18 Aug From nonsense towards a meaningful story? The winding path of a Byzantine coin
Mysterious markings on an old coin take Ingela Nilsson on a journey into a storyworld full of unexpected turns.
Coins were never part of my undergraduate or even graduate studies. I was trained as a philologist and I guess coins were not considered relevant. It was Roger Scott who first taught me that coins tell stories, which – as he well knew – was an efficient way of catching my interest. A couple of years after Roger with great enthusiasm had showed me the coin collection at the British Museum, I met Cécile Morrisson, who could really tell the stories of coins, and since then I have been able to much better understand and appreciate the Uppsala University coin cabinet, directed by numismatist Ragnar Hedlund.
When the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, in collaboration with Koç University and GABAM (Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies), created the online exhibition Nordic Tales, Byzantine Paths, coins had a given place as important artefacts travelling between Byzantium and the North – both as money and as money turned into jewelry.
It was because of this exhibition and my involvement in it that Ivan Marić contacted me about a year ago, in July 2024. Ivan works with the coin collection at Dumbarton Oaks and we had met in early 2024, when I spent two months at DO as invited scholar. Ivan had now come across a histamenon of Michael VII “with runic graffiti on both sides.” The coin was not at DO, but had been bought by a private collector from New York for whom Ivan was curating a collection of ancient and Byzantine coins. He had then come to think of me and the Nordic Tales exhibition: could this coin perhaps be something to consider as an addition, in order to complement the famous graffiti in Hagia Sophia?
Runes on a Byzantine coin did sound perfect for the exhibition but since I don’t know runes, I needed help and began to contact suitable colleagues. This turned out to be the beginning of a long and winding path towards possible interpretations of what first looked like a straightforward indication of Byzantine-Nordic connections.
I started with Magnus Källström, whom I know from our work with Byzantium and the Viking World and who now works at the Swedish National Heritage Board.
Magnus was helpful as always, but in this case his reply was a little disappointing because he couldn’t really find any runes: “Actually, it’s only the three characters at the top of the photo on the left that resemble the Viking Age S rune, and the last character in the photo on the right that corresponds in form to an L rune. Since the rest of the characters are not runes, I think one should rather assume a corruption of a character from some other alphabet.”
This corresponded to what one of Ivan’s colleagues had already observed: that the characters might be a combination of several alphabets, including Greek and Church Slavonic. And the other colleagues I asked very much agreed. Two rune experts – Eric T. Lander and Henrik Williams – confirmed that these, with the exception of what “could formally be an S rune from the younger futhark”, were not runes. Since Greek and Slavonic had been suggested, I also asked my colleague Alexander I. Pereswetoff-Morath, expert in Old Slavonic. He too came back with a negative reply: no Cyrillic letters, at least nothing that could be “phonotactically possible”.
But I don’t give up easily and I’m lucky enough to have many knowledgeable colleagues, so I mentioned the writing to Neil Price at the Centre for the World in the Viking Age, VIWA. Neil took at quick look and then – as often – came up with a creative suggestion: could it be a case of “nonsense runes”? He also told me I had an expert within reach at my own faculty: Marco Bianchi.
Marco offered a swift reponse to my question, now finally with an interpretation of the graffito as “a script imitation”, with “elements of runes and Latin script, but also pure fantasy characters”. It turned out that Marco had studied a group of such runic inscriptions and named them krumelurinskrifter: “they look like runestones, but the inscription contains nothing that resembles known script”.
Marco also offered references to a book written by Martin Hannes Graf, terming the phenomenon parascript, and to a summery article available open access. In addition to this important information, Fedir Androschchuk – another colleague and friend from the Byzantium in the Viking World period, former director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv and currently a member of the VIWA team, too – told me that the graffiti reminded him of examples he had seen in different part of Eastern Europe, sixteenth- to seventeenth-century ‘fake runes.’
With this, I could get back to Ivan with a summary of the information I had received: fake runes, possibly mixed with fake letters from other alphabets, and perhaps rather late. We agreed that the negative result – in the sense that we didn’t have a rune inscription that could actually mean something – was not necessarily disappointing. We might have to dismiss the idea of a Northener inscribing a Byzantine coin he had gained in Constantinople with runes proper, but there might still be some kind of Nordic connection in the resemblance of runes – some kind of mixture of ‘letters’ by someone who could not read or write in any alphabet? In either case, as Ivan put it, we were still dealing with “a fascinating story embedded in an object of material culture”. I thought it would make for a nice little blog essay here on our website. I expected the quest to be over and put ‘Write up blog piece on coin’ on my to-do list.
