Why would you assume the original had an exclamation mark? Indeed the whole symbol was not invented until the 1300s.

The article puts punctuation into its rendering of the original text. That confused me too.

	▲	tsimionescu 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'll note that it's not this decision is not coming from the newspaper article's writer, it's coming from any common transliteration of the manuscript that you'll find. But it's clearly a transliteration decision made because the people doing this assume it is an interjection, and they're using modern punctuation rules accordingly.