Happy Nice Mall

Two summers ago, while snorkeling in the marshy streams of the Tollense River on Germany’s Baltic coast, a 51-year-old truck driver, Ronald Borgwardt, made a startling discovery.

Mixing the peat, she got a six-inch-tall bronze figurine with an egg-shaped head, looped arms, lumpy breasts, and a snout that would make an anteater envy.

The figurine with a belt and neck ring was only the second of its kind unearthed in Germany, though the 13th was found near the Baltic Sea. The first appeared around 1840. They are all similar in shape and proportion.

“The latest figurine poses an archaeological puzzle,” said Thomas Terberger, archaeologist and head of research at the Department of Cultural Heritage of the State of Lower Saxony in Germany. “What was it, how did it get there, and what was it used for?”

Remarkably, 24 years ago, while rowing in the same swamp, Mr. Borgwardt’s father saw a bunch of bones popping out of a bank. She brought her son and they got into the mud together. His finds included a human arm bone pierced with a flint arrowhead and a six-foot-long wooden stick resembling the Louisville Slugger.

Further exploration of the area uncovered the skeletons of half a dozen horses, numerous military artifacts, and the remains of more than 140 individuals, most of whom were men between the ages of 20 and 40 who showed signs of blunt trauma. Nearly all of the remains date back to 1,250 BC, suggesting that they originated from a violent event that may have lasted for a single day.

A 2013 geomagnetic survey revealed that this narrow section of the Tollense Valley was once part of a trade route bisected by a 400-metre stone and wooden causeway used to transport amber to points in the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. The amber road was at least five centuries before the bloodshed.

Today the area is considered the oldest battlefield in Europe. Helping start a series of excavations based on Borgwardts’ original discoveries, Dr. “Although 3,270 years ago the area was sparsely populated, more than 2,000 people were involved in the conflicts,” Terberger said.

In an article published Feb. 12 in the archaeological journal Praehistorische ZeitschriftDr. Terberger and five colleagues suggest that the figurine found by the young Mr. Borgwardt dates to the seventh century BC and is either a counterweight, an object of worship, or a combination of both.

Dr. “The unanswered question is why the figurine was found there in a river valley along a trade route hundreds of years after a major war,” Terberger said. “Did this happen by chance, or is it a commemoration site for the 13th century BC conflict that still exists in the oral history of Late Bronze Age people? And if the figurine depicts a goddess, did it play a role in a primitive weight system?”

eat your heart out

Lorenz Rahmstorf, professor of Prehistoric Archeology at the University of Göttingen and co-author of the study, states that weights and scales first began to be used around 3,000 BC with the development of trade in Egypt and Mesopotamia; The first weighing devices were a simple system for assessing the value of goods, consisting of two plates attached to an upper beam fixed to a central post. The Sumerian texts earliest mention the mina, a unit of weight with the scales about 500 grams or 18 ounces.

Balance scales spread to the Aegean in the west and the Indus Valley culture of South Asia in the east. By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, weight systems appeared in Italy, and in 1,350 BC north of the Alps.

“Small bronze weights and balance rods made of bone were mixed in bags and placed next to the dead in a number of tombs from eastern France and southern Germany,” Rahmstorf said. “We do not yet have clear evidence of when weighing equipment was introduced to northern Germany and Scandinavia.”

From the 2nd millennium BC to the Roman Period, no ancient civilization attributed a symbolic and spiritual meaning to stamps as much as the Egyptians. Their most solemn otherworldly moment was the Weighing of the Heart.

It was the Egyptian belief that after a person died, Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification, took the deceased to the judgment hall of Osiris, where the dead heart was weighed against a feather of Maat, the personification of truth, justice and righteousness. cosmic order.

If the heart was pure, it would be as light as a feather, and the deceased was deemed worthy of entering the hereafter. Thoth, lord of knowledge and patron of the scribes, stood ready to record the final verdict, and under balance, the devouring Ammut—the head of a crocodile, the forepart of a lion, the back of a hippopotamus—sat ready to devour the damned.

“Balance had to be reached so that your heart wasn’t beating by dear Ammut,” said Kara Cooney, professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The first precise weights are pebbles from the Second Dynasty of ancient Egypt, which lasted from 2,890 BC to 2,686 BC. “Metal weights only became common in the next millennium.”

goddess wealth

Most of the 13 bronze statuettes were found in or around rivers near the Baltic coast – six of them were found in the Öresund, a strait that separates the Danish island of Zealand from the Swedish province of Scania. The figurine found by Mr Borgwardt in Tollense is the largest and heaviest at 155 grams or about 5.5 ounces.

During the Bronze Age it was long believed that the economy of northern Europe was based more on the exchange of gifts than on trade. The idea that bronze figurines represent measurements of an early Scandinavian weight system was developed by Swedish archaeologist Mats Malmer in 1992.

After considering erosion and weight loss, Dr. Malmer analyzed the 12 existing “Goddesses of Wealth” for weight consistency and proportionality. Their calculations showed that the weight of the figurines could be expressed in grams as multiples of 26 in a common denominator.

Recently in his office at the University of Göttingen, Dr. Terberger worked out the weights of some figurines: 55 grams, 85 grams, 102 grams, 103 grams, 103 grams, 104 grams, 106 grams, 110 grams, 132 grams, 133 grams. Across the room, his colleague from the department, Dr. “Not every figurine fits the diagram perfectly, but most were pretty close,” Rahmstorf said.

While units of weight seem standardized, Dr. Rahmstorf suspects the figurines were used as weights. “It is possible that they are weight-adjusted,” he said. “By that I mean the amount of metal used could have been weighed down.”

Still, examples of figurines are scarce. And so far, net weights and scales are missing from northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. However, some Late Bronze Age objects in these regions are possible candidates for weights: horizontal grooved stone discs.

Dr. Rahmstorf’s initial analyzes with colleague Nicola Ialongo are promising, but he warned that “these will be heavyweights of more than 100 to several thousand grams.” Since there are no texts and inscriptions from that period of northern Europe, “at present, the existence of weights and scales in that area is likely, but still only hypothetical.”

nutritionist

Dr. When Malmer put forward his theory, the figurines were widely rejected as artistically inferior to other Late Bronze Age figurines. He wrote to Antiquity magazine:

Terberger objects. “As a result, 13 such figures do not support the idea that the figurines are cheap household deities,” he said. “They were interpreted as goddesses in the past, but they don’t fit any of the widely worshiped deities at the time.”

On the other hand, Flemming Kaul, a senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, is not convinced that the figurines are weight-adjusted. “To me the gram numbers seem too random and the ‘statistical material’ is too low to draw such a conclusion,” he said.

Dr. Kaul speculated that the figurines were deities, though not necessarily part of a defined pantheon. “These figurines may have magical powers linked to their ability to produce offspring,” he said. “They can be seen as talismans or votive pieces about childbirth, the most dangerous time in a woman’s life.”

How could the Borgwardt figurine have fallen to the bottom of the river? Dr. “On the Tollense trade route, a traveler with Nordic amber presented his amulet to local nymphs for more luck in the journey,” Kaul said. “Perhaps he left the talisman as a symbol of friendship, or perhaps to promote life, fertility, and cosmological order—for us—in the mysterious world of Bronze Age religion.”

For now, the riddle has not been solved.