Yet another birch bark from Novgorod

Some Russian news agencies reported on the recent find in Novgorod. During the construction works, two pieces of a birch bark letter were found. The archaeologists say that the letter was written in XV century. The experts have read the text.

The letter was written by someone Alexey, the steward at a manor near Novgorod. It seems that Alexey gave away some of the landlord's meadows to the peasants for mowing, but a local priest accused him of squandering the landlord's property. In this letter, Alexey asked the landlord to send him a confirmation of his right to dispose of the meadows.

"The priest threatens that should he catch someone on the lord's land, he will tie the grass around his head," writes Alexey. It's absolutely unclear what he means by "tying the grass", but the procedure is, probably, not at all pleasing. So, Alexey hurried the landlord up, asking him to send the confirmation of his rights by St. Peter's day (12 July).

Russian sources:
Новгородские археологи подтвердили, что "без бумажки ты букашка"
В Великом Новгороде раскопали еще одну берестяную грамоту

Underwater excavations in Novgorod.

The Novgorodian Divers Federation and The Novgorodian Society of Amateurs of Antiquity have been running archaeological excavations at the bottom of river Volkhov for some years already. They have found some thousands of various artefacts of XII-XVII centuries. In the end of February, the new annual expedition began and in the first days of March three articles about the new finds appeared one after the other in Russian media.

On 1 March, the archaeologists found a XV century town stamp. The stamp featured the image of a bird and the inscription "Орел" (Eagle). It belonged to the Council of the Lords, the ancient Novgorod administration. It was the thirteenth town stamp found in the city.

Then, a cannonball was found. It weighed about 6 pounds. It was the standard weight of Russian cannonballs in XVII century. Probably, it fell into the river during the siege of Novgorod by the Swedish army in 1611 or 1615.

And, finally, on 4 March it was reported that two metal arrowheads were found. It's not clear why, but arrowheads are an unusual find in Volkhov. These are the first arrowheads found at the bottom of the river during the 2005-2008 expeditions.

The goal of this year's expedition is to find the earliest remains of the so called "Great bridge" and to establish where it was located in XI-XII centuries. The bridge connected the districts of Novgorod situated on the opposite banks of Volkhov.

This year in Ryurikovo Gorodische, Novgorod

In 2007, archaeologists worked in 7 districts of Novgorod. In Rurikovo Gorodische (Rurik's, or Roerik's settlement, ancient Holmgard), they are working for thirty years already. More than 1,500 artifacts were found there this year. Among the finds are six knyaz's stamps, Arab coins, chisels and moulding forms, womens decorations, etc. Some of the artifacts confirm the presence of Proto-Slavs in this location in the first century BC.

Besides Russian scientists and students, students from France and Sweden participated in the expedition. In the next year, students from Finland are expected to come. It was decided that after the digs are over, an international archaeological and tourist centre will be created on the site of the settlement.

Birch bark collection grows

The collection of the birch bark writings found in Novgorod and around, keeps growing. On July 5, yet another writing was found in Staraya Russa. The linguists have concluded that the text is about salt manufacturing. This bark became the 1000th inscription found in the Novgorod region — a good reason for a celebration :). Hopefully, the text will soon appear at Gramoty.ru (their collection counts 956 images from Novgorod, 40 from Staraya Russa and more than 50 from other areas). The text contains the word размера (size), in the feminine form which is absent in modern Russian. The linguists think that this word might denote a unit of the volume measurement.

Full collection of birch bark writings is available onlin

Thanks to Languagehat who wrote:

The site "Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus: Contents and Contexts" has put online all the extant birchbark documents unearthed in Novgorod; as they say, this "will constitute a qualitative leap forward in the development of the study of birchbark documents by laying a reliable foundation for the further research into the texts and rendering the material accessible to an international medievalist audience of different backgrounds."

Unfortunately, this web-site is in Russian. It includes photographs of the writings, their text in ancient Russian and translations to modern Russian. They also write:

This web-site is a part of the system of the electronic resources being built, which will include the digital archive, a multifunctional database with full archaeological information about the birchbarks and a text corpus with lemmatization and morphological markup. The database will be available for download upon completion.

It is also possible to search for the inscriptions by period, city, site, genre and damage level.

We discussed this topic some time ago at Sima Qian Studio.:

55 years ago, on July, 26, 1951, the first birch-bark writing was found in Novgorod by Nina Akulova, a participant of the expedition led by Artemy Artsikhovsky. To celebrate the date, the Novgorod State Museum in collaboration with Moscow State University, Institute of Russian Language and other organizations are planning to launch a web-site that would feature the full collection of the found inscriptions (more than 1000), with photographs, translations and comments from historians. Initially, about 950 writings of XI-XV centuries will be published.The final date of the project is 2007. By that time, the web-site is to be finished and a CD will be published. Scientists from Cambridge, Leiden and Helsinki also participate in the project. Some of these writings are written by feudals, by their ministers or even peasants. There are barks written by men, women and children, who learned to write. Some of inscriptions made by a boy named Onthim, contain alphabet, simple drawings and simple texts (the pictures may be found on this page (text in Russian)). People wrote business and legal documents, notes, reminders, jokes... Only 3 or 4 of found inscriptions contain religious texts. Actually, everyone wrote everything. The society of the medieval Novgorod republic was almost 100% literate. The absolute majority of the writings are written in vernacular Old Novgorod dialect of Old Russian language. However, there is one, birch-bark letter 292, dated by the early XIII century, which is the oldest document ever written in a Finnic language. More samples of birch-bark letters may be found on the web-site of the Uni of Chicago, Slavic dept: Birch-bark letter photographs. See also an article at Stefan's Florilegium: Old Novgorod birch-bark writings.

Interesting pottery found in Novgorod

Last year, Russian archaeologists found two clay pots near Novgorod, in the so called Rurikovo Gorodishche (Roerik's settlement). The pots are dated by I century BCE. One of them, fully ornamented, is basically intact. Similar pottery was found earlier in Svyato-Yuriev and Varlaamo-Hutynski monasteries near Novgorod, but they were much more primitive than the last finds. These pots prove that the territory was inhabited in the earliest times.

Besides pottery, some other interesting finds were made there in 2006, like two seals, made of lead. They were used to seal documents.

During the exploration of Rurikovo Gorodishche, some strange and funny things were found. For example, in 2003, archaeologists found a monkey's skull. They think that the animal was brought to Novgorod in XII century and was an exotic gift to the family of knyaz.