One phrase translated to "this is the community's property," leading experts to believe the treasure may have belonged to a religious group.
The 2014 discovery of over 11 pounds of largely silver treasure stashed in a pit in Scotland befuddled experts as much as it excited them. But now, new linguistic insights may just be enough to provide the answer to at least part of the mystery: who once owned this Viking-age treasure?
As it turns out, it may have been an entire community of people.
When a detectorist happened upon the find at Balmaghie in Scotland -- now dubbed the Galloway Hoard -- there were few clues as to why the stash from 900 A.D. was placed where it was found. But actual names and messages left by owners have since helped fill out that picture.
"With the Galloway Hoard, we have those rarest of things: actual names and messages left by its owners," Adrian Maldonado, Galloway Hoard Researcher at the National Museums Scotland museum, wrote in a statement from the museum.
The hoard included at least four arm rings with runic inscriptions on them, and one more message from a piece located near the pit. Originally, considering the Viking nature of the fnd, the script was thought to have potentially been Old Norse names written in Scandanavian runes. But in fact, according to the statement, the silver pieces featured Anglo-Saxon runic inscriptions denoting Old English words and names.
The Galloway Hoard -- the richest Viking-age collection ever located in Britain or Ireland -- includes deposits split into several groups. The lower level of the hoard, which went into the ground first, contains the most valuable material, and a smaller deposit on top was used as a decoy. The runic-inscribed objects come from the silver in the lower section, which included 15 silver ingots and 31 arm rings placed in a leather bag.
The lightest inscribed arm ring (at .8 ounces) featured an Old English word that the experts believe translates to "riches," and may also hold the name "Edgar." Another arm ring likely reads "Tila" (a personal name), and a larger ring bears a name along the lines of Bercol, Berwulf, or Berric. The small runic inscription on the fragment of an arm ring found nearby the hoard pit has been translated to the modern name "Egbert."
"This is a difficult and unusual inscription, and the proposed translation is challenging," David Parsons, a runologist from the University of Wales, said in a statement. "There are a number of things which are technically 'wrong' when we compare it with what we know about 'correct' runic writing. However, if we think about both spoken and written English today, there are a huge range or regional and idiomatic variations and, if we allow for this, then it becomes possible to accept this as a plausible reading. And in the context of what we can deduce about the Galloway Hoard, it becomes really quite compelling."
The largest arm ring, weighing 4.6 ounces, bore the longest and trickiest inscription. But a breakthrough came when experts looked through a microscope and found dots known as puncts, which were used in medieval manuscripts to denote abbreviation. The eventual translation of this largest ring is now understood to read "this is the community's property."
"This is another really interesting and significant development in our understanding of the Galloway Hoard," Martin Goldberg of the museum said in a statement. "The idea that the wealth this hoard represents would be communally held is fascinating."
Maldonado and Parsons believe that the 'community' nature of the property could have referred to the entire treasure or just the silver in the leather bag. They also think that whatever community is being referenced here was likely a monastic one, given the presence of clear ecclesiastical objects within the treasure. "One thing is clear," they wrote. "This does not look like a single person's belongings."
Despite this breakthrough in translation, plenty of mysteries still remain. If this was truly a communal burial, how many people knew about it, why did they bury it, and why didn't anyone ever come back to dig it up? Hopefully, we will one day learn those answers, but for now, they lie with Egbert, Tila, and Berwulf.