Living Worlds
The Norse trading town of Birka: turf-roofed houses, a timber jetty, traders weighing silver beside furs and glass beads.

950–1350 · Birka, about 950 CE

Silver and Scales

Everything is weighed, nothing is counted.

The law of Silver and Scales

Everything is weighed, nothing is counted.

Birka, about 950: a Norse trading town on a lake island in Sweden. Silver coins from the Islamic world are weighed on folding scales beside furs, iron, glass beads and silk from far to the east.

A Norse woman trader weighing silver on a folding balance at her harbour stall.

A life in Silver and Scales · composite, based on the record

A trader, thirty-four

She weighs the silver on her folding scale and never counts the coins. Her scales will be buried with her.

Meanwhile, in the same age

Worlds joined by sea and road

A double-hulled voyaging canoe with crab-claw sails of pandanus matting on the open ocean at dusk, voyagers keeping watch.

Wayfinders

The Pacific, about 1000 to 1200 CE

The Kaifeng night market along a canal with an arched bridge, steaming food stalls and lanterns.

Night Market

Kaifeng, about 1100

Karakorum: felt gers beside a small walled town where temples, a mosque and a church stand side by side, caravans arriving.

Crossroads

Karakorum, 1254

An island shore in the 1340s: men in plain white cloths smoking tuna in palm-leaf baskets and beating coconut husks for cord, a boat with fish, wooden houses and a small mosque under palms.

Islands of Shell

The atolls, the 1340s

A double-hulled voyaging canoe with pandanus sails on the open Pacific at dusk.

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