Quote:A woman may have signed her name on the world's oldest dated runestone, researchers in Norway have found, as they piece together the 2,000-year-old puzzle.

The inscription begins with the word “I” in runic script, followed by the name of the writer and a verb that indicates writing, before ending with the word “rune,” researchers wrote earlier this month in the journal Antiquity after studying a fragment of the stone found at a grave site in Hole, a small municipality in southern Norway to the east of the capital, Oslo.

Quote:Due to the damage and the weathering of the stone, she added that determining the exact text, including the name of the inscriber, is a “bit tricky,” but what especially caught the attention of the researchers is a feature in the name that indicates it ended with a “-u.”

In ancient runic script, she said that would indicate a possible woman’s name which, if confirmed, “would be the earliest known record of a female rune-inscriber.”