00:00I'm Martin Goldberg, I'm the curator at National Museums Scotland who's been working with the
00:06Galloway Hoard for the last 10 years. Today we are looking at the largest armoring from
00:13the Galloway Hoard and it's been the most intriguing because it had a long inscription
00:18on the inside of it that up until now couldn't be translated. But we've been working with
00:25runologists and we've come up with what we think is the best translation we can make.
00:32We've been working with one of the leading runologists, Dr David Parsons, and he of course
00:37could transliterate each one of these Anglo-Saxon runic characters. So we knew what it said
00:44but we didn't really know what it meant and the key to unlocking all of that was the realisation
00:51that the final letter in the inscription was telling us something different because it had
00:56two puncts either side, two points that separated it from the rest of the inscription. It wasn't
01:02clear at first, we could only see this under a microscope, but that then unlocked the rest of
01:08the inscription because the F rune stands for the name of that rune which means wealth or property
01:15and so when you separate that element out it meant that the five letters before it began
01:20to make more sense and can be translated as the community and so you have this is the community's
01:28wealth. And as a complete concept that makes a lot of sense particularly in how we've come to
01:34understand the hoard as something that is owned by multiple people, by a community. Well the other
01:41runic inscriptions that were in this portion of the hoard had much shorter inscriptions, they were
01:48almost like abbreviated name elements and so we think that's exactly what those were doing, they
01:53were signifying parts of the names of individual owners. But this fourth one being longer and not
02:00having a personal name but having a communal signifier to it, the community's wealth, this tells
02:08us something that's really quite important, something that we had previously thought was
02:13important about the hoard, that it seemed to have multiple owners, it wasn't just the wealth of one
02:19person, but this inscription really clinches that idea because it literally tells us this is the
02:26community's wealth. This was a group of material that had been brought together by multiple people
02:32probably over a long period of time but it had that sense of community behind it, it was the
02:40wealth of more than one person.
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