Viking Coins Found in Denmark Were Minted With Islamic Silver

Silver Viking Age coin, Damhus, Denmark

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—Live Science reports that a new study of Viking coins from the Damhus hoard, a cache of 226 pennies unearthed in Denmark near the site of the Viking town of Ribe in 2018, suggests that they contain silver recycled from Islamic coins. The 1,000-year-old coins, known as pennies, bear a face on one side thought to represent the Norse god Wodan or Odin, with a stag on the reverse. Thomas Birch of the National Museum of Denmark said that each coin would have been enough to buy ale, bread, or simple tools. Analysis of the coins also shows that when the dies used to stamp them were worn, they were replaced with similar ones, Birch added. At least 30 dies had been used to make these coins, and likely hundreds of thousands like them, at a single mint in Ribe. Twenty-five of the coins were also examined with X-ray fluorescence to analyze their chemical compositions. Trace elements detected in the silver suggest that more than half of the metal in the coins came from Islamic silver coins known as dirhams. The Islamic coins are thought to have been melted down outside of Scandinavia, and transported to Ribe in the form of ingots. “If these coins are being minted in the hundreds of thousands, that’s a huge quantity of Islamic silver,” Birch explained. Read the open source academic paper on the research at Archaeometry. To read more about what coins can reveal about the ancient Norse, go to "Hoards of the Vikings."

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Original author: Jessica Esther Saraceni