In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language.

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The symbols can be traced back to Futhark, the oldest known runic alphabet. Archaeologists remain baffled by a surprising, ...

Side view of the blade of an 1,800-year-old iron knife with Danish runes that seem to spell out the word "hirila.". Archaeologists in Denmark have discovered runic letters inscribed on a knife blade ...

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 ...

Perhaps no one has ever been as excited to see a comb as Danish archaeologist Søren Sindbæk. He and a team of archaeologists from Aarhus University recently unearthed one at a historic Viking town ...

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 ...