding' the Bosphorus? In English mikel, mickle, mickel are connected to 'much' as in big, great.
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Hatty
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Also Jerusalem having a salt component is new to me (or have I been missing things?) though now obvious enough.

Yes, we discussed the connection between salt and 'shalom' which means peace, health, prosperity, all 'salt' associations.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Mick Harper wrote:
I very much like sold = salt.


Sold=solid

A medium of exchange needs to be solid.

Which is one reason unless you are in the middle of nowhere you wont use salt as a medium of exchange.

If metal is available then that is the way to go.
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Jorn



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Wile E. Coyote wrote:
Mick Harper wrote:
I very much like sold = salt.


Sold=solid

A medium of exchange needs to be solid.


I am pretty sure the German kaufen and Kupfer(copper) is the same, and in old Norse we have kaupen. No matter when the Roman Empire existed, they made millions of small copper coins, and I don't think that we got the word from the copper coin is a far stretch.

You also find OE bec-apian = ver-kaufen (ger) =sell, and Copenhaven = buy-haven

The word to sell in Old English seems to have been very common.

sellan1 [] irreg wv/t1b 3rd pres sel.. past sealde ptp geseald (w.d. person and w.a. thing) to give something (acc) to somebody (dat); 1. of voluntary giving, to put into the possession of a person, transfer ownership from one to another, appoint, allot; ....

there are a lot more meanings, also the modern meaning of to sell something for money.

http://home.comcast.net/~modean52/oeme_dictionaries.htm


The strangest pure OE word I found, was

efengelike = even-like = of even value

AFAIK it is pronounced the same as the evangelic gospels in the bible, that is supposed be of equal authority.
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Jorn



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Hatty wrote:
Constantinople was called Miklagard, so the Norse seems to have separated these between these cities. Rome, was Romaborg or Romaborgir (plural or borg), so this was not Miklagard at the time the Norse came in contact with it.

Any relation to Michael (Archangel) 'guarding' the Bosphorus? In English mikel, mickle, mickel are connected to 'much' as in big, great.


I doubt it is from Scandinavia, as professional priests only arrived with Christianity, but perhaps from OE, as they had the same meaning for mikil, and were a much richer country, and could afford holy men.
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Mick Harper
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Interesting article in Q-Mag (translated from Der Spiegel, October 5, 2017). As you know one of my/our pet theories is that the Anglo-Saxons were salt traders using the salt mines from Saxony, trading up the Elbe to 'the angle' in order to supply the Baltic markets where, because it’s cold and the Baltic is only 2% salt, they can’t use the then standard method of sea-evaporation. Anyway the story is headed

A Germanic harbor town found at the mouth of the Elbe River
and there were Romans there too...

It begins

If we are to believe the opinion of historians up until now, the Romans would not have trusted themselves all the way to the River Elbe, in Northern Germany. According to the Roman scholar Pliny, they found the area around the mouth of the river to be too wet, so much so, he wrote, that "there is doubt whether it should be counted with the land or with the sea." In order to remain relatively dry, Pliny goes on, the tribes of the Chauci who lived there erected earthen dykes, "which they build with their hands, up to the height of the highest waters."

Or, as we would say, a whole heap of people went to a whole heap of trouble to create some land in an area and at a time there was land a-plenty available without going to all the trouble.

Their main source of nourishment were the fish which remained stranded behind these dykes, after the waters retired.

Not necessarily, according to the caption of the pic accompanying the article

The site of the harbor town, in the intensively cultivated Elbe marshes.


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Mick Harper
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Their main source of nourishment were the fish which remained stranded behind these dykes, after the waters retired.

Or as we would say, their main source of trade was salt fish. Though it is possible these were the first and last human beings in recorded or archaeological history for whom fish was the main source of nourishment.

As for heating, they used peat.

As did everybody else who had access to peat. It's the cheapest there is.

"While collecting with their hands the mud which they put to dry more with the help of the wind than that of the sun, they use this earth to warm up their food and their limbs, which are numbed by the North wind."

I suppose in the absence of JCB's it can't be helped but excavating fish traps, keeping the sea out and accruing a heat source would seem a triple whammy for handimen. Not sure how you distinguish between sun and wind as a drying agent but, hey, I live in a basement, what do I know?

In short: it was not a desirable spot for Romans.

Unlike similarly undesirable spots inside the Roman empire eg Britain, Holland, Hungary, the Crimea etc etc

Nobody ever thought of looking in the Lower Elbe for larger settlements...

We could have told them.

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Mick Harper
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... or for traces of a Roman presence. But then, three years ago, archaeologists from the district of Stade, discovered in a field, to the South of the mouth of the Elbe, in the Elbe marshes of Nordkehdingen, a settlement together with a harbor

Actually there’s no harbour yet but we won’t press the point.

"It was a place where at least a few Romans, if they were not residents, were certainly, at least at times, welcome guests," according to archaeologist Daniel Nösler.

I suppose ordinary common or garden traders (or tourists) are welcome guests but it suits the current paradigm always to portray Romans as not ordinary or common or garden. Or residents. They’re The Romans.

