Birch bark letter no. 292

The birch bark letter given the document number 292 is the oldest known document in any Finnic language. The document is dated to the beginning of the 13th century. It was found in 1957 by a Soviet expedition led by Artemiy Artsikhovsky in the Nerevsky excavation on the left coast side of Novgorod. It is currently located in Novgorod City Museum.

The language used in the document is thought to be an archaic form of Livvi-Karelian, the language spoken in Olonets Karelia, although the exact form is difficult to determine as Finnic dialects were only developing during that period.

The text is written in Cyrillic in the Karelian dialect of the archaic Finnish or Finnic language. A transcription of the text is as follows:

The text, as transliterated to the Latin alphabet by Yuri Yeliseyev in 1959 and interpreted in modern Finnish:

jumolanuoli ï nimizi
nouli se han oli omo bou
jumola soud'ni iohovi

Jumalannuoli, kymmenen [on] nimesi
Tämä nuoli on Jumalan oma
Tuomion-Jumala johtaa.

In English, this means roughly the following:

God's arrow, ten [is] your name
This arrow is God's own
The Doom-God leads.

Yeliseyev believes, that this is an invocation against lightning, as evidenced by "ten your names" construction. According to superstitious notions, knowledge of the name gives a human the magic power over an object or phenomenon.

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