Gothic Runic Spearhead from Kovel image - 457 AD: Last Years of the Western Empire mod for Mount & Blade: Warband

Everyone knows the Vikings and their runes:, but few people knows that germanic tribes used them long before the Early Middle Ages. This is the spearhead from Kovel (Ukraine), mainly linked to the Goths and the Chernyakhov culture found in a farmer fields at the beginning of the last century and broadly dated towards the end of the 3th century and most of the 4th century: sadly it is impossible to make a more accurate radiocarbon datation of the spears as they have been stolen by Nazis during the WWII (and if you look at the spears you can also guess why!) and are currently lost.

These spears are incredible on many points of view, as they show a strong sarmatian influence on the decorations such as the presence of the tamgas, a (plausibly) heraldic sarmatian symbol. It is not a strange feature if we think the Goths migrated during the 3th century on the region of the Black Coast, displacing and absorbing many sarmatian tribes and breaking the power of the Alans on the steppes.

The spear carries a runic inscription in gothic language, an eastern germanic language now obviously gone extinct. Henning transliterated the inscription as "tilarids" (TᛁᛚᚨᚱᛁDᛊ); this reading has been accepted by most scholars. Tilarids would have then been either the owner of the spear or the name of the weapon itself that was interpreted as "thither rider". A very similar other case to the speahead of Kovel is the Spearhead of Dahmsdorf-Müncheberg, which also carries a gothic runic inscription on it.

For the few that will be left appalled by the presence of a swastika on the spears, we want to underline the fact that this is in no way linked to any hate group or contemporary political ideology but is, instead, a largely used decoration among Germans and Romans through all Antiquity.