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.

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 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.

Runic inscriptions have been found on objects such as a bone knife and iron knife from Denmark and a comb, which archeologists have dated to around 150 A.D. Those found on other runestones date to around 700 A.D.

Often they bore messages, including spells to bring back the dead and charm words.

But very little is known about their development as it varied over time and deciphering them can be challenging without archaeological context.

The latest research suggests the fragments, the first of which was discovered in 2021, were part of a single slab. The discovery also brings scientists one step closer to understanding the language’s evolution and the use of such stones, the researchers said.

Two years later, researchers found more fragments and the script on them appeared to continue across the fragments, indicating they were all part of a single stone.

“They managed to find two extra pieces, and they fit perfectly within the middle part of one of the inscriptions, and gave us almost a complete inscription,” Zilmer said.

Due to the damage and the weathering of the stone, she added that determining the exact text, including the name of the inscriber, is a “bit tricky,” but what especially caught the attention of the researchers is a feature in the name that indicates it ended with a “-u.”

In ancient runic script, she said that would indicate a possible woman’s name which, if confirmed, “would be the earliest known record of a female rune-inscriber.”

Because the fragments found in Hole were buried along with cremated human remains, scientists had the crucial archeological context that allowed them to use radiocarbon dating to confirm the fragments dated between 50 B.C. and 275 A.D.

“We may have here a series of events unfolding involving different people,” Zilmer said. “It may be a stone that combines different purposes.”

While much of the research is still ongoing, “we are still missing significant portions, so there are evident gaps,” she said.

“It’s a puzzle with holes, but nonetheless it will be very interesting to see how far we can get, how many of these small fragments, some of these also inscribed, that might be able to connect to each other,” she added.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com