suggested that one possible transcription, 'Qlwn', may have denoted a predecessor of the modern city and may somehow be related to a toponym Kolyvan, which has been discovered from later East Slavic chronicles. However, a number of modern historians have considered connecting any of al-Idrisi's placenames with modern Tallinn erroneous, unfounded, or speculative. Henry of Livonia, in his chronicle (ca. 1229), called the town with the name that is also known to have been used up to the 13th century by Scandinavians: Lindanisa (or Lyndanisse in Danish, Lindanäs in Swedish and Ledenets in Old East Slavic). The Icelandic Njal's saga—composed after 1270, but describing events between 960 and 1020—mentions an event that occurred somewhere in the area of Tallinn and calls the place Rafala (probably a derivation of Rävala, Revala, or some other variant of the Estonian name of the adjacent medieval Estonian county). Soon after the Danish conquest in 1219, the town became known in the Scandinavian and German languages as Reval (). Reval was in official use in Estonia until 1918. The name Tallinn(a) is Estonian. It has been widely considered a historical derivation of Taani-linna, meaning "Danish-castle" (), conceivably because the Danish invaders built the castle in place of the Estonian stronghold after the 1219 battle of Lyndanisse. The Finnic element -linna, like Germanic -burg and Slavic -grad /-gorod, originally meant "fortress", but has been used as a suffix in the formation of town names. In international use, the English and German-language as well as the Russian analog Revel () were all gradually replaced by the Estonian name after the country became independent in 1918. At first, both Estonian forms, Tallinna and Tallinn, were used. Tallinna in Estonian denotes also the genitive case of the name, as in Tallinna Sadam ('the Port of Tallinn'). History The first archaeological traces of a small hunter-fisherman community's presence in what is now Tallinn's city centre are about 5,000 years old. The comb ceramic pottery found on the site dates to about 3000 BCE and corded ware pottery around 2500 BCE. Around 1050 AD, a fortress was built in what is now central Tallinn, on the hill of Toompea. As an important port on a major trade route between Novgorod and western Europe, it became a target for the expansion of the Teutonic Knights and the Kingdom of Denmark during the period of Northern Crusades in the beginning of the 13th