Novgorod Codex

• 1. Introduction

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  The Novgorod Codex arrived on the 13th of July 2000 not in a library or a monastery, but buried in the soil of Veliky Novgorod, Russia. Three small wooden tablets, each roughly the size of a paperback book, sat in a stratum of earth beneath a medieval walkway. On their surfaces: wax. And in that wax, psalms. But underneath those psalms lay something far stranger. Decades of texts, written and then deliberately wiped away, had pressed their shapes into the soft lime wood beneath the wax. Tens of thousands of ghost letters, layered on top of each other, waiting to be read by a method no research team had ever tried before. The codex is the oldest-known book of the Kievan Rus'. Its wax holds a prayer so unorthodox it gives its author powers usually reserved to God alone. And its hidden scratches may contain the earliest surviving record of a forgotten heretical movement that the mainstream church spent centuries erasing.

• 2. Discovery at the Trinity Dig

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  Artemiy Artsikhovsky started the Novgorod Archaeological Expedition in 1932, and excavations of the medieval city have continued without interruption ever since. Since the early 1970s, the dig has concentrated on the Troitza area, the ancient Ludin part of town, covering nearly 6,000 square meters. That ground held affluent mansions and a large communal building that served as both a courthouse and a city treasury. Nearly everything written that comes out of Novgorod is birch bark. Wax tablets are extremely uncommon. When professor Valentin Yanin's team found three wooden wax tablets on that July day, it was an unusual find by any measure. The tablets measure 19 by 15 by 1 centimeters, with wax-filled indentations of 15 by 11.5 centimeters. Two tablets have one wax layer and one blank wooden side; the third has wax on both faces. Round holes at one edge allowed wooden pegs to bind all three tablets together as a four-page book. The tablets lay 50 centimeters away and 30 centimeters below a walkway that dendrochronology dated to the year 1036. Strata in Novgorod accumulate at roughly 1 centimeter per year, placing the tablets in the ground around 1015-1020. Radiocarbon dating of the wax at Uppsala University in Sweden gave a range of 760-1030 with 95.4% certainty. Because the text on the tablets is explicitly Christian, dates before the Christianization of the Kievan Rus' in 988 are ruled out, putting the reliable window at 42 years: 988 to 1030.

• 3. The Basic Text and Its Language

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  Psalms 75 and 76, along with a small fragment of Psalm 67, fill the wax of the tablets as they can be read today. This visible layer is called the basic text, and it reads as clearly as any document on parchment. The psalter translation follows a somewhat different tradition than other Old Church Slavonic translations of the Psalms, particularly compared to the Psalterium Sinaiticum. The language throughout the codex is Old Church Slavonic, notably regular in the basic text, but with some errors in the rendering of the yus letters. Those errors point to the author's East Slavic origin. Every word across the entire codex was written by a single person, and that person used what scholars call a monoyeric orthography: instead of two yer letters, the letters ь and ъ, only ъ appears. Before the codex's discovery, scholars believed the dual-yer system came first and the single-yer system was a later development. The codex proved that belief was backwards. On the question of age, it predates the Ostromir Gospels, which had been considered the earliest precisely-dated book of the Kievan Rus'.

• 4. The Hyper-Palimpsest Problem

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  Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak, an expert on the medieval Novgorod dialect, took on the task of reading what the wax concealed. Separating the wax from the wood for preservation turned out to be the easy part. The usual method for preserving wood would have destroyed the wax, so researchers separated the two materials and preserved each one independently. Once the wax was removed, the newly exposed wood was found to be covered in scratches left by a stylus cutting through the thin wax layer to the wood below. It took the research team several weeks to realize that some of those scratches formed letters. Zaliznyak called what he found a "hyper-palimpsest". The traces of tens of thousands of letters, pressed by the stylus over decades, are superimposed on each other across the soft lime wood. Natural grain and scratch marks blur together. Deciphering a single concealed text from one page can take weeks. Zaliznyak did not call his work reading. He called it reconstruction. His approach was not to ask what was written on a given line, but to ask whether a specific phrase or word was possible somewhere within a given sector of the surface. He worked letter by letter, starting from an arbitrary position near the top of a tablet, identifying letters in a spot, moving sideways, identifying the next cluster, and so on. Once a chain of letters grew long enough to suggest a word or sentence, false leads branched off and had to be followed and eliminated, sometimes over the course of several days or weeks. Many texts were written multiple times by the same hand, each repetition slightly shifted because the earlier copy had been erased. That repetition, while adding complexity, made identifying false chains somewhat easier. The process resists peer review. Linguist Izabel Vallotton of Geneva worked with Zaliznyak on portions of the reconstruction, independently matching his chains in some segments, but the verified matches ran only 20-30 characters long.

