For this was a hoard indeed. Mining engineers have calculated that 1,700 tons of copper must have been extracted from these ancient mines. That is enough to make more than ten million axes – three for each man, woman and child who then lived in Great Britain.
Alternatively, look at it this way. The copper could have supplied enough bronze for three million saws. Enough for the pyramid builders, 2,000 miles (3,210 kilometres) away in Saqqara, ancient Egypt.
TECHNIQUES WITH BRONZE AND COPPER
Professor R.F. Tylecote of Durham University describes the process of pouring copper or bronze into moulds to make bronze tools and weapons. He begins with the basic problems of casting. First, when metals are heated in solid fuel furnaces they absorb gases from the fuel – wood, in the case of the Bronze Age. Of these gases, by far the most troublesome is water vapour, which dissolves in contact with the metal into copper oxide and hydrogen. The hydrogen enters the liquid metal and stays dissolved until the metal cools and begins to solidify, when it emerges as gas bubbles which spoil the casting.
This problem can be alleviated by giving the gas plenty of time to rise to the top of the molten metal – that is by cooling the liquid metal slowly. That is easier if you are making a large amount of alloyed metal at one time.
Another problem is shrinkage, which occurs as the metal cools and contracts, causing cracks and cavities in the casting. These cracks can be filled by pouring in more liquid metal from the feeder. In a thin section like a sword or a socketed axe, a washer was removed and the sides of the casting mould were moved slightly together as the metal cooled. The majority of Bronze Age castings were of this type. The density of the cast object can be increased, and cracks reduced, by hammering the metal after the casting – this was done in the case of flat copper axes, principally to harden their cutting edges.
The better the mould, the sharper the axe. By the early Bronze Age, stone moulds were used. There was little variation in this type of manufacture. Moulds were cut from blocks of stone, with cavities for two or more axes, the moulds being closed together with a flat removable washer or gasket between the two. That would be withdrawn as the metal started to cool. In the early Bronze Age, most of the stone for the moulds came from the Pennines, a mountain chain in the north of England.21
The whole experience resonates in my mind as I return to the hotel for a quick wash and brush-up, followed by a snifter at the bar. A fascinating picture of prehistoric Britain is coming to life in my mind: a society with a level of industrialisation and organisation that is astounding. This is not anything like how we tend to think of ancient Britain: perhaps we need to think again.
The copper ore is mined in Wales, the tin in Cornwall. The axes are made in north Wales from smelted metal, using local charcoal. Casting is done with hard limestone from the north of England. The large numbers of new bronze-workers eat locally farmed Welsh cattle and lamb; clothiers and shoemakers use the hides. All of these workers need bread and the best corn lands are in the dry, sunny east of England. Woods and forests there are cut down, using brand new Welsh axes. The grain is then transported by ships constructed from crude planks made from the swaying trees of eastern England – which are taller and thicker than wind-blown Welsh trees.
At the mine itself, the dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) of the charcoal shows that the miners used standard-sized, pollarded branches. So we now have yet more groups of workers at Great Orme – not just miners, but foresters, charcoal-makers and a host of other tradespeople; huge numbers must have been involved. The miners used antlers and bones for their digging – these animals had to be hunted. Their skins were stretched and dried to make leather clothes and shoes – which means leather-workers, clothiers and shoesmiths. More and more men kept their hair tidy and shaved with bronze razors; they also used copper eyelets to tie up their clothes and button their shoes. Copper from the mine then began to be hammered into decorative ornaments and jewellery, as locals became more wealthy.
For the Minoans and their budding empire, Britain would have been like a treasure trove. It was a treasure trove, moreover, that gave them a jumping-off point for the whole of northern Europe. Perhaps even further.
That tell-tale prickling of excitement was in my veins again. I was going to track my Bronze Age pioneers even further, if I could. Another sea voyage of my own beckoned.
CHAPTER 25
STRANGE BEASTS AND ASTROLABES
The dead of night: Saxony-Anhalt, northern Germany: 1999. Two hundred miles (322 kilometres) away from here, at the amber-trading city of Rungholt, is the very place where Hans Peter Duerr had found his Bronze Age Minoan cooking pots and had concluded that the Minoans had been sailing here – routinely.
