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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- What’s now known as the Nebra Sky Disk was illegally excavated by looters in 1999, but they had no idea it was likely the most ancient known depiction of the cosmos.
- Vestiges of Norse, Egyptian, and Greek mythology are visible in the disk’s symbolism, which features a curve thought to be the solar barge of Ra and stars mirroring the Pleiades.
- There’s been some debate about the actual age of the disk and how it was made, but archaeologists believe it’s probably ancient and was created in phases.
In 1999, a pair of looters armed with a metal detector and a pickaxe crept towards Mittelberg Hill, near Nebra, Germany, seeking artifacts. They picked up a metal signal and started digging. When they uncovered a bronze disk inlaid with gold moons and stars, which age had given a greenish patina, they were unaware of the significance of the object they were looking at. But as experts would later surmise, it was possibly the oldest astronomical depiction on Earth.
Records and tools used to observe celestial bodies going all the way back to prehistory have been recovered. Visuals of the night sky appeared later. When the looters of Mittelberg Hill were caught in a 2002 sting, the disk and other objects from the same hoard—which included swords, spiral bracelets, a chisel, and flanged axes—fell into the hands of archaeologists, who dated them to around 1600 B.C.E. They were manufactured by the Únětice culture during the European Early Bronze Age. What stood out was the disk, thought to have been created a century or two earlier and modified over time.
Now known as the Nebra Sky Disk, the artifact is believed to be “the oldest precise depiction of the heavens in human history,” as archaeologist Harald Meller and his team said in a 2024 study published in Scientific Reports. It’s been analyzed and scrutinized many times over since its discovery and inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Meller found it had gone through several phases, which started with inlays of a gold moon and stars, followed by the addition of gold curves on either side (one of which was lost or removed) representing the solstices. Another curve on the bottom, with incised details, is thought to represent the magnificent solar barge of Ra from Egyptian culture and religion.
The stars that glitter on this disk aren’t random. They were probably intended to mirror the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters, daughters of Atlas, which could have served as a guide for planting and harvesting. Ancient Greek poet Hesiod advised farmers to begin harvesting when the Pleiades rose towards the end of summer, then to plow when they vanished into the horizon as the early blossoms of spring unfurled. Hesiod’s writings have led to an alternate interpretation of the bottom curve as a sickle. If it was meant to be the vessel in which the sun god Ra navigated the sky, brought to life by the barge of Khufu, that’s just as astronomically significant, since it symbolizes the transition from sunrise to sunset.
Bronze Age Europeans being inspired by Egypt isn’t as unlikely as it seems. Other images of the solar barque have been found in Northern Europe, a testament to the spread of iconic Egyptian ideas far beyond the banks of the Nile. There’s also been some debate about the same gold curve symbolizing mother goddesses Isis and Hathor, whose Norse incarnation is Freya. Some historians argue that it’s actually the golden ship Skíðblaðnir belonging to her twin brother Freyr, since both deities are associated with the sun. The disk may have been buried as a ritual offering to the gods. For thousands of years, it slept on a hill where stars and astronomical phenomena such as the rising and setting of the sun were especially visible.
It’s been debated whether the Nebra Sky Disk is actually as ancient as the looters claimed when they were captured. Skeptical about whether the disk was excavated from a Bronze Age site, archaeologists Rupert Gebhard and Rüdiger Krause suggested that the site actually dated to the Iron Age, which is 1,000 years younger, and that it was reburied to appear more valuable. The archaeologists were convinced that soil still clinging to the disk hadn’t come from the older site, and that Norse motifs of stars against the night sky were often seen during the late Iron Age. The State Museum for Prehistory in Germany refuted this claim as misleading, however.
Another researcher who thought the artifact wasn’t an ancient find argued that its patina was a modern effect created by acid, urine, and a blowtorch. But he’d never even held the disk in his hands. It was already known that the disk was fashioned from copper mined in the Alps and gold from Cornwall, England. To find out how it was actually made 3,600 years ago, Meller’s team collaborated with coppersmith Herbert Bauer for a recreation, and analysis of microstructures that guided the process showed it had likely been hammered from an existing piece of bronze, since it wouldn’t have been possible to cast liquid bronze into a disk that thin.
“The influence of the Únětice culture on Early Bronze Age metallurgy has been often discussed, with a particular focus on innovative casting techniques,” Meller said. “In this context, the Nebra Sky Disk documents that the Únětice culture craftsmen were excellent and innovative copper smiths with extensive experience in sophisticated bronze manufacturing.”
