Bronze port of Frankleben

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The bronze town of Frankleben is one of the largest finds (42 kg) of bronze sickles . It was made in 1946 during the open- cast lignite mine on the (former) river Leiha, southwest of Frankleben near Merseburg . Frankleben is a district of Braunsbedra in the Saalekreis in Saxony-Anhalt .

At the transition from the middle to the late Bronze Age (1500–1250 BC) there was a change in burial customs. Most people switched from body cremation to cremation and burnt the corpses in urns . The reason for this was an almost Europe-wide change in religious ideas. Part of the material changes was the massive appearance of bronze button sickles, standardized in size and weight, as a phenomenon of the urn field culture .

The hoard consists of three depots, which are deposited in large ceramic vessels about one meter apart. An excavator destroyed the southernmost of the pots and tore up its contents (Depot I). The excavator operator still hid 17 sickles. A month later, the excavator hit metal again one meter north of Depot I (Depot II - received 93 sickles and two axes). He dug and discovered Depot III, which could be recovered in its entirety. The almost intact clay pot, closed with four stone slabs, contained 132 sickle blades and 14 bronze rag axes. In the round pot, the sickles lay tightly packed in a fan shape, with the tip facing outwards, forming a kind of vortex wheel . The axes lay above it. Since the first two hoards were of similar size and shape, it can be assumed that they were originally more than 300 sickles and more than 16 hatchets. While some of the bronzes remained in private ownership, the majority went to the State Museum in Halle . There, Wilhelm Albert von Brunn examined the find and published in the 1958th The examination of the 237 apparently identical, consistently well-preserved button sickles revealed 91 different types that came from 182 molds . Their distribution over the three depots speaks for a simultaneity of the resignation. 179 blades showed signs of use. Patterns and symbols in the form of ribs, lines and angles can be found on the sickles. These sickle marks placed in the mold were interpreted by WA von Brunn as symbols (pictograms) of the metal foundry. Christoph Sommerfeld, on the other hand, interprets the brands - based on the lunar month - as conceptual values ​​that represent numbers between zero and 30. The lunar month has 29.5 days. The shape of the sickles also points to the earth's satellite. Bronze sickles (along with ax , hatchet and hammer ) are an example of a symbiosis of tools and symbols, which communism recently took up.

literature

  • Marco Chiriaco: The hoard of Frankleben: A sickle mass hoard in the chronological and geographical context as well as its meaning , Munich 2009 ISBN 978-3-640-27115-3
  • Christoph Sommerfeld: Equipment money sickle. Studies on the monetary structure of Bronze Age hoards in northern Central Europe (Prehistoric Research Vol. 19), Berlin / New York 1994 ISBN 3-11-012928-0
  • Bettina Stoll-Tucker: crescent moon in the earth . In: State Office for Archeology Saxony-Anhalt, State Museum for Prehistory (Hrsg.): Beauty, power and death. 120 finds from 120 years of the State Museum for Prehistory in Halle. Accompanying volume for the special exhibition from December 11, 2001 to April 28, 2002 in the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle / Saale.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Your vertex is in the rear center of the device and the height is 8.3 cm. The curvature of the sickle is strong. The leaf is provided with three ribs. The conical, tall button sits on the base end of the ribs;

Coordinates: 51 ° 18 ′ 0 ″  N , 11 ° 55 ′ 48 ″  E