Приноси към българската археология (Dec 2021)
Надписите от Надсентмиклош и тяхната културно-историческа характеристика
Abstract
The article aims to briefly overview the three types of inscriptions on the vessels of the Nagyszentmiklós treasure (NSM) as an uniform evidence of the existence of specific religious beliefs in the Middle Danube area in the 8th – 9th c. The emphasis of the study is on deciphering the runiform inscriptions, which the author considers as cryptography of sacred concepts and names of a Christian community with Gnostic conceptions and ideas. At the basis of their decoding he placed the decipherment of individual runiform graphemes and short texts in related written monuments from the Lower Danube area (Pliska, Murfatlar, etc.). The concepts and names decoded (Tetragrammatôn, Hexagrammatôn, Eôn, Five/the Fifth Eon, Hiueh, Eueh and others) allow establishing that they are cryptograms, attested in the ideas about the God of Gnostic Christians in the first centuries AD in the Middle East. This is evidenced by the use of specific Semitic and Greek graphemes in the three types of inscriptions from the treasure. Their use on vessels of precious metal in the Early Middle Ages is part of these beliefs and is evidence of their stability and transfer to the Middle and Lower Danube area by adherents of Christian Gnosis, most likely the doctrine of the socalled Valentinians. The link of repetitive or similar cryptograms and Greek-language texts to vessels of identical or similarshape and similar use allows those marked with them to be distributed in “sets” that met the cult and ritualneeds of different categories of believers in Christian Gnosis (“pneumatikoi”, “psyxikoi” and “hylics”). Finally, the author tries to highlight cultural and historical traces of the presence of a population with similar ideas in the region of the Middle Danube. Although fragmentary and hypothetical, they allow us assuming that the so-called Danube runic script was in fact a relic of the life of Gnostic-Christian sects in Central and Southeastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages.
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