1,200-year-old ‘Viking graffiti’, the oldest drawing ever discovered in Iceland
Archaeologists in Iceland unearthed the country’s oldest known drawing: a scratched-out piece of “Viking graffiti” that looks like a partly drawn boat.
The researchers found the graffiti in the remains of a longhouse, said Bjarni F. Einarsson, an archaeologist and manager at his private company Fornleifafræðistofan (The Archaeological Office) and the project’s excavation leader. The scribble was engraved on a 1-inch-wide reddish clay stone and dates to shortly after A.D. 800, Live Science reported.
The ship isn’t complete, which is typical of Viking boat graffiti, Einarsson said. But the carving shows a sail with vertical lines, a rope from the sail to the front of the ship and a partly drawn hull. “It’s very common that the ships are not drawn [fully] in their hull,” Einarsson told Live Science.
Viking Age ship graffiti — both depictions of lone boats and carvings of fleets — are common in Scandinavia and are often found on fragments of bone, stone and timber, he noted.
The clay stone is just one of many artifacts discovered in the longhouse, which Einarsson uncovered in Stöð, east Iceland, in 2007 while doing an archaeological survey for a company that planned to lay down fiber-optic cable in the area.
Einarsson found the ship graffiti while excavating a wall from the middle settlement phase, when the hall was about 141 feet (43 m) long. There are a few contenders for the second-youngest carving in the country, but one shows an engraving of a walrus face from a Viking Age farm in western Iceland that dates to the 10th century, he said.