Quest: for the Magical Heritage of the West

no. 205, March 2021, pp. 17-21

Brightest Heaven of
Invention
Chris Wood

Quest: for the Magical Heritage of the West

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 Brightest Heaven of
Invention
Chris Wood

H ow old is the Nebra Sky Disc? That was the subject of a spat between
German academics that broke out in September 2020. It even made the
English-language news media.
Discovered by ‘nighthawks’ (unauthorised treasure-hunters) in July 1999 at a
recognised ancient site on the Mittelberg, above the river Unstrut, near Nebra
in Saxony-Anhalt, a hoard of bronze swords, axes, chisels, arm rings and the
disc eventually found its way to the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, after
an adventure which involved the State Archaeologist, Harald Meller, going
under-cover in a sting by the Swiss Police!
With a beginning such as that, the tale has not surprisingly attracted its share of
detractors. The disc’s provenance was an inevitable issue, given its uniqueness
(and its resemblance to a smiley face), but the crystal structure in the deep
green patina prove it is not a recent fake. The question raised in 2020, however,
was whether the disc was actually part of the same hoard as the other items,
and whether it was as old as the Bronze Age, with a claim that it fitted better
stylistically in the Iron Age. Whilst a hoard would not necessarily contain
items all made from metal mined in one area, this proved to be the case for the
copper of the disc and the rest of the hoard. Furthermore, analysis showed that
it came from a source that appears to have been depleted before the Iron Age.
The associated finds (especially the swords clearly deposited as new) and
material in them allow stylistic and radio-carbon dating to c.1600 BCE.
Whilst the challenges were easily answered, the episode did prove valuable for
the international community. The hoard was found in Germany and, not
surprisingly, most of what has been published about it has been in German.
The disc has mainly been exhibited in German-speaking countries. A major
international exhibition, ‘Der geschmiedete Himmel’ (‘The Forged Sky’),
premiering in Halle in 2004-5, toured museums in Copenhagen, Vienna,
Mannheim and Basel from 2005 to 2007.
A new exhibition, ‘The World of the Nebra Sky Disc – New Horizons’, is due
to open in June 2021 in Halle, jointly organised with the British Museum,
where it is planned to be repeated in 2022. Indeed, there has been a great deal
of interest beyond the German-speaking world, so it is a surprise that little of
the basic archaeological detail has been published in English. Those
specialising in German archaeology can be expected to be able to read German,
but generalists and comparative researchers not necessarily. I, for instance, can
read four languages, but my German is not up to academic papers. Indeed, my
interests are broad enough to suggest a need for a reading knowledge of some
40 languages for in-depth knowledge, so I have to rely on specialists making
the information available in a language I can read. However, the challenging
paper (Gebhard and Krause, 2020) on the Nebra Sky Disc that was ‘pre-
published’ in September 2020 – in a German ‘open-access’ academic journal,
Archäologische Informationen, in both German and English – prompted a
detailed rebuttal (Pernicka et al., 2020) in another open-access journal,
Archaeologica Austriaca, in English. The journals may appear obscure, but
they are at least available to the English-speaking world.

The Sky Disc

The Sky Disc is made of bronze, about 32cm in diameter and with a thickness
varying between 4.5mm at the centre and 1.5mm at the edges. The copper for
the bronze probably came from Austria. What has excited interest from the
beginning, however, is the gold symbols that are inlaid on one side. This gold
has been traced to Cornwall, showing the extent of trade at the time.
The symbols are universally interpreted as aspects of the sky: 32 dots across
the surface are seen as stars, with a group of seven generally seen as
representing the Pleiades. A large circular shape may be the Sun or the Full
Moon, and a crescent shape is surely the Moon in its first quarter. That was the
initial configuration, but two arcs were added to the edges at a later date,
covering two of the stars and requiring another to be moved. (One of these arcs
was lost before burial.) At a still later date, another arc was inserted, at what is
generally taken to be the bottom of the design, but this time carefully threaded
between the stars, possibly therefore A sketch of the Sky Disc as it might
compromising its desired shape. This have appeared prior to the edge
arc has lines scored along it and a being perforated.
border of fine lines reaching out from
its long edges, suggesting that it
represents a ship. At some point after
this, and before it was buried, holes
were pierced around the edge,
presumably to allow the disc to be
tied or sown to some kind of support.
The reverse of the disc is unadorned.

