Gold hat from Ezelsdorf / book
Coordinates: 49 ° 19 ′ 31 ″ N , 11 ° 21 ′ 53 ″ E
The gold hat from Ezelsdorf / Buch is a Bronze Age artefact made of thin gold sheet. It served as the outer decorative covering of a long-shafted headgear with a brim, which was presumably made of organic material and mechanically stabilized the thin sheet of gold on the outside.
classification
The copy from Ezelsdorf / Buch belongs to a group of meanwhile three well-known, conical gold hats from the Bronze Age, which were used in southern Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries ( Golden hat from Schifferstadt and sheet gold cone from Ezelsdorf / Buch) and in France ( Sheet gold cones from Avanton ) were found in a more or less good state of preservation. In addition, there is the fourth specimen, the Berlin gold hat , which appeared in the art trade in 1996 as a find without a place of discovery, but whose original place of discovery is also believed to be in southern Germany or Switzerland.
Today it is assumed that the gold hats served as religious insignia of gods or priests of a sun cult that was widespread in Central Europe in the late Bronze Age . This view is underpinned by the pictorial representation of an object interpreted as a cone hat on a stone slab from the grave of Kivik in Skåne, southern Sweden, in a clearly religious and cultic context.
After partial decoding of the ornament canon of the cone-shaped gold hats of the Schifferstadt type , the gold hats are today ascribed extensive calendar properties in addition to their representative cultic function. It is unclear whether they were actually used as a calendar or whether they merely represent the underlying astronomical knowledge.
The gold hat from Ezelsdorf / Buch was recovered as a deposit without any additional finds that would allow a more precise dating. On the basis of the ornament comparison with other, more precisely dated finds, the time of its manufacture is dated to the end of the Bronze Age , approx. 1000–900 BC. Dated.
description
The gold hat from Ezelsdorf / Buch is a 310 g sheet gold body with a long, slim shaft and a stepped and bulged foot, decorated with punch marks and ornamental wheels . The lower edge is beaded around a 1.8 cm wide ring made of flat bronze sheet. The original brim is missing.
After the second restoration in 1976, the total height of the cone is now 88.5 cm.
The hollow cone is ornamented with horizontal decorative and frame bands over the entire length. 21 different punch marks and 6 different ornamental wheels were used. The horizontal bands were systematically decorated with repeating, similar stamp patterns.
The visual separation of the individual ornamental bands was achieved by ribs and drifting beads. In the ornamental bands, there are mainly hump and circular motifs that have a circular inner hump and are framed with up to seven outer rings.
In addition, decorative ribbons with threefold coupled point humps (12 such point hump ribbons versus 20 ribbons with circular motifs ) often appear . A special feature is the unique appearance of a decorative ribbon consisting of eight-spoke wheels or eye-shaped or almond-shaped bumps. The tip of the cone is crowned by a ten-pointed, uncontoured star , the background of which is underlaid with point humps.
The illustration opposite shows an overview of the shape of the hat as well as the type and number of pattern marks used in the respective ornament zones .
The shaft merges into a wide, vertically ribbed band in the conical base, which is provided with similar motifs . A band of bronze sheet served as a stand ring , around which the rim of the gold sheet was flanged.
Another rod-shaped bronze fragment (32 mm long, 2.8 × 1.4 mm wide) was found, which was possibly movably arranged on the hat and whose function is interpreted differently in the specialist literature, namely as a possible pointer element or as a brim reinforcement.
Calendar function
According to Wilfried Menghin , the gold hats of the Schifferstadt type , to which the gold hat from Ezelsdorf / Buch belongs, show a systematic sequence in the number and type of ornaments used in the individual ribbons. Based on studies on the completely preserved Berlin gold hat , Menghin postulates an astronomical calendar function based on a lunisolar system for the ornaments of the gold hats . For the calendar function , which is not generally accepted, see Berliner Goldhut .
Site and history
The Ezelsdorfer gold hat appeared in the spring of 1953 as "sheet metal that hinders work" directly below the surface of the earth, at a depth of about 8 cm. The site is at the foot of the wooded, 576 m high Brentenberg on the boundary between the places Ezelsdorf and Buch near Neumarkt in the Upper Palatinate . The map published in the literature describes a geographical position at the foot of the Brentenberg at approx. 11 ° 21'59 east, 49 ° 19'38 north ( WGS84 ) as the exact location .
