Leg box from Heilbronn

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Top of the Heilbronn leg box (reconstruction by Alfred Schliz)

The Heilbronn leg box was a 5th century box with a sliding lid, the remains of which were found in an Alemannic women's grave in 1901 during an excavation on the Heilbronn Rosenberg by Alfred Schliz . The box probably had a wooden core that had already crumbled at the time of the excavation, and was clad on the outside with ornamentally decorated panels. The length of the individual fragments allows only the shoulder blade bones from either domestic cattle or red deer to be used as material.

The box was part of the prehistoric and early historical collection of the historical museum of the city of Heilbronn (inventory number 1451) and was later kept in the Alfred Schliz Museum founded in 1935, where it was probably destroyed during the air raid on Heilbronn in 1944.

A replica of the ivory box, which was made by A. Peter from Stuttgart at the instigation of the prehistorian Peter Goessler and which was created on the occasion of a small article on the leg box in Germania from October 1932, is now in the holdings of the Heilbronn Municipal Museum .

Find context

The women's grave was part of a row grave field named by Alfred Schliz Heilbronn I near an Alemannic settlement that had already been abandoned in Franconian times. The grave field itself is one of the oldest grave fields from Alemannic times. In the grave there was also a pair of five-button fibulae, the foot of which ends in an animal's head, and which enable the woman to be buried for the period between 450 and 500 times more precisely. The Germanic finds are among the oldest on the right side of the Neckar. The second notable find in the grave was a silver spoon with the late Roman inscription Posenna vivas , and Schliz also found the remains of a silver needle that has now been lost.

description

The fragments

A total of seven parts of the box were still preserved, but none of them from the wooden core. This involved a part of the lid (57 × 107 × 2 mm), a sheet of bronze (17 × 24 × 1 mm) that held a broken part of the lid, two ornamented strips as parts of the guide rail for the lid (12 × 116 × 3.5 mm or 12 × 70 × 3.5 mm), remains of a smooth leg plate (originally: 74 × 113 × 2 mm) and two irregular remains of plates, also decorated with ornaments, which came from the sides. The leg boards were each attached to the wooden core with the help of leg pins, whereby the drill holes paid no attention to the incised pattern.

Grinding marks on the side of the cover fitting proved the use as a sliding cover. The plate showed the Christogram XP and the symbols Alpha and Omega , framed by ornaments of concentric circles in several sizes ("eye circles"). The bronze plate used to repair the cover may, due to the fact that it was a sliding cover, not - as Schliz suspected - have been attached to the underside, but, according to Goessler, must have been on the top of the cover. Due to the fact that both the holes for fastening the leg plates on the wooden core and for attaching the bronze sheet to the back of the lid have the same diameter of 2 mm and were therefore probably made with the same drill, Goessler suspects that the manufacturer of the Repaired the box himself.

Further traces of a repair were a handle strip (12 by 57 mm, thickness 3.5 mm) with coarse incisions on one long side of the lid with the iron rivets attached to the lid, which were supposed to replace a lost, original strip.

The ornaments

The most striking decoration of the box is a Christ monogram, framed by five concentric circles on the sliding lid of the box. In addition, there are 13 small eye circles above and below the chrismon, 10 of them on the outermost edge of the circle, the remaining three connect the central ornament with the upper and lower edge of the sliding lid. In each corner there is another, larger eye circle, which in turn is surrounded by seven to nine bowl-shaped depressions. With the smaller eye circles, the outer circle has a radius of 2 mm, the inner one of 1 mm; the larger ones are 4 mm and 2 mm. The reconstruction of the lid ornament turned out to be easy due to the good state of preservation. The strips surrounding the sliding cover are also decorated with the larger eye circles.

interpretation

Alfred Schliz first interpreted the fragments as part of a diptych and the spoon as a liturgical device, as it would be used in the Eastern Church when giving communion, but denied that the owner was a Christian during her lifetime. Nevertheless, both objects were interpreted as the earliest references to Christianity in today's Württemberg, although it often remained open whether the owner or the creator of the objects was actually already of Christian faith and whether the finds were not rather looted or looted Traded goods from the areas on the left bank of the Rhine. Also Christhard Schrenk relativized the assignment to an origin of a potentially Christianized environment: "The Christianization of our space was formerly associated with two notable grave finds from Rosenberg (...)". Nevertheless, it is considered to be one of the "most famous finds of the early Middle Ages from Heilbronn".

