Novgorod Codex
The vast majority of text found in Novgorod were birch bark manuscripts; wax tablets were extremely uncommon.
The boards have round holes at one edge, through which wooden pegs were inserted, holding the tablets together as a four-page book.
[1] The language of the Novgorod Codex is a very regular (especially in the basic text) Church Slavonic, albeit with some 'mistakes' in the rendition of the yus letters betraying the author's East Slavic origin.
[2] The whole text was written by the same hand in a so-called 'monoyeric' orthography (Russian одноеровая система письма), i.e. instead of the two yer letters ь and ъ only ъ is used; before the codex discovery, the monoyeric system was considered to have been a late invention, with the dualyeric system being the original; the discovery proved that the reverse was the case.
The main difficulty with this task is the fact that the feeble traces of dozens of thousands of letters left by the stylus, often hardly discernible from the natural shading of the soft lime wood, have been superimposed on each other, producing an impenetrable labyrinth of lines (Zaliznyak speaks of a “hyper-palimpsest”).
[2] According to Zaliznyak, reading the concealed texts in the scratches is a unique challenge unlike anything attempted by any research team previously.
After several positions are discerned in that way, most letter combinations are discarded as senseless jumble, and possibly meaningful words are identified.
Finally, a problem Zaliznyak considers unsolvable is identifying spelling errors or Russisms in the Church Slavonic.
The text contains a highly unorthodox prayer, reading 'we pray to thee father Alexander, forgive us our sins by your will and give us salvation and the food of paradise, amen'.
This is followed by a highly original call following along the lines of 'leave your villages and homes', with dozens of phrases starting with 'leave your' and listing a great number of things to leave, all starting with a Slavic prefix 'raz-': разлады, раздоры, расклады, развозы, распловы, разлогы, разлеты, размеры, размолвы, and so on (troubles, strifes, positions, moving around, sailing, flying, sizes, disagreements, etc.).
A subsequent concealed text contains the following passage: 'The world is a town in which live the Armenians and the Africans and the Thracians and the Italians and the Spanish and the Greeks'.
“Spiritual Instruction from the Father and the Mother to the Son” continues onto increasingly more gloomy analysis of the state of the world, showing that the writer identifies with people excluded from the official church for believing unorthodox teachings.
The concealed texts contain a conversion prayer, which in first person singular and plural (I and we) denies idolatry and accepts Christianity, so it is likely Isaakiy himself converted pagan Slavs.
The Nikonian Chronicle contains a mention of a schismatic monk Andreyan jailed for disagreeing with the official church in 1004, during the timeframe the codex texts were written.
In this context, the strange title of a schismatic work written 500 years later by a Fyodor Kuritsyn, The Message of Laodicea, takes on a new light.
After the ‘official’ church had prevailed, the sect’s texts were no longer copied and most traces of the existence of this heresy were erased.
An especially symptomatic example of the scribe’s attitude to the ‘official’ church is the following excerpt from the “Spiritual Instruction from the Father and the Mother to the Son”: Work on the Novgorod Codex is continuing.