However, it turned out the story had not come to an end just yet. In March this year (2025) I went to a conference at the École Franҫaise in Rome, “Translation and Transmission of Arabo-Byzantine Texts”, and met, among others, our advisory board members André Binggeli and Maria Mavroudi. There were many fruitful discussions about cultural transfer and multilingualism, giving me ideas for seminars and workshops to come, but the best thing was to meet people I didn’t already know. For instance, I met Gerasimos Merianos, who works on alchemy – such a fascinating topic – and we started talking about coins as artifacts and the stories they can tell. I mentioned the coin with the fake runes (the blog post still being on my to-do list), and Gerasimos said something like: “The presence of the graffiti alone does not necessarily prove a magical-religious use, but it could suggest an apotropaic or talismanic function.”
And suddenly it dawned on me: the amulets and papyri I had seen, here and there, with magical functions and the use of various strange characters. Why had I not thought of this before? Gerasimos reminded me of the article by Henry Maguire titled “Magic and Money in the Early Middle Ages”, which examines many aspects linking magico-religious beliefs with coinage and contains rich iconographic material, and also sent me in the direction of magical objects at the Met.
The timing was perfect, because after the conference in Rome I went straight to Athens for a few meetings and events, and had the privilege of visiting the Benaki Museum together with Anastasia Drandaki. Anastasia – whom I had met at DO in early 2024, when I had also met Ivan – agreed with what Gerasimos had told me and showed me a number of objects in the Benaki collections with similar magico-religious letters and functions. Such objects really complicate the idea of ‘writing’ in ways that I hadn’t really thought about before: when do letters go from mere ‘signs’ or decorations to intelligable messages? And doesn’t writing sometimes have a kind of magical dimension, even when it simply states the name of an object’s owner?
In a later email discussion with Gerasimos, it turned out that he had discussed the coin with his numismatist friend Yiannis Stoyas, and their thoughts had turned in a direction similar to the one that my Swedish colleagues and I had been toying with a bit aimlessly – could we be dealing with Pseudo-Greek or Greek scribblings and accordingly imagine a slightly different scenario? “Perhaps a member of the Varangian Guard could have reproduced a form of ‘writing’ he had seen in Constantinople.” A speculation, of course, but one as good as any, given that we have no information but the coin itself.
Gerasimos also noted a curious detail: that there is another histamenon of Michael VII Doukas, at CoinArchives.com, labelled with the note “graffito in Greek and Arabic(?) on reverse edge”. In contrast to the description of ‘Ivan’s coin’ on the same site, which offers an imaginative little story involving a Varangian guard, there is no explanation of this graffito and the image is rather blurry. In light of the numerous Byzantine coins with graffiti on them, it is perhaps not that strange to have to of the same kind carrying curious ‘scripts.’ However, it does place our ‘runes’ in a context where coins are used for purposes that go beyond their monetary value, in combination with ‘letters’ used with no linguistic content, which is an interesting issue in itself.
This in turn made me think of the pseudo-Byzantine coins made in Scandinavia between the tenth and twelfth centuries, imitating Byzantine coins but with incorrect legends that make no sense. Such coins were obviously modeled on Byzantine coinage: the written message was lost in translation but another meaning was clearly maintained. When Rebecca Darley visited Uppsala in May this year, she reminded us that such imitations were also made in the East in the Ummayad period – much earlier than the Scandinavians discovery of Byzantine iconography.
I could go on, but I’m sure you’re wondering if there’s a point to this story? Well, there are several, but none of them is to offer an interpretation of the ‘runic graffito’ in question – I was never the right person to do that anyhow. But the little quest that I set out on, after having been asked by Ivan to see if the runes could be read, reminded me of a few important things. First, that coins indeed tell many more stories than we might think at first glance, as do the many grafitti and scribbling that have been passed down through history. Second, that ‘scripts’ and ‘texts’ are not always what they seem – sometimes they have a rather different story to tell than any actual content. Moreover, a message doesn’t necessarily exclude a little bit of magic. Third, and perhaps most importantly, that communication across disciplinary boundaries is not only crucial in order to find answers to tricky questions, but also one of the most rewarding aspects of being a scholar. The curiosity, engagement, and cheerfulness that I came across was absolutely stunning. So even if this perhaps took me nowhere as a philologist, it took me far as an academic and as a person.
With this, ‘Write up blog piece on coin’ is no longer on my to-do list, so I will end here with a heartfelt thanks to my wonderful colleagues and with an advice. When you cannot answer a question, ask a colleague, or ask many – it might take you on an unexpected path.
