Hoards of spillings
The closely neighboring Horte von Spillings ( Swedish Spillingsskatten - Spillingsschatz) were discovered in the summer of 1999 in a field north of the hamlet of Spillings near Slite in the north of the Swedish island of Gotland . The site is in the area of Bogeviken , a natural harbor from the Viking Age ( site ) that is now partially silted up and about three kilometers wide .
Two of the hoards contained silver , the third bronze items . Together they represent the richest of the almost 800 hoards from the Viking Age that were found on Gotland in historical times . The hoards were on one line one behind the other. The distance between Hort 1 and Hort 2 was three meters, that between Hort 2 and Hort 3 was one and a half meters. All after-school care centers were originally located in a larger building, the remains of which were discovered during further investigations.
The treasure trove is exhibited in the Gotlands Fornsal Museum in Visby .
Hort 1
Hort 1 contained 3000 to 4000 strongly bonded Arabic silver coins ( dirhems or dirhams), numerous silver objects and fragmentary arm rings, so-called broken silver, which was weighed and used as a means of payment ( English ring money ). The hoard is poorly preserved due to chemical decomposition; it contains about 25 kg of silver.
Day care center 2
Hort 2 contained 342 bracelets and bracelets, 20 finger rings, 20 silver bars and over 14,000 silver coins from the 7th to 9th centuries, mostly Arabic coins. The most recent correspond to the year of issue 866/867, which means that the hoard can be dated to the end of the 9th century, after the end of the Sassanid period , from which some early coins come. Only the standard dirhem (درهم), which was used in the late Ottoman Empire (from 1299 AD) and weighed 3.207 g, became a fixed currency. Among the coin fragments, three come from the issue of around 820 to 825 in Haithabu . The hoard consists of over 40 kg of silver.
Nursery 3
While almost 800 silver hoards were discovered on Gotland, the bronze hoard was only the fifth on the island. In a wooden box with iron locks there were about 20 kg of bronze material in fragmentary or melted form. It was about needles, arm and neck rings and fittings, mostly of Baltic origin. This led to the assumption that the bronze was intended for further processing.
- Hoards of spillings
literature
- Ann-Marie Pettersson (Red.): Spillingsskatten. Gotland i vikingatidens världshandel. Länsmuseet på Gotland, Visby 2008, ISBN 978-91-88036-69-8 .
Web links
- The recently found hoards from Spillings farm on Gotland, Sweden. Archived from the original on August 20, 2006 ; Retrieved January 5, 2008 .
- Horte von Spillings - entry in the database "Fornsök" des Riksantikvarieämbetet (Swedish)