A Skeleton Discovered by Archaeologists with an Amulet That Could Change the Course of Early Christian History

On just 1.37 inches of silver foil, a 1,800-year-old silver amulet with 18 lines of Latin text was found buried in a tomb near Frankfurt, Germany, still next to the wearer's chin. The known history of Christianity in the Roman Empire may be altered by that alone.

The first examples of Christianity discovered north of the Alps are the amulet and the inscription.

All other credible evidence of Christian existence in the northern Alpine region of the Roman Empire dates from the fourth century A.D. and is at least fifty years younger. However, the amulet, now known as "The Frankfurt Inscription," was created to help translate the text and was discovered in a burial that dates from between 230 and 270 A.D.

According to a translated statement from Frankfurt's head of culture and science, Ina Hartwig, this remarkable discovery has implications for several fields of study and will keep scientists busy for a very long time. This is true for anthropology, philology, religious studies, and archaeology. This important discovery in Frankfurt is really something out of the usual.

In 2018, the amulet was discovered at an archeological site west of Frankfurt in what was formerly the Roman city of Nida. When the location was excavated, workers discovered a whole Roman cemetery. In the site known as "grave 134," a little silver amulet called a phylactery was found just beneath the corpse of the tenant. He was probably buried with it and wore it around his neck.

After the discovery, the silver amulet was repaired by the Archaeological Museum Frankfurt, which contained a thin silver foil with an inscription visible by X-rays and microscopic inspections in 2019. It was too fragile to roll out the wafer-thin silver foil.

A breakthrough was made at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology in Mainz in May 2024 while utilizing a cutting-edge computer tomograph. In a statement, Ivan Calandra, the center's laboratory manager for imaging processes, stated that the study was difficult because, although the silver sheet was rolled, it was also crumpled and compacted after some 1,800 years. They created a 3D model by scanning it with the CT at a very high quality.