Archaeologists in Denmark revealed Tuesday the discovery of a more than 2,000-year-old knife inscribed with the oldest known example of runic letters in the nation.
A team working for the Museum Odense found the tiny little iron knife inside a grave at a small cemetery in central Denmark, CBS reported. It’s believed the knife was left at the site around 150 A.D, and its engraved with one of the oldest known written languages throughout the Scandinavia region.
“The knife itself is not remarkable but on the blade there are five runes — which is extraordinary in itself — but the age of the runes is even more extraordinary because they actually are the oldest we have from Denmark,” archaeologist Jakob Bonde told AFP. “We don’t have any writing before this.”
But before you get excited, the word engraved on the knife is extremely, unadulteratedly, absurdly funny. It says “hirila,” which literally translates to “little sword.”
Could it be that this “little sword” was nothing more than a brand name, a term that over the centuries went on to become a generic term? (RELATED: The Most Incredible Biblical Discoveries Of 2023)
Evolving brand names to general terms is a prevalent human trait. British people call most vacuum cleaners “Hoovers,” even though it’s a brand name. We even call our Dysons “hoovers.”
Eminent Nordic philologist Grayson Quay (who totally knows what he’s talking about and isn’t just shooting from the hip here as my editor with zero of the aforementioned qualifications), said it would be “like if future archeologists thought our word for ‘shoe’ was ‘Nike.'” I have to agree with Quay’s idea because we have no way of disproving it, and neither do you.