Drive from Nebra

Disc discovery has become the largest archaeological sensation ^{[3] of the} first decade of the XXI century and has caused a lot of controversy in the scientific community. This artifact appeared on the black market of archaeological antiquities in 2001 . Since archaeological finds are state property under German law, the Swiss police detained disk distributors during a special operation in Basel . The mysterious item was transferred to the archaeological museum at the University of Halle , and antiquity hunters were sentenced to several months in prison.

The news of the discovery of a prehistoric heavenly disk was skeptically received by archaeologists, especially in Germany. At first, many took him for a fake. Regarding patina, Peter Schauer from the University of Regensburg said: “If you urinate on a piece of bronze and bury it for a couple of weeks, you will get exactly the same patina.” A recent micrograph of corrosive crystals confirmed the ancient age of the find, and now most scientists accept the disk as a genuine artifact .

In the course of the trial, the sellers of the disk testified that it was discovered in 1999 by a metal detector in the town of Nebra ( Saxony-Anhalt , 60 km west of Leipzig ). From the same burial place they extracted two bronze swords, two hatchets, a chisel, as well as fragments of spiral bracelets. During excavations in Nebra, archaeologists, indeed, discovered traces of the presence of bronze. It also turned out that the soil from the excavation site exactly corresponds to the one whose traces were found on the disk .

A study of bronze items put up for sale along with a disk made it possible to attribute them to the Unetitsk culture. A radiocarbon analysis of a piece of birch bark taken from one of the swords indicates the burial of objects in 1600-1560. BC. It should be borne in mind that before the burial, the heavenly disk was probably used by several generations of local residents. An early X-ray analysis of the disk showed that the copper that went into its production comes from Styria , and gold was mined in the Carpathians . A more recent study showed that the gold used for the first phase of disk evolution was mined from the Carnon River, Cornwall , England ^[4] . The tin, which is part of bronze, is also of Cornish origin ^[5] .

Objects were discovered in a forest that was inhabited in the Neolithic era, as evidenced by about a thousand discovered burials. The place of detection of objects was on the top of a 252-meter-high hill fenced in antiquity. A second study of the site led archaeologists to conclude that the site was arranged in such a way that every solstice the sun went down right behind Broken - the highest point of the Harz . This made it possible to associate the disk with such prehistoric "observatories" as Stonehenge and the nearby, but much more ancient Gozek circle .

If we accept the hypothesis that the disk was used to measure the angle between the points of sunrise and sunset during solstices, it should be recognized as the oldest portable device for this kind of measurement. The astronomical function of the disk is indicated by the addition from the right and left edges of arched plates made of gold of a different origin than the signs of the Sun, Moon and stars. The arcs describe an angle of 82 degrees, which corresponds to the angle between the position of the sun during the summer and winter solstices at the latitude of Nebra. When these plates were superimposed, two stars were hidden beneath them, and one star had to be moved to the side. Currently, the left plate is lost.

Some time later, another arcuate gold insert was attached to the bottom of the disk, the meaning of which is not clear. This image is interpreted as a solar boat (with numerous transverse scratches symbolizing oars), the Milky Way or a rainbow . In addition, by the time the disk was buried, 39–40 holes each with a diameter of about 3 mm were drilled around its circumference .

A disk from Nebra was at the center of several lawsuits after the state of Saxony-Anhalt registered it as a trademark . In 2003, state representatives won a lawsuit against the city of Querfurt , which used the image of the disk on their souvenirs. In 2006, a new trial began, this time after applying a disk-like pattern to the covers of books from the series produced by the publishing houses Piper and Heyne.

The court has to determine to what extent registration of such a significant work of art as a trademark is permissible. Representatives of the defendant indicate that the disc was published 3,500 years ago and therefore its image is in the public domain , while authorities attribute the first publication of the object to 2002 and insist that its images should be copyrighted for 25 years until 2027.

From October 2004 to February 2007 the drive from Nebra, along with the Trundholm cart and another 1,600 items of the Bronze Age , participated in the exhibition “Forged Skies”, which was exhibited in Halle , Copenhagen , Vienna , Mannheim and Basel . Although the disc is currently located in Galle, in June 2007, a multimedia center was opened in Nebra to attract tourists, dedicated to a unique archaeological find.

• “Brilliant geometry. Traces of Mysterious Ancestors ”( Eng. Genius and Geometry. Traces of Our Enigmatics Ancestors ) is a documentary filmed by Ronald Vaugan in 2010.

• Phaistos disc
• Drive from Magliano
• Gozek circle
• Stone of the sun
• Antikythera mechanism

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• BBC: Disc from Nebra - the oldest calendar?