Three black-clad figures were combing through a deep forest at Nebra, with illicit metal detectors.
After several cold, dark hours of scanning the forest floor, the men found themselves in a small clearing near a hill. Suddenly their detectors came alive. That high-pitched whine meant metal – lots of it. They tore into the earth with pickaxes. After a brief struggle that earth gave way – and yielded up a treasure it had kept safe for more than 3,000 years.
Carefully, one of the men picked a strange, flat object out of the hole and delicately brushed it free of the clinging forest loam. What was it? Pocked and covered with a green-bronze sheen, in his hands lay something that looked strange, almost magical.
A bronze disc 30 centimetres across; its surface inlaid with gold. Even in the moonlight, the men could see that they had found something special; something that drew an incredibly vivid image of the heavens. You can view the disc in the second colour plate section.
The sun – or possibly a full moon – faces a crescent moon. The two images are divided by what seem to be stars. The surface of both the sun and the moon are pockmarked with metal corrosion, making them look eerily realistic as if their real, crater-ridden counterparts had been studied through a telescope. A boat navigates the sea beneath. To a traveller the boat design seems similar to the barge of the Egyptian sun god, Ra.
This object is unique. Nothing like it has ever been seen before. We now know it as the ‘Nebra Sky Disk’.
A few years later, the Nebra Disk was rumoured to be circulating the black market with a price-tag of a quarter of a million pounds. Unauthorised digging of archaeological finds is a crime in Germany. In an elaborate sting operation dreamt up by Harald Meller, who had just been appointed head archaeologist at the nearby museum of Halle, the looters were caught in a hotel – and the Disk was rescued.
Meller was the hero of the hour. He had won the Disk for posterity – and for his museum. When he finally got his find back to the calm and quiet of his office, he must have smiled in relief, and then thought: ‘After that huge struggle to get hold of it – now what?’
What exactly had they won? Was it an astronomical device? The surface of the mysterious Disk was a mass of symbols. Were these just random images, or did they mean something more? The astronomer Professor Wolfhard Schlosser, of the University of the Ruhr, was called in to try to verify if these symbols might in fact represent heavenly bodies – the constellations.
Could northern Europeans have been advanced enough in the Bronze Age to have mapped out the stars? If not, the Disk’s existence supported my theory that the Minoans had been here – and that they had had access to knowledge at least the equal of that of the Babylonians. Professor Schlosser’s first move was to isolate the largest group of ‘stars’.
The ‘star’ marks were spread out in a pattern across the object’s surface. The professor ran them against a recognised computer programme to see if they would match with the stars in the night sky, first in the northern hemisphere and then in the southern. But there were no matches. These dots, it seemed, were just decoration.
Then the professor looked at the small cluster of seven stars in the middle of the Disk, right between the circles that might represent the sun and the moon. They seemed to form a distinct pattern. Could
that be a constellation?
Professor Schlosser quickly realised that the cluster resembled one above all others: the Pleiades. The ancients thought there were only seven stars in the cluster. To them it was one of the most beautiful in the night sky. Significantly, in the mythology of the ancient world, where the greats literally became stars, it was celebrated for being made up of the seven daughters of one of the great Titans. His name was Atlas.
Today we know that the Pleiades is made up of eleven main stars, but only some of them are easily visible to the naked eye. So Schlosser turned to the oldest images of the Pleiades that he could find: tablets and scrolls from the East. And there he saw a wonder: the Pleiades, drawn with just seven stars. An image just like that on the Disk.22
The Nebra Disk had been found buried with a trove of bronze artefacts: two bronze swords, two hatchets, a chisel and fragments of twisted metal bracelets. Although the swords themselves look to be of German design, their metal content is not. Analysis found that the gold was from the Carnon River, where Marcella and I had been staying in Cornwall. The tin content of the bronze was also from Cornwall. If the swords were in fact made at the same time, they dated the Disk to c.1600 BC.
