From ancient times mankind was appealed by unknown writings: half-forgotten antique languages, Egypt hieroglyphs, Indian inscriptions… The fate of runes was much happy – their sense wasn’t lost in the ...

Like many important discoveries, it happened by accident. Alena Slamova, a Czech graduate student in archaeology, was routinely washing some animal bones that had been recovered from a dig in an early ...

Historians have long thought that Slavic peoples did not develop an alphabet until the ninth century—but the new findings suggest otherwise. Masaryk University A Czech graduate student has discovered ...

People living in Scandinavia may have written encrypted messages in runes – the alphabet later used by the Vikings – several centuries earlier than previously thought. In runic writing systems, each ...

Runes are the characters of the alphabet used by the Vikings and other Germanic peoples from about the second to the 15th centuries A.D. Some runes vaguely resemble letters in our own alphabet; others ...

A Concise History breaks off these later accretions and unearths their long history. Runes’ primary function as an alphabetic writing system is underlined throughout, as part of the ‘uphill battle’ ...