The golden hat was completely hacked up by the finder, a worker, and thrown aside. The fragmented sheet metal parts were later collected by the worker's wife for their shimmering gold color and presented to a dentist. A melting test showed that the sheet was made of solid gold . The finds were subsequently offered to the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg, which recognized the find as a counterpart to Schifferstadt's Golden Hat and bought it.
During a follow-up examination of the site by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum , further fragments of the find were discovered up to a depth of 80 cm. It turned out that the sheet gold cone had been buried in "pure sand" as a single piece with no accompanying findings just below the forest humus. This is of particular importance with regard to the planned deposit of the golden hat in the ground , presumably for cultic purposes, in comparison with the find conditions in the largely preserved find from Schifferstadt .
The location of the find in the ground could no longer be reconstructed, but it is assumed that the Ezelsdorf gold hat - analogous to the golden hat from Schifferstadt and estimated for the Berlin gold hat - could have been buried vertically in the ground.
Manufacturing
The gold hat from Ezelsdorf / Buch consists of a gold alloy with 88.3% Au , 11% Ag , 0.59% Cu and 0.086% Sn . It was made as a drive from one piece and without a seam.
If the gold weight of the hollow cone is transferred into the dimensions of a cuboid gold bar, taking into account the missing brim, the result is a gold lump about the size of a matchbox as the starting material. This gold blank was forged to an average wall thickness of 0.078 mm during the machining process.
Due to the tribological properties of the material , the material solidifies as the degree of deformation increases and then tends to crack. To avoid these cracks, a particularly uniform deformation was required during forging . In addition, the workpiece had to be annealed repeatedly to at least 750 ° C during the manufacturing process .
Due to the low melting temperature of the gold alloy (approx. 960 ° C), a very precise temperature control and isothermal heating of the component was necessary in order to prevent the surface from melting. For this process, the Bronze Age craftsman used a charcoal fire or an oven similar to the kilns for pottery , the temperature of which, however, could only be controlled within limits by the addition of oxygen with a bellows .
If you take into account the tribological peculiarities of the material used and the modest technical means, the production of an undecorated component from such thin gold sheet alone represents an enormous technical achievement.
As part of the further processing, the gold hat from Ezelsdorf / Buch was provided with radial ornamental bands. For this purpose, the hollow inner body was probably - similar to the golden hat from Schifferstadt - filled with a suitable goldsmith's putty based on tree resin and wax for the purpose of stabilization , and the thin gold sheet from the outside by repeatedly pressing a total of 21 different negative marks and rolling six different roll marks in structured in the present form.
Whereabouts
The Ezelsdorf gold hat is located in the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg and is a central part of the Bronze Age collection.
monument
In spring 2011, the communities Postbauer-Heng and Burgthann decided to erect a memorial near the site of the gold hat as a joint project. The monument was completed in 2012 and inaugurated in August 2012.
See also
- Gold hat - general description of the gold hats of the Schifferstadt type
- Berlin gold hat , approx. 1000 to 800 BC Chr.
- Golden hat from Schifferstadt , approx. 1400 to 1300 BC Chr.
- Nebra Sky Disc , c. 1700 to 2100 BC Chr.
literature
- Anja Grebe (Red.): Gold and the cult of the Bronze Age. Verlag des Germanisches Nationalmuseums, Nuremberg 2003, ISBN 3-926982-95-0 (exhibition catalog, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, May 22 - September 7, 2003).
- Wilfried Menghin: The Berlin gold hat and the golden calendars of the old European bronze age. In: Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica. Vol. 32, 2000, ISSN 0341-1184 , pp. 31-108.
- Wilfried Menghin , Peter Schauer: The sheet gold cone from Ezelsdorf. Cult devices of the late Bronze Age (= the prehistoric and early historical antiquities in the Germanic National Museum. H. 3). Theiß, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-8062-0390-3 .
- Peter Schauer : The gold sheet cones of the Bronze Age. A contribution to the cultural connection between Orient and Central Europe (= Roman-Germanic Central Museum. Monographs. Vol. 8). Habelt, Bonn 1986, ISBN 3-7749-2238-1 .
- Mark Schmidt: Of hats, cones and calendars or the dazzling light of the Orient. In: Ethnographic-Archaeological Journal. Vol. 43, 2002, ISSN 0012-7477 , pp. 499-541.
Individual evidence
- ^ Germanisches Nationalmuseum : Online object catalog Goldhut
- ↑ Goldkegelplatz Ezelsdorf-Buch. Tourism website of the Nürnberger Land region.
Web links
- Golden hats in the Archaeological Lexicon (Landscape Museum Obermain Kulmbach)