Historic find could shed new light on key world culture
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=7744
by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3452
An amateur treasure seeker is being hailed as a hero after discovering an historic hoard of Anglo-Saxon artifacts. The AP news service quoted expert Roger Bland: “This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue. It will make us rethink the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4573." The Hoard is the largest Anglo-Saxon find of its kind, beating the iconic Sutton Hoo trove discovered in 1939.
An unemployed man found the giant trove, now called the Staffordshire Hoard, in July and did the right thing in informing archeologists of his find, among which were eleven pounds of gold. The treasures, which date from the period of 675 to 725 AD come from an area that was formerly the Kingdom of Mercia, one of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchies. Recently, Islamists have claimed that the Mercians were early Muslim converts, a claim dismissed as absurd by genuine historians. At the time to which the Staffordshire Hoard dates the Mercians were Christians, a fact underlined by a scriptural verse found on a helmet piece.
The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic-speaking tribesmen who came to give their name to what is now England, or Angle-land. Their rule was overthrown by the Normans, the descendants of Vikings who had settled in part of what is now France, in 1066. However, despite their displacement, Anglo-Saxon influence has persisted, from the English language to the legal system of the English-speaking world, to our names for the days of the week.The so-called Dark Ages were in fact rich in cultural achievement, especially thanks to the influence spread by the continental Carolingian Renaissance, with which the Mercians were closely associated. Anglo-Saxon intellectuals had a great deal of interaction with ecclesiastical developments of the period. One of the best known thinkers of the time is Alcuin of York, who served as the Emperor Charlemagne’s court philosopher. Alcuin convinced his patron to cease the forced conversions of European pagans.
In present-day England “Englishness,” like whiteness itself, is derided as “boring” and exploitative in the name of “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6858." Hopefully, this discovery will allow at least some young English people to take an interest in their roots.
The new find is likely to shed light on this seminal but little understood period of our collective European historical experience, a period which laid the groundwork for the Middle Ages and the modern world.
The Staffordshire Hoard goes on display at the Birmingham Museum of Art for a month from October 13th.