The reconstruction as a writing tablet by Schliz did not prove to be durable for long - in his description of the historical Heilbronn collection, Schliz himself described the fragments as “part of a diptych or a flat box for liturgical purposes”. Later authors turned away from this assumption entirely: “Schliz considers it to be a diptych. But you can see that the parts come from a box. ”Presumably the material of the reconstruction (ivory) leads to the fact that the original material is also indicated as ivory up to the present day.

literature

  • Peter Goessler : The early Christian ossuary from Heilbronn. In: Germania . Vol. 16, 1932, pp. 294-299.
  • Alfred Schliz : The share of the Alemanni and Franks in the grave fields of the early Middle Ages in Neckargau. In: Heilbronn Historical Association. Report. Issue 7, 1900/1903, ISSN  0175-9825 , pp. 1-42, online version .

Web links

Commons : Beinkasten von Heilbronn  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Goessler (1932), p. 298.
  2. ^ A b Alfred Schliz : Guide through the collections of the historical museum in Heilbronn. In: Heilbronn Historical Association. Report. Issue 8, 1906, pp. 1–114, here p. 72.
  3. ↑ Goessler (1932), p. 294.
  4. ^ Peter Wanner: Wüstungen in Heilbronn and the surrounding area. Preliminary report on a research desideratum. In: Christhard Schrenk (Ed.): Heilbronnica. Contributions to the city's history (= sources and research on the history of the city of Heilbronn. Vol. 15). Volume 2. Heilbronn City Archives, Heilbronn 2003, ISBN 3-928990-85-3 , p. 13.
  5. ↑ Peter Goessler: The beginnings of Christianity in Württemberg. In: Leaves for Württemberg Church History. New series vol. 36, issue 3/4, September 1932, ISSN  0341-9479 , pp. 149–187, here p. 172.
  6. ↑ Goessler (1932), p. 294.
  7. ↑ Schliz (1900/1903), p. 22.
  8. ↑ Goessler (1932), p. 295.
  9. ↑ Goessler (1932), p. 297.
  10. ↑ Schliz (1900/1903), p. 22 f.
  11. ↑ Schliz (1900/1903), p. 27.
  12. ↑ Schliz (1900/1903), p. 28.
  13. ^ Helmut Schmolz , Hubert Weckbach: Heilbronn. History and life of a city . 2nd Edition. Konrad, Weißenhorn 1973, ISBN 3-87437-062-3 (No. 3 and 6 ivory boxes with Christian symbols from Heilbronn, around 500 ).
  14. ↑ Christhard Schrenk , Hubert Weckbach , Susanne Schlösser: From Helibrunna to Heilbronn. A city history (=  publications of the archive of the city of Heilbronn . Volume 36 ). Theiss, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-8062-1333-X , p. 10 ( Bone box from Rosenberg. Lid with Christogram, late 5th / early 6th century. The find is an indication of isolated early Christianity. ).
  15. ↑ City history Heilbronn ( Memento from September 18, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  16. ↑ Walther Veeck : The Alamannen in Württemberg (= Germanic monuments of the migration period. Vol. 1, ZDB -ID 1150746-9 ). Text tape. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 1931, p. 23.
  17. ↑ “The earlier dated leg box from Heilbronn (…) is composed (…) of large leg panels, each of which covers an entire box area. It is also about ivory, not strips of bone. ”Ilse Fingerlein: Small finds from the Middle Ages to modern times. In: Landesdenkmalamt Baden-Württemberg (Hrsg.): The city church of St. Dionysis in Esslingen a. N. Archeology and building history (= research and reports on the archeology of the Middle Ages in Baden-Württemberg. Vol. 13). Volume 1: Günter P. Fehring: The archaeological investigation and its results. Theiss, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-8062-1040-3 , pp. 333-374, here p. 345.

Coordinates: 49 ° 8 ′ 16 ″  N , 9 ° 12 ′ 48 ″  E