Old map of the cosmos brought down to earth
Four centuries before the sack of Troy and nine before the dawn of written literature, an ingenious smith in what is now central Germany took a circle of bronze and turned it into an intricate map of the heavens.
That is the story of the Nebra sky disc, one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of the past few decades, and possibly the oldest systematic depiction of the stars and planets.
Yet this account has been challenged by two distinguished German professors, whose study suggests that the artefact is about a thousand years younger than previously thought. The paper has led to rancour, with one state archaeologist accusing the academics of acting out of revenge for a perceived slight.
The disc was illegally excavated in 1999 with a cache of Bronze Age swords, axes and ornaments by treasure hunters on a hill near the town of Nebra. They sold their haul on the black market for about NZ$25,700 , but the disc was recovered three years later by a police sting in Basel.
The disc is now the centrepiece of a purposebuilt museum in Nebra. Harald Meller, chief archae
ologist for the surrounding Saxony-Anhalt region, dated it to 1600BC.
However, Rupert Gebhard, director of Munich’s state archaeology collection, and Rudiger Krause, of Goethe University in Frankfurt, argue that it is much later than the Bronze Age paraphernalia found nearby, and was probably forged more than a millennium later under the influence of late Iron Age Celtic culture. Its metallic composition is also different, they say.
‘‘The iconography entirely matches the Celtic concep
tion of the world,’’ Gebhard said. ‘‘Identical pictures with this reference to the phases of the Moon and a lunar calendar system first begin to appear on swords from the 5th century BC.’’
Meller dismissed the study, and suggested that the archaeologists were motivated by an earlier argument over the authenticity of a hoard of golden artefacts, supposedly from the Bronze Age, found near the Bavarian village of Bernstorf. Gebhard replied that this was ‘‘nonsensical’’.