By CHE, licensed under CC BY 4.0
In the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh you will find the oldest Christian artefact in the country: the Chi-Rho. This symbol can be found on several ladles recovered from a stash of 22 kilos of exquisite silverware found by archaeologists in 1919 on Traprain Law, a hill about 23 miles east of Edinburgh. Other Christian themes depict biblical scenes of paradise and the adoration of the Magi. The Chi-Rho is the well-known sign of Constantine which he had painted on his soldiers’ shields. But what does the Chi-Rho mean, and how did it end up in Scotland? In AD 312 Constantine’s army was outnumbered by his rival Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in Italy. In his desperation Constantine began to pray earnestly to the God of the Christians for the first time, and then he and his soldiers saw the sign of the cross above the sun, bearing the inscription, Conquer by this. Lactantius, who later became a spiritual advisor to Emperor Constantine and a private tutor for his son, gives us more details about the Chi-Rho:
‘Constantine was directed in a dream to cause the heavenly sign to be delineated on the shields of his soldiers, and so to proceed to battle. He did as he had been commanded, and he marked on their shields the letter Χ, with a perpendicular line drawn through it and turned round thus at the top, being the cipher of Christ. Having this sign [ΧΡ – an abbreviation for Christ from the Greek], his troops stood to arms.’
Tyssil, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This then led to Constantine being victorious and he went on to become the Emperor. As an act of thanksgiving to God he had coins struck with this symbol and so the Chi-Rho went everywhere in the Roman Empire, including Scotland, ending up on Traprain Law in about AD 410.