By Atila Altuntas

STOCKHOLM (AA): Swedish researchers this week unveiled burial costumes in graves from the Viking Age with the words ‘Allah’ and ‘Ali’ written on them.

Muslims use the word Allah for god, while Ali is the name of Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law.

The Vikings could be influenced by Islam and “the idea of an eternal life in paradise after death,” Annika Larsson, a researcher in textile archaeology at Uppsala University, told Anadolu Agency on Friday.

The words which appeared as ancient Arabic script’s Kufic characters were found in silk costumes in boat-graves as well as in chamber graves in Sweden’s Birka, the historic Viking city.

“In the Quran, it is written that the inhabitants of paradise will wear garments of silk, which along with the text band’s inscriptions may explain the widespread occurrence of silk in Viking Age graves,” the researcher said in an earlier statement.

Similar Kufic characters were also found in mosaics on burial monuments and mausoleums, primarily in Central Asia, the university said in a statement.

In 2015, Swedish researchers at Stockholm University also discovered a ninth century ring in a Viking grave with an inscription that says ‘for Allah’ or ‘to Allah’.

An engraved ring excavated from a ninth-century grave in the Viking trading centre of Birka, Sweden, suggests that friendlier ties existed between modern Sweden’s forefathers and the Islamic civilizations.

Made of silver alloy, the ring is adorned with coloured glass, an exotic material at the time, engraved with an ancient Arabic script spelling the words “for Allah” or “to Allah”,

The ring was found in a grave near Birka on Björkö Island in the Stockholm archipelago in the late 1800s. Other objects found in the grave indicated a woman had been buried there at around 850 AD, although the skeleton was completely decomposed.

Additional report by The Muslim News

[Map of Viking towns of Scandinavia by Sven Rosborn/Creative commons]