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

Birch bark letters to be translated into English

I wrote about the online library of birch bark letters before (here and here). A good news: the full archive will be translated into English. A large part of the birch bark writings is already translated. The publication of the English texts is scheduled for early 2008.

Currently, the online catalog includes 1,049 inscriptions dated by XI-XV centuries and found in Veliky Novgorod, Vitebsk, Zvenigorod, Staraya Russa, Tver, Torzhok and other locations.

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.