To the naked eye, there is hardly anything that remains visible today of the settlement. The land looks just the way Pliny described it, 2000 years ago: wet, flat and treeless.

And intensively cultivated. Don’t forget that part. Like you say, not much has changed.

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Mick Harper
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Nösler points with his arm to the North: "There it is!" When one looks closely, one may indeed make up, at a short distance, a slight rise in the fields: the former settlement area lies all of 1m 20cm above the surrounding fields.The first traces were noticed by excavation technician Dietrich Alsdorf on an aerial photograph. It was possible to distinguish clearly the lines of several arms of water losing themselves in the land. The harbor is conjectured to have been situated between those.

Ah, the old conjecture. Actually harbours are the opposite of several arms of water losing themselves in the land, they are non-linear bodies of water that don’t get lost in the land, but never mind, it’s only a conjecture.

In the mean time, archaeologists discovered numbers of coins, beads, sherds of Roman pottery and even a fragment of a Roman bronze sculpture. The finds leave no doubt: these was not a sleepy fishing village. It was a metropolis with far-reaching trade relations – not only to the Roman empire. Two coins from the early Middle-Ages were brought here from Venice. A buckle ornated with horse heads points to an origin in the British Isles.

It’s almost as if the Roman Empire was irrelevant. Elbe-town, sorry, Elbetropolis, seems to have been beavering away quite contentedly before, during and after the Romans. But archaeologists and historians are classically-trained so its significance can only be truly appreciated if looked at from a Roman perspective.

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Mick Harper
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Most remarkable, though, are the traces of Roman luxury: a silver spoon, jewels, also a piece of a Roman cuirass. Nösler turns a gold coin between his fingers

Goodness, it could almost be a trading centre.

"This particularly precious piece shows us that there existed here – in the Middle of Germania – an elite which was in close contact with the Roman Empire...

Well, it was just up the road.

...In the second halt of the first century AD, at the time when Pliny was describing the wet earthmounds of the Chauci, the first Roman ships had already anchored in the harbor here."

Well, it was just along the coast.

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Mick Harper
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"Originally, the Elbe River was planned by the Roman emperors to become the Northeast border of the Roman empire," Nösler explains. "There were at least two military expeditions in the direction of the Elbe, one in the year 9 BC, the other in the year 5 AD. But then the devastating defeat of the Roman in the Varian disaster (Battle of Teutoburg) frustrated these plans durably."

Bit of a puzzle that. Some people prancing around in the mud (or, as per the earlier received wisdom, skulking around in trackless forests) defeated the greatest power on earth not once but twice. Then apparently maintained the status quo without further trouble for the next four hundred years or so. Makes you think. If you are capable of thought.

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Mick Harper
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The newly discovered harbor at the mouth of the Elbe tells us what happened instead:

Instead of what? Elbetropolis would have had a Roman rather than a Chauci harbour master for a bit?

trade relations were established.

No, Roman ships had already been tie-ing up there, remember?

Additionally, a great number of Germans lent themselves out as mercenaries to the Roman army.

I think he means ‘took advantage of job opportunities with the biggest local employer’.

If they survived their time in service, and returned as veterans to their Northern Germanic home country, they would bring with them gold coins, silver spoons and pretty implements.

If I know soldiers, more likely souvenirs – cuirasses, horse studded buckles, that sort of thing.

To one of these veterans belonged probably the gold coin with the head of the Roman ruler, Magnentius ...

Probably not. Gold coins are super-useful for international trade but less so at the corner shop. Got anything smaller, squire?

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Mick Harper
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... who, on January 18, 350 became the first German to be proclaimed Roman emperor.

The Roman Army was an equal opportnities employer.

The coin was fitted with a loop so that it could be worn around the neck with a leather tie.

Also to hold lederhosen up.

“The owner was probably a Germanic soldier ...

You’re being too modest. We’ve already established that.

who was so proud of his 'very own' emperor that he worked the coin with his likeness into a piece of jewellery," Nösler conjectures.

It’s almost as if he was there.

Archaeological finds of the harbor reach into the eleventh century.

Unlike the Roman Empire.

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Mick Harper
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The settlement extends over a surface of almost 20 hectares, which made it as big as Hamburg in the early Middle-Ages. But in the end, the Elbe left the harbor. Alluvial slime and sediments turned the drainage channels to land, and the river moved farther north.

So they opened Hamburg.

Around the year 1000, ships could be moored there no longer. Greedily, the upriver towns of Stade and Hamburg took on the additional trade.

Bastards. Just because ships can't get to us they think they can just take over

The wooden houses of the formerly stately harbor city rotted away.

It’s what we geographers call ‘harbourless harbour city’ syndrome.

Peasants plowed under what was left, and sowed wheat onto the flat mound.

Bastards. That was a Grade Two Star listed metropolis.

The name of the harbor was forgotten.

It’s what we etymological place name theorists call ‘nameless harbourless harbour city’ syndrome. But don’t worry, we’ll think of something.

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