Interpretations
No-one knows what the Sky Disc
would have been used for. It was
clearly a prestige object, however.
Almost as certainly, the symbols in gold are more than just symbolic
representations. The large circular one has been argued to be more likely the
Full Moon than the Sun, as no rays are depicted. The position of the group of
stars, if seen as the Pleiades, relative to the lunar crescent seems to be correct
for times when the subsequent Full Moon will be eclipsed. The other scattered
dots have not been tied convincingly to actual stars, however. The two
opposing arcs are proposed to represent either the dawn and dusk glows, or the
arc through which the Sun rises and sets through the year, as seen from the
Mittelberg. The lower arc is proposed as a ship, probably that which carries the
Sun through the Sky, or possibly a rainbow.
The ship theory has been challenged for two reasons. Firstly, the arc has an
unlikely longitudinal section for a real vessel. On the other hand, the shape
may be down to the desire to avoid slighting the stars (although this is a fairly
weak argument). Secondly, the Mittelberg is far from the sea, so ships would
not be an obvious vehicle for the Sun. However, the river Instrut is a tributary
of the Saale (navigable by ships to Naumberg, just above the confluence), itself
a tributary of the Elbe, one of the most important rivers in Europe. Even the
Instrut, whilst not navigable by modern ships until the end of the 18th century,
would have been accessible to smaller vessels in the past.
Much has been made of the Sky Disc being the earliest astronomical
instrument known, acting as a calendar indicator, a means of reconciling solar
and lunar years, and lunar eclipse predictor. However, there is no sight line on
the disc, and the Mittelberg site itself has perfectly adequate horizon markers –
for instance, viewed from there, the Sun sets behind the Brocken at the
Summer Solstice. Farmers do not need priests to tell them when it is time to
plough, plant crops or harvest them. Furthermore, the astronomical knowledge
would have been needed to set up the arrangement of symbols on the disc
rather than be derived from it. The same is true of Neolithic monuments and
Medieval churches: they may embody significant alignments to Sun, Moon or
constellations, but they are not observatories. As with Solstice alignments to
the Sun’s rising or setting points in stone circles, so with church alignments to
the East, or sometimes Sunrise on the feast day of the saint of its dedication.
The monuments do not serve to predict these phenomena; the alignments
embed the monument in its environment, show its place as part of the sacred
Earth, Sky and Cosmos.
So, the Sky Disc probably required astronomical knowledge for its creation and
was specific to the Mittelberg. It may have been a cosmological marker,
emphasising the Mittelberg’s status as a sacred place, a manifestation of the
Cosmic Axis and a conduit of divine power. The Sky Disc may also have been
a means of demonstrating special knowledge in a more mundane power
relationship, but it would also have provided a powerful symbolic map of the
Cosmos, not dissimilar to shamanic drums from around the world. Pásztor and
Roslund (2007) emphasise this potential, indeed illustrating a modern Inuit
artwork1 that, at its centre, has a circular Sky scene remarkably similar to the
Nebra Sky Disc in its current, dark-green patinated state, which sets off the
gold of the Heavenly bodies. So, the symbolic map of the Heavens would
doubtless have been at least as important as the astronomical alignments, if not
more so.

Heavenly Mirror?
What no-one seems to consider is that the Sky Disc looks very different now
from how it would have appeared in 1600 BCE. The bronze has a thick patina
from its long burial in soil, which gives it a particular beauty, not least from the

1The artwork – Kenojuak Ashevak’s lithograph, Nunavut Qajanartuk (Our Beautiful Land), which has
been in the British Museum exhibition, ‘Arctic culture and climate’ – was created in 1992, before the Sky
Disc was found.
contrast between the Earthly green and the Heavenly gold, but when made it
would have shone. Depending on storage conditions, bronze can keep its shine
for some years, eventually taking on a brown patina, which becomes green
over time. Storage in damp, acidic conditions speeds up this process, but it can
be retarded by polishing. Indeed, we know from the excavation of ancient
graves that bronze was used to make mirrors (back to the beginning of the
Bronze Age, at least in central Asia), with one side highly polished, the other
decorated, producing shimmering effects when the patterns caught the light.
We do not know that the Nebra Sky Disc was polished. Perhaps the patination
of the bronze was even encouraged to allow the gold to stand out more, but
perhaps not. The ability to reflect light, indeed the presence of an object that
could be made to shine like the Sun or the Moon, would have been a powerful
ritual tool on a starry night on the Mittelberg.

Further Reading
The 2020 controversy
Rupert Gebhard and Rüdiger Krause (2020) ‘Critical comments on the find complex of the
so-called Nebra Sky Disk’, Archäologische Informationen 43:
https://dguf.de/fileadmin/AI/ArchInf-EV_Gebhard_Krause_e.pdf [accessed 31/1/2020].
Ernst Pernicka and twelve others (2020) ‘Why the Nebra Sky Disc Dates to the Early
Bronze Age. An Overview of the Interdisciplinary Results’, Archaeologica Austriaca 104
pp. 89-122: https://austriaca.at/0xc1aa5576_0x003bfe98.pdf [accessed 31/1/2020].
Earlier publications
Anja Ehser, Gregor Borg and Ernst Pernicka (2011) ‘Provenance of the gold of the Early
Bronze Age Nebra Sky Disk, central Germany: geochemical characterization of natural
Gold from Cornwall’, European Journal of Mineralogy 23 pp. 895-910.
Regine Maraszek, Brendan O’Connor (trans.) and David Tucker (trans.) (2009) The Nebra
Sky-disc, Kleine Reihe zu den Himmelswegen Band 2, Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte,
Halle.
Harald Meller (2004) ‘Star Search’, National Geographic, 205 (1, January) pp. 76-87.
Emília Pásztor and Curt Roslund (2007) ‘An interpretation of the Nebra Disc’, Antiquity
81 (312) pp. 267–278.
The promotional leaflet for the new joint Halle and British Museum exhibition can be
downloaded from: https://www.landesmuseum-
vorgeschichte.de/fileadmin/landesmuseum/alle/pdf/pdf_sonderausstellung_neue_horizonte
/nebra_sky_disc_new_horizons.pdf .