Or well, instrument – you couldn’t look at the stars with it, but there is really no doubt that various celestial bodies are depicted on the 12-inch disk.
‘The Nebra disk is the earliest representation of heaven on earth’, says Luc Amkreutz, curator of prehistory at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. ‘I’ve seen it ten times now, but I still get goosebumps every time I see it. It’s really super cool.’
The sea green colored bronze Nebra disc is between 3600 and 3750 years old. Little imagination is needed to recognize the sun, moon and stars in the golden circle, sickle and dots. The striking group of seven ‘stars’ probably represents the Seven Stars, a well-known star cluster that is especially visible in winter.
Amateur Archaeologists
The disc, along with bronze swords and axes, was excavated in 1999 by amateur archaeologists Henry Westphal and Mario Renner on the Mittelberg, a hill near the village of Nebra, about 60 kilometers west of Leipzig, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. . It changed hands several times on the black market, before the police seized it in an undercover operation in 2002.
The arcs on the edges were applied to the disc at a later stage; the gold also has a slightly different composition. Exactly what the lower arc represents is not known (according to Amkreutz it could symbolize the solar boat that transports the sun through the day and night world), but the two arcs on the left and right edges form an angle of 82 degrees, giving exactly the difference between the northernmost and southernmost rising and setting points of the sun. The disc thus forms a kind of graphic representation of the seasons.
Although the dating (and even the authenticity) of the Nebra disk was initially questioned, it is now established that it was ceremonially buried along with other precious objects between 1600 and 1560 BC. The disc was probably many decades old at the time.
Holy Grail
‘The origin of the special metals – copper from the Eastern Alps, gold and tin from Cornwall and Romania – shows how large the networks were at the time, not only for raw materials and objects, but also for people and knowledge,’ says Amkreutz.
Prehistoric structures such as Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, which are also oriented to the starry sky, are older, but the Nebra disk is the oldest known ‘hand-held’ object of astronomical significance. Since 2013, it has been on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Heritage List. Amkreutz: ‘Archaeologically speaking, he is a kind of holy grail.’
Until mid-July, the Nebra Disc was temporarily on display in the British Museum in London. Before returning to his ‘home base’ in the Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte in Halle, Germany, he will be the showpiece of the exhibition until September 18 The Nebra Disc – The Discovery of Heaven in the Drenthe Museum.