Subject: Ancient Tablets Found In Latvia. May 7, 2008.
Here is something right down my alley because I work
as a volunteer in a museum.
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THE DISCOVERY OF THE AINO TABLETS.
In 1922 on a Latvian farmstead south of the town of
Liepaja, a remarkable discovery was made by a local
farmhand. While plowing a field, Istvan Kogalniceanu
discovered several flat stones under the dirt and he
dug them up. What he discovered were 207 stone tablets
upon which were carved strange characters which he
could not read. The stones all appeared to have been
cut from one larger rock. Kogalniceanu carted the
tablets into a storage shed where they were eventually
forgotten. A few years later, the owner of the farm,
Stig Viksne, used the stones for a fence along the
perimeter of his property. Word of the tablets
eventually made it to Riga and the newly renamed
University of Latvia (formerly the Latvian Higher
Education School).
Around 1927 or 1928, the tablets were ****pped to the
university where undergraduates transcribed all of
the runes on the stones and began the arduous task at
deciphering them. The runes were similar in fa****on to
Norse runes, but it was determined that the language
that the tablets were written in was not related. Few
breakthroughs were made at deciphering the stones, and
Viksne eventually retrieved the tablets before the
stones were to be ****pped to Moscow.
Viksne's stones gained some interest locally and he
displayed them at a fair in neighboring Estonia in 1932
(conflicting accounts place the fair at Sauga or
Parnu-Jaagupi, both near the city of Parnu). Viksne
died in 1934 and the stones were soon forgotten,
sitting crated in the storage shed on his farm.
The farm changed hands and its new owner, Agris
Mickus, soon discovered the stones in the shed. Despite
the fact that Latvian farmers were enamored by Karlis
Ulmanis and his new totalitarian regime, Mickus decided
to immigrate to the United States. He became a U.S.
citizen in 1940 just weeks before Soviet occupation of
Latvia on June 17, 1940. Unfortunately Mickus had not
placed much im****tance on the crates of tablets in the
farm shed, and he did not have them ****pped to the U.S.
After World War II broke out, the tablets once again
served the purpose for a stone wall on the farm. Little
information has been found about what transpired on the
farmstead between 1940 and 1951, but Agris Mickus, who
had spoken of the stones to associates in the U.S.
decided to try to reclaim the tablets. He was
unsuccessful as the shed had been razed and the stones
were missing; however, Mickus was able to retrieve the
written transcriptions of the stones that had been made
in the late 20s at the University of Latvia.
http://www.aino.freeservers.com
Mickus, who had no training in translating languages,
had no more success than the students of the University
of Latvia had at deciphering the runes. Eventually he
forgot about the stones and the transcripts.
Agris Mickus died 1952 at age 73 on his farm in
central Missouri.
The same month, the stones in Latvia had been
recovered. Once again they had found themselves as part
of a stone wall separating fields on the farm. The
tablets were boxed up and ****pped to the U.S. and put
in storage with the rest of Mickus's belongings. Having
no children or heirs, the tablets sat in storage in
Columbia, Missouri for almost half a century.
Latvian farmstead near where the tablets were
unearthed
NEW DISCOVERY OF AN ANCIENT CULTURE IN EUROPE?
In August of 1998, the estate of Mickus was sold to
the general public, and a Thomas A. Lack purchased all
of the Latvian tablets. The transcript of the stone's
runes, however, had found their way into the possession
of a former neighbor of Mickus. Tracking down the
stones and the transcript was a student of archaeology,
Alan Trupnow, who had heard about the stones during an
expedition in Estonia. Trupnow attempted to view the
tablets that now were owned by Lack, but the young
college student was turned away. Trupnow bought the
transcript from Mickus's neighbor for twenty dollars
and a cheap watch.
Trupnow, although an avid language buff, was not
formally trained in translating or deciphering.
However, by early the next year, Trupnow had
singlehandedly deciphered the entire alphabet of runes
from the tablets, and had made considerable progress
translating the text.
Once the translation of the first two tablets was
complete in February of 2000, Trupnow once again sought
out Mr. Lack in hopes of examining the stones. For
after Trupnow saw what the tablets meant, he was
determined to prove that they were a hoax. Lack was not
to be found, nor the stones, and Trupnow failed to
relocate the man who had purchased the tablets.
Trupnow decided that if the tablets were authentic,
he had stumbled upon perhaps one of the greatest
archeological discoveries of Europe. If it was a hoax,
he was still intrigued at its purpose. Why would
anybody painstakingly carve 207 tablets in an unknown
alphabet and language describing a diverse mythology of
an up-to-now unheard of culture in northern Europe?
This site is in no way affiliated with the University
of Missouri.
The Aino site is owned and maintained by Kendal
Selle.
(JW That's all I know about this subject so far.
I will continue to check this information out.)
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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