Two golden arcs run along the sides of the Nebra Disk: they appear to have been added later. Those mysterious arcs tell another story, but to relate it we need to travel a few miles further, to the Saale valley.
High on a plateau overlooking the valley, just 15 miles (25 kilometres) away from where the Nebra Disk was first found, is the tiny hamlet of Goseck. Here is another hidden treasure, one which was only discovered by chance in 1991, by aerial reconnaissance. A large, double concentric ring of post holes, pierced by gates and surrounded by a circular ditch. Again, as a specialist in astroarchaeology, Wolfhard Schlosser was called in to investigate.
The first clue as to the function of this new discovery was the fact that the gate leading into the Goseck circle’s wooden palisade is precisely aligned with north. The site was positioned to observe the movements of the sun, the moon and the stars and for keeping track of time. The southern gates marked the sunrise and sunset of the winter and summer solstices.
Schlosser believes that the Nebra Disk and the circle are connected and that the constellation patterns on the Disk were based on previous astrological observations, possibly made over a period of time at Goseck. The two golden arcs that were added to the Disk, he reasoned, must also mark the winter and summer solstices. Spanning an angle of 82 degrees, the arcs mark the same angle that occurs between the positions of sunset at the summer and winter solstice at the latitude of this area, Mittelberg (51.3 degrees north).
I think that the Nebra Disk is a device that links the sun’s movement with that of the moon. What use would the people here in Saxony – whoever they were, whether locals or visiting travellers – have put that knowledge to? Well, the very name ‘the Pleiades’ is from the same root as the Greek word pleio: ‘to sail’. We now know that in ancient times, the Pleiades’ heliacal rising was used to predict the time that ships could set sail from the Mediterranean: from early May to early November.23
Needless to say, I believe that the device must have been brought here by the only people who had this sophisticated understanding of the skies, the Minoans. Hans Peter Duerr’s experience is proof of the Bronze Age Minoans’ journeys to this area. The only people who had the reason to be here – in this case probably bartering their precious bronze for the sumptuous prize of Baltic amber – were the Minoans.
What reason could they have had to create the Nebra Disk? Why, for example, would it have been found so close to an ancient wooden circle aligned with the stars? I am convinced that this is no accident. This beautiful little object, like the extraordinarily intricate gold seals found on Crete, has in fact a highly practical purpose.
I am sure the Disk was used, perhaps in ceremonial fashion, as an aid in navigation.
There was now a huge, and to tell the truth somewhat overwhelming, question hovering in my mind. Almendres; the circle here at Goseck; the one near the Red Sea; the one in Kerala; and even Stonehenge. Why did stone and wood henges keep cropping up on my trail? I could no longer avoid the moment. It was now imperative for me to explore one of the world’s most ancient mysteries: the ceremonial stone circle.
NOTES TO BOOK III
1. Philip P. Betancourt, The Chrysokamino Metallurgy Workshop and its Territory, A.S.C.S.A, 2006
2. Gerald Cadogan, Palaces of Minoan Crete, Routledge, 1991
3. K. Aslihan Yener. ‘An Early Bronze Age Age Tin Production Site at Goltepe, Turkey’, The Oriental Institute and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, 2007
4. Richard Cowen, UC Davis
5. C. H. W. Johns, Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters, 1904. Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28674)
6. Richard Cowen, UC Davis
7. Theodore A. Wertime. ’Man’s First Encounters with Metallurgy’ in Science 25, December 1964, vol. 146, no. 3652, p. 1664
8. Oliver Rackham, The Illustrated History of the Countryside, J. M. Dent, 1996
9. Rodney Castleden, Minoans
10. The Thera Foundation (www. therafoundation.org)
11. F. Nocete, ‘The smelting quarter of Valencia de la Concepción (Seville, Spain): the specialised copper industry in a political centre of the Guadalquivir Valley during the Third millenium B.C. (2750–2500 B.C.)’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 35:3
12. Mark A., Hunt Ortiz, Prehistoric Mining and Metallurgy in South West Iberian Peninsula, Archaeopress, 2003
