MOSCOW, Sep. 7, 00 (CWNews.com)

    Archeologists said this week they found 11th century tablets bearing copies of the Psalms at a site in Novgorod in western Russia and they be the oldest written artifacts ever found in the country, The Moscow Times newspaper said on Wednesday.

    The wax tablets with Psalms 75, 76, and 67 on them were found this summer and were dated to the first quarter of the 11th century. A copy of the Gospels dated to 1056 was the previous oldest surviving Russian book.

    The tablets, which also contained the text of what appeared to be a sermon, suggest that Christianity spread through Russia more quickly than has been thought. The date of the tablets would place them just a few decades after Christianity was first adopted in Kiev far to the south, the report said.

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