Nebra Sky Disc
Two men with metal detectors dug the Nebra Sky Disc out of the Mittelberg in 1999, and Swiss police recovered it from a hotel sting in Basel on February 23, 2002. UNESCO listed it in 2013. In 2020, Rupert Gebhard and Rüdiger Krause argued that it is Iron Age, about 1,000 years younger than the 1600 BC burial date the Halle museum gives, and a team that included state archaeologist Harald Meller published a rebuttal the same year.
Field Guide Entry
The find
Two men with metal detectors dug a bronze hoard out of the Mittelberg, a hill near Nebra, in summer 1999. Stuttgarter Zeitung gives the date as Sunday, July 4, at about 3pm, from a finder's account in court. Volksstimme says June. The hoard held the disc, two swords with gold-banded hilts, two axes, a chisel, and two arm spirals. The museum records that the disc was damaged during the recovery and in improper cleaning: gold sheet was torn off, the surface was scratched, and a hammer blow struck the rim.
The finders sold everything to a dealer from the Rhineland, for 31,000 marks according to Volksstimme and 32,000 according to Freitag.
The Basel sting
On February 23, 2002, Saxony-Anhalt's state archaeologist, Harald Meller, went to the Hilton in Basel disguised as a buyer. The meeting began in the foyer, and the two sellers led him down to the cellar bar. He had planned to call the police from the cellar toilet, where his phone had no signal, until it unexpectedly picked one up. His text message went out, and police who had been watching from the background arrested the sellers.
In September 2003, Naumburg courts convicted the two dealers of receiving stolen goods and sentenced them to 12 and 6 months, suspended.
What the disc shows
The Halle museum describes five phases. The bronze disc first carried 32 stars, a full moon, and a crescent, with one cluster, the Pleiades, set apart. Gold arcs were later laid along two edges and covered two stars. A third, ribbed arc, the one read as a ship, differs in color and decoration from the rest and is squeezed between stars, which leads the museum to conclude that it does not fit the original picture.
The museum reads the side arcs as the sun's path between spring and autumn. With the disc held north, the upper end of the western arc points to the Brocken, behind which the sun sets on June 21. The museum reads the ship as traveling between the horizons, perhaps carrying the sun or the moon.
The listing
UNESCO added the disc to its Memory of the World Register in June 2013; the advisory committee took the decision on June 18 in Gwangju, South Korea. The register entry calls the disc the oldest concrete depiction of cosmic phenomena worldwide.
The dating dispute
The disc has no direct parallels and cannot be dated itself, so its age rests on what was found with it. The museum dates the burial to about 1600 BC. Radiocarbon dating of birch bark left in the sword hilts gives the 16th to 15th century BC, and the axes are typical of the end of the Early Bronze Age.
On September 3, 2020, Rupert Gebhard and Rüdiger Krause published a paper in Archäologische Informationen arguing that the disc was not found with the swords and axes and is probably Iron Age (about 800 to 50 BC) rather than Early Bronze Age (about 2200 to 1600 BC). They made three arguments. First, the damage to the disc does not match the finders' description of how it lay in the ground. Second, the lead isotopes in the disc differ more than they do in hoards known to be one deposit, and four objects, the disc first among them, do not fit the rest. Third, the motifs resemble Celtic ones, such as the gold-inlaid crescent, full moon, and five stars on a 5th century BC sword from Munich-Allach. They did not dispute that the disc is a genuine prehistoric object.
Ernst Pernicka, Meller, and co-authors answered in November 2020 in Archaeologia Austriaca, with a paper titled "Why the Nebra Sky Disc Dates to the Early Bronze Age." They cite the radiocarbon dates from the sword hilt and soil analyses from the Mittelberg, where Pernicka found gold and copper concentrations he links to metal leaching from the disc. On the ship, Flemming Kaul of the National Museum of Denmark, who was not part of either study, regarded it as a Bronze Age motif, while Gebhard told the New York Times, "We have no pictures, indeed, with barges which are totally round."
When their paper appeared, Gebhard and Krause noted that the results of the excavation on the Mittelberg had still not been published in a scientific journal.
Visiting Information
The museum says the disc has been in its permanent exhibition since May 23, 2008. It has also traveled for special exhibitions, including the Pergamon Museum in Berlin in 2012, so a call to the museum at +49 345 5247-30 settles whether it is on view before a long trip.
The museum is open Tuesday through Friday from 9am to 5pm, and on Saturday, Sunday, and public holidays from 10am to 6pm. Monday is by prior arrangement for groups and tours. It closes on December 24 and December 31.
The find site is on the Mittelberg above the village of Kleinwangen, where the Arche Nebra visitor center stands at An der Steinklöbe 16 in Nebra. The center is open daily from 10am to 6pm from April through October. From November through March it is open Tuesday through Friday from 10am to 4pm, and on Saturday, Sunday, and public holidays from 10am to 5pm. It closes on December 24.
The observation tower on the Mittelberg is free and open year-round, with no ticket and no hours, and the Brocken and the Kyffhäuser can be seen from it. The official guided walk from the Arche Nebra to the find site is listed as about 1.9 miles (3 km) each way and takes about 3 hours.
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