ARCHAEOLOGISTS COME ON 11TH CENTURY GREEK SIGNET IN RUSSIAN NORTH

VELIKY NOVGOROD, August 13 (RIA Novosti's Andrei Letyagin) - Excavations in Veliky Novgorod, affluent medieval commercial center in Russia's northwest, have brought a Greek lead signet. The obverse represents St. Nicetas. A Greek text on the reverse is in a bad state of preservation, and it will take time to decode it. Though found in the 13th century layer, archaeologists date the signet to the 11th century. Medieval Russians used similar signets to seal documents of essential importance.

The latest finds on the Nikitino borough site include sixteen lead stamps, which experts know as "minor seals", says Gennady Dubrovin, excavation supervisor. Similar stamps represented saints or princely and grand-ducal coats-of-arms, or bore no symbols and pictures at all. As historians assume, medieval Russians used them to seal standard bunches of precious pelts, which served as big monetary units. Sixteen is an extraordinarily large number of seals for one particular site.

Nikitino excavations started three years ago, and are coming to a finish. Three urban estates of well-to-do Novgorod's households have been unearthed. The most noteworthy finds include eleven birch-bark manuscripts and close on twenty pendant seals for documents of importance.

This season brought a sizeable number of finds approximately seven centuries old. Among the most valuable is a small metal icon of Russian make. Its obverse represents St. Nicholas. The reverse is inscribed, "Nikola", in Cyrillic lettering. Another spectacular find is a lead document seal of Prince Mstislav son of Vladimir Monomachus, who reigned in Novgorod in the 12th century.