World's oldest runestone may have been signed by a woman, researchers say

A woman may have signed her name on the world's oldest dated runestone, researchers in Norway have found, as they piece together the 2,000-year-old puzzle.

A woman may have signed her name on the world's oldest dated runestone, researchers in Norway have found, as they piece together the 2,000-year-old puzzle.

The inscription begins with the word “I” in runic script, followed by the name of the writer and a verb that indicates writing, before ending with the word “rune,” researchers wrote earlier this month in the journal Antiquity after studying a fragment of the stone found at a grave site in Hole, a small municipality in southern Norway to the east of the capital, Oslo.

“Basically the text would be saying, I, the rune inscriber’s name, wrote the runic inscription,” one of the study’s co-authors, Kristel Zilmer, told NBC News in telephone interview Monday.

“It’s a type of inscription also that has parallels in some other romantic inscriptions, basically somebody telling us that they made this inscription,” added Zilmer, a professor of runology at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History.

The runic stone is visible in a section of excavations. Museum of Cultural HistoryThe researchers said they believed the Germanic alphabetic script was inspired by the Roman alphabet, of which runes formed the foundational blocks in the first A.D. centuries. It was widely used in Scandinavia up until the late Middle Ages. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/worlds-oldest-runestone-norway-woman-signature-rcna193400

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