Archaeologists in Denmark have discovered a small knife inscribed with runic letters dating back almost 2,000 years, marking the oldest trace of writing found in the country, according to the Museum Odense.
Runic letters, called runes, are the oldest alphabet known in Scandinavia. They were in use from the first or second century A.D. in northern Europe until they were replaced by the Latin alphabet amid Christianisation in the 10th century.
"The knife itself is not remarkable, but on the blade, there are five runes – which is extraordinary in itself – but the age of the runes is even more extraordinary because they actually are the oldest we have from Denmark," archaeologist Jakob Bonde told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"We don't have any writing before this," he said.
Dating back to around 150 years A.D., the iron knife was found in a grave in a small cemetery east of Odense in central Denmark. The five runic letters spell out the word "hiring," which in the Proto-Norse language spoken at the time means "small sword." The inscription is a "note from the past," Bonde said.
"It gives us the opportunity to look more into how the oldest known language in Scandinavia developed and how people interacted with each other."
Bonde said: "The person who owned it wanted to show he was, or wanted to be, some kind of warrior."
The first traces of human settlements in what is now Denmark date back to the Stone Age, around 4,000 B.C., but there are no traces of any writing before the Roman Iron Age (0 to 400 A.D.).
A small comb made of bone discovered in 1865 and inscribed with runes dates back to around the same period as the knife, Bonde said.
When writing first appeared in Scandinavia, it was "only small inscriptions, mainly on objects, we don't have books for example or bigger inscriptions."
Denmark's most famous runestones, erected in the 10th century in the town of Jelling, have longer inscriptions, strongly identified with the creation of Denmark as a nation-state, they were raised by Harald Bluetooth, in honor of his parents King Gorm and Queen Thyra.