13. Concepcion Martin et al. ‘The Bronze Age of La Mancha’ JSTOR
14. W. Sheppard Baird, 2007 (www.minoanatlantis.com)
15. Edward Wright, in The Dover Boat, ed. Peter Clarke, English Heritage, 2004, p. 261
16. Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek – The Man Who Discovered Britain, Walker & Company, 2002
17. Pliny XXXIV, 47, Harvard Classics
18. In Keilschrifttexte aus Assur verschiedenen inhalts 1920, no. 92, trans. Professor Waddell
19. A. Sayce, The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylon, 1902, p. 3. Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35856)
20. Cyrus Gordon, Before Columbus; Links Between the Old World and Ancient America, Crown Publishers, 1971, p. 81
21. R.F. Tylecote, The Prehistory of Metallurgy in the British Isles, Institute of Metals, 1986
22. Schlosser, W. (2002), ‘Sur astronomischen Deutung der Himmelsschiebe von Nebra’, Archaölogic in Saschsen-Anhalt 1/02: 21–30.//E. and C-H Pernicka, ‘Naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen an den Funden von Nebra’, Archaölogic in Saschsen-Anhalt 1/02: 24–29
23. Theophrastus of Eresus, On Weather Signs, Brill, 2006 pp. 29, 43
BOOK IV
EXAMINING THE
HEAVENS
CHAPTER 26
SEEING THE SKIES IN STONE . . .
A visit once again to Egypt: the majestic and formidable Minoan ally, and a cultural lynchpin of the era. Egypt was my next logical step in following the trail of ancient knowledge around the world. This is because the oldest stone circle on the globe lies on the Upper Nile.
The stone circle at Nabta was begun in the 5th millennium BC. I sensed that as privileged guests in Egypt, the Minoans might well have been able to study the Nabta site. I knew little about Europe’s oldest astronomical observatory at Gosek, 200 miles (322 kilometres) up the Elbe, and the Nebra Disk found so close to it. Neither could I rely on written research, or much in the way of expert help: Gosek has been little studied. But Gosek and the Nebra Disk seemed to be pushing me towards a solution that was obvious enough to be staring me in the face.
A pattern was emerging. Wherever the Minoans had travelled, a stone or wooden circle seems to have appeared. Was this idea too improbable? I decided to follow my instincts and research the oldest stone circle in the world, to uncover the truth.
I am convinced that the M
inoans’ drive to travel was supported by their astounding grasp of navigation. But to navigate you need reliable calculations about the stars – and that information needs to relate to your precise location on the globe. How did they obtain such information? Like many others, I strongly suspected that stone circles were built for astronomical as well as ceremonial purposes and that they were used for far more than predicting the seasons. I was convinced that the Minoans needed to build on the astronomical and navigational knowledge they had already gained from Babylon. The only way they could do that was to create their own observatories by building, or perhaps adapting, suitable structures. Stone circles.
At the edge of the Western Desert, 500 miles (800 kilometres) south of Cairo, near the border between modern Egypt and Sudan, lies the flat, arid bed of an ancient dried-up lake. It is a desolate spot between the desert springs of Bir Kiseiba and the shores of Lake Nasser, and about as far away from civilisation as you will ever find. Dust is everywhere: in summer the wind roars over the nearby sandy ridge. Once this place was green and lush, a seasonal lake filled by the summer rains. Now the land is a barren sea of sand, and the heat is crushing.
A millennium before the beginning of the Egyptian 1st Dynasty, nomadic tribespeople – cattle herders who normally roamed wide over the Sahara with their livestock – would congregate here with the arrival of those all-important rains. They slaughtered some of their precious cattle as a sacrifice of thanks.
Nabta Playa, as it is now known, has forced Egyptologists to rethink their theories about Egypt’s origins. It was an enigma: a totally unexpected stone circle set in one of the world’s most isolated spots, until a trunk road was put in to allow construction traffic to reach Egypt’s New Valley Project. About 62 miles (100 kilometres) west of here are the colossal Nubian rock monuments of Abu Simbel, imposing huge sculpted figures that are now part of a World Heritage Site. The impressive statues were relocated by the authorities in the 1960s, to accommodate a new dam on the Nile.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 21