NEWS for the weekend of September 8-10, 2000
PSALM TEXTS MAY BE OLDEST WRITTEN ARTIFACTS IN RUSSIA
MOSCOW, Sep. 7, 00 (CWNews.com)
Archeologists said this
week they found 11th century tablets bearing copies of the
Psalms at a site in Novgorod in western Russia and they be
the oldest written artifacts ever found in the country, The
Moscow Times newspaper said on Wednesday.
The wax tablets with Psalms 75, 76, and 67 on them were
found this summer and were dated to the first quarter of
the 11th century. A copy of the Gospels dated to 1056 was
the previous oldest surviving Russian book.
The tablets, which also contained the text of what appeared
to be a sermon, suggest that Christianity spread through
Russia more quickly than has been thought. The date of the
tablets would place them just a few decades after
Christianity was first adopted in Kiev far to the south,
the report said.
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