Taking five or six years to read 18 lines of Latin might seem slow. But the painstaking effort was worthwhile, because archeologists who deciphered a tiny note tucked inside a nearly 1800-year-old, 1.4-inch-tall amulet found that the passage shed new light on Christianity’s spread through Northern Europe.
Archeologists first discovered the amulet in a cemetery just outside Frankfurt during a 2017 to 2018 dig. Based on where they found the amulet in the grave, the archaeologists suspect that the man likely wore it around his neck.
Translating a Tiny Text
The amulet held a tiny scroll printed on a thin sheet of silver. Experts at the Leibniz Center for Archeology (Leiza) in Mainz painstakingly restored the scroll, scanned it with CT to view the words, then translated the text, which they shared in December 2024.
It was not an easy task. Because the thin sheet had been rolled up so long, it was creased and pressed, making it hard to see the writing. The scientists used CT scans to reconstruct it, then consulted with theologians and historians to interpret it.
