Sigtuna box
11th century copper box from Sweden
The Sigtuna box is a copper box from Sigtuna, Sweden, which was engraved with a runic inscription in the early 11th century. The box not only tells of trading across the Baltic Sea, it is also engraved with an Old Norse poem in dróttkvætt, the lordly meter which was used when skalds praised lords and kings. The poem talks of thieves being devoured by ravens.
Discovery
The box was discovered in August 1911, when an upholsterer was digging at the bank of lake Mälaren. The finder reported it to have been filled with a heavy substance like coarse wet coffee-grounds, and which was probably made up of small pieces of metal. The substance was kept inside a cloth which quickly disintegrated as soon as he touched it. The content, which weighed about 2 kg (4.4 lb), was unfortunately thrown away, but the box was sent to the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities where the runic inscription was discovered.
Description and use
The box measures 10 cm (3.9 in) across on the outside and the space inside measures 9.6 cm (3.8 in) to 9.8 cm (3.9 in). The thickness of the metal is on average 2 mm (0.079 in). From top to bottom, it measures 7.8 cm (3.1 in).
“Sigtuna box” enters the record as 11th century copper box from Sweden. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sigtuna, 11th and century can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Sigtuna box” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Sigtuna, 11th and century provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7513188. Authority coordinates are 59.617, 17.723. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sigtuna box” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.