Frankfurt silver inscription

The amulet was discovered in 2018 during archaeological excavations at a cemetery near the former Roman town of Nida, located in the northwestern suburbs of Frankfurt am Main.

[3][4][5] The existence of a grave field near Heilmannstraße in Frankfurt's Praunheim district has been known since the 19th century, with a total of twelve burials excavated between 1893 and 2016.

The thin, fragile foil could not be unrolled physically, so it was scanned via computed tomography by the Leibniz Center for Archaeology [de] and Goethe University Frankfurt.

[10] The 3rd-century piece functioned as a magical protective amulet, meant to ward off demons and safeguard its wearer.

[9] According to the archaeologist Markus Scholz [de], what is unique about this inscription is that it exclusively features Christian content rather than polytheistic elements.

[15][18][9] It was only in the 5th century that amulets made of precious metal stopped commonly representing a variety of different faiths in parallel.

[9] The only comparable artifact from an area east of the Rhine comes from a child's grave at the Roman bath ruins of Badenweiler, and that inscription invoked both the Christian-Jewish God and a Germanic spring deity.

[15] For example, according to Scholz, it must now be examined whether the Latin version of Paul's letter to the Philippians is the oldest source for it to date.

[10][c] According to the church historian Wolfram Kinzig [de] from the University of Bonn, the inscription is among the earliest attestations of the New Testament in Roman Germania.