• 5. Alexander, Isaakiy, and the Hidden Faith

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  One of the first concealed texts Zaliznyak reconstructed carries an introduction written in first person by someone who names himself "Alexander, the Areopagite of Thracia, of Laodicean origins." The text contains a prayer addressed not to God but to Alexander himself: "we pray to thee father Alexander, forgive us our sins by your will and give us salvation and the food of paradise, amen." The author then delivers prophecies and calls on followers to "leave your villages and homes" and walk the Earth spreading his message. The call to departure is built from dozens of phrases, each beginning with "leave your" and listing things whose names all start with the Slavic prefix raz-: разлады, раздоры, расклады, and so on, meaning troubles, strifes, positions, moving around, sailing, flying, sizes, and disagreements. Zaliznyak believed this pattern was composed originally in Old Church Slavonic rather than translated, because a translation from another language would not fall so neatly into Slavic roots. A separate text contains the line: "The world is a town in which live the Armenians and the Africans and the Thracians and the Italians and the Spanish and the Greeks." Another text provides the most concrete identification in the codex. Written in the margins, it reads: "In 6507 i.e. 999 CE I, monk Isaakiy, was posted as a priest in Suzdal, at the church of St. Alexander the Armenian." The year 6507 reappears several times elsewhere on the tablets. Zaliznyak assembled these fragments into a coherent theory: the scribe was the monk Isaakiy, a follower of the self-proclaimed prophet Alexander, an Armenian who taught from Thracia. The "church of St. Alexander" referred not to a building but to a doctrine. As there were no monasteries in the Rus' at the time, Isaakiy was likely educated elsewhere and was probably a witness to the Christianization of the Rus' in 988. A conversion prayer in the first person, denying idolatry and accepting Christianity, suggests Isaakiy was converting pagan Slavs in the still-largely-pagan Rus' of the early 11th century.

• 6. Bogomils and the Word Laodicea

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  The teachings of Alexander the Armenian, as Zaliznyak read them, bear the marks of an early form of Bogomilism: a dualistic heresy that took root in the Balkans and spread in various forms across medieval Christian Europe. The Nikonian Chronicle records a schismatic monk named Andreyan jailed in 1004 for disagreeing with the official church, placing him squarely within the timeframe the codex was written. Church historian Evgeny Golubinsky identified Andreyan as a Bogomil. The tablets were found near a courthouse, which sits within the same communal building where Andreyan might have been held. The concealed texts include a tetralogy Zaliznyak titled "From Paganism to Christ," comprising four works: "Moses' Law," "The Unstrengthening and the Unpeacing," "Archangel Gabriel," and "Jesus Christ's Law." Other texts include a previously-unattested Old Church Slavonic translation of John Chrysostom's treatise "On virginity," as well as the beginning of the Apocalypse of John and dozens of psalms, each written multiple times. Several text fragments refer explicitly to Laodicea without describing any events there. Zaliznyak concluded that Laodicea functioned as a code word among the Bogomils, a way of signaling group membership without being legible to outsiders. That reading gives new weight to a schismatic work composed five centuries later by Fyodor Kuritsyn: its title is "The Message of Laodicea."

• 7. A Voice Against Exclusion

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  The "Spiritual Instruction from the Father and the Mother to the Son" contains a passage repeated with deliberate variation, building a litany that reads as a direct indictment of church authority. Each line follows the same structure: "The world is a town in which... are excluded from the church." Those excluded include heretics, unwise people, and disobedient people, but also the blameless, the innocent, the inflexible, people of pure faith, and people worthy of praise or veneration. The final line reads: "The world is a town in which people not forsaking the true faith in Christ are excluded from the church." The writer did not position himself as an opponent of Christianity. He positioned himself as Christianity's truest defender, shut out by the institution claiming to represent it. The great number of previously-unknown texts throughout the codex, Zaliznyak argued, survives precisely because the scribe belonged to a heretical community whose writings were not copied after the mainstream church prevailed. Most traces of that community were erased. The wax tablets, because each text was wiped away rather than preserved, ended up preserving those traces in the wood below, in a form no persecutor would have thought to destroy.