{"it":{"id":"ART023","kind":"artifact","sub":"Authenticated","name":"Berlin Gold Hat","place":"Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, SMB — IIc 6068","date":"c. 1000-800 BC","mat":"gold leaf","dims":"height 74.5 cm; 490 g","loc":"Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, SMB — IIc 6068","acc":"Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, SMB — IIc 6068","flag":"genuine ancient","src":[155,156,157],"tags":[],"sum":"A tall cone of thin gold, covered in rows of suns, moons and circles, appeared on the art market in Switzerland in 1996. The Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin bought it, and it is now known as the Berlin Gold Hat.\n\nThe museum dates it to 1000 to 800 BC, in the Late Bronze Age, and says it probably came from southern Germany. It is 74 cm tall, 31 cm across and weighs 480 g. It was beaten from a seamless sheet, decorated in repoussé and strengthened with a bronze band and twisted wire. Its find spot is unknown, as Der Spiegel reported.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is the decoration. Wilfried Menghin, then the museum's director, read the rows of circles and crescents as a calendar. The count, he said, encodes the Metonic cycle, in which 19 solar years almost exactly match 235 lunar months, a rule the Greeks credited to Meton in 432 BC.\n\nThat reading is the museum's own: it describes the hat as a system for calculating the shift between solar and lunar years and predicting lunar eclipses. Other gold cones from France and Germany are read the same way, as ceremonial hats.\n\nIf Bronze Age priests wore their calendars, who taught them to count the sky?","why":"A Bronze Age gold cone in Berlin carries symbols its museum reads as a calendar.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":3,"yt":"Count the symbol rows and test them against solar and lunar year lengths.","rel":["W11A25","ART022"],"hook":"A gold hat 74 cm tall, bought in 1996, may encode a 19-year calendar."},"S":{"155":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Gold_Hat"],"156":["search.smb.museum","https://search.smb.museum/object/obj-457388"],"157":["www.wikidata.org","https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q318813"]},"rec":{"id":"ART023","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"find_circumstances","r":"not in staged/legacy artifact record (free sources)"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA101","a":"Lunisolar calendar","who":"popular AA literature/TV","main":"Ornament bands may encode calendar counts (proposed by mainstream scholars)","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Gold_Hat ; https://search.smb.museum/object/obj-457388 ; https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q318813","st":"unresolved","n":"status from artifacts row; no new lab rows this batch","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"art":{"claimed_anomaly":"Lunisolar calendar","mainstream_reading":"Ornament bands may encode calendar counts (proposed by mainstream scholars)","provenance_flag":"genuine ancient","current_location":"","find_circumstances":"","claimant":"","status":"","dimensions":"height 74.5 cm; 490 g","material":"gold leaf","date":"c. 1000-800 BC","culture":"Late Bronze Age","museum_accession":"Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, SMB — IIc 6068","b":"V","s":[]},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0437","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Gold_Hat"},{"id":"S0673","t":"search.smb.museum","u":"https://search.smb.museum/object/obj-457388"},{"id":"S0936","t":"www.wikidata.org","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q318813"},{"id":"VART023-4","t":"Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Berlin Gold Hat (Goldener Zeremonialhut)","u":"https://id.smb.museum/object/457388"},{"id":"VART023-5","t":"Der Spiegel: Herren der Zeit","u":"https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/herren-der-zeit-a-0da37d49-0002-0001-0000-000021662562"}],"qs":["If Bronze Age priests wore their calendars, who taught them to count the sky?","With no find spot, how much can we trust what we read into an object?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Cappello_d%27oro_di_berlino%2C_1000_ac_ca._01.jpg/1280px-Cappello_d%27oro_di_berlino%2C_1000_ac_ca._01.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cappello_d%27oro_di_berlino,_1000_ac_ca._01.jpg","title":"Cappello d'oro di berlino, 1000 ac ca. 01.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Sailko","cap":"Berliner Goldhut"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Berlin_Gold_hat_calendar.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlin_Gold_hat_calendar.jpg","title":"Berlin Gold hat calendar.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Athinaios","cap":"Berlin Gold hat calendrical system"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d1/Goldhut_detail.jpg/1280px-Goldhut_detail.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goldhut_detail.jpg","title":"Goldhut detail.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Philip Pikart","cap":"Detail of the \"Goldhut\" of Berlin"}],"sum":"On 4 February 1996, in a private room of a hotel in Zurich, the director of Berlin's Museum of Prehistory and Early History watched an art dealer open a padded metal case. Inside lay a horn of gold, tall and slender, glittering, covered from tip to rim in tiny suns and moons. Wilfried Menghin's first thought, he later told Der Spiegel, was that it had to be a fake. It was too wonderful. A colleague scraped a little patina from the shaft. Back in Berlin, chemists ran the sample through a mass spectrograph. The result was startling. The gold was genuine, and it was about three thousand years old.\n\nToday it stands in a room of its own in the Neues Museum in Berlin, and it is known as the Berlin Gold Hat. If the museum's reading of it is right, it is not only a crown. It is a calculator.\n\nPicture a wizard's hat, the tall pointed kind, and you are close. The Gold Hat is a cone of thin gold 74.5 centimetres tall, with a narrow, rising shaft that swells at the foot into a rounded cap and then a brim; at its widest it measures about 31 centimetres across. Its gold weighs just under half a kilo. A narrow band of bronze stiffens the base, and a twisted wire runs inside the rolled edge of the brim. It was once the outer skin of a headdress, probably lined with something soft that has long since rotted away. The museum dates it, by comparing its ornaments and techniques with datable finds, to about 1000 to 800 BC, the Late Bronze Age.\n\nThe craft is extraordinary. The whole hat was hammered from a single piece of gold, without a seam. Gold hardens as it is worked and grows likely to crack, so the smith had to heat it again and again, to at least 750 degrees, and beat it with perfect evenness. All that gold, the whole towering cone, would melt down into a cube only about three centimetres on each side. Then the smith covered it. The surface is divided into 21 horizontal zones, filled with patterns pressed in with 14 different stamps and three decorated wheels: raised bosses ringed by up to six circles, rows of crescent moons lying on their backs above almond or eye-shaped signs, and at the very tip, an eight-pointed star.\n\nHow it reached Zurich is a story about money and silence. The hat had appeared on the international art market in 1995. The seller, a firm based in Vaduz in Liechtenstein, said it came from an anonymous Swiss private collection put together in the 1950s and 1960s. The museum paid a record price of 1.5 million marks. The agent would say nothing more about where it was from, and the museum has never been able to find out. Researchers suspect a treasure hunter with a metal detector found it somewhere in southern Germany or Switzerland. That is the uncomfortable bargain at the heart of the object: the museum secured it for the public, but the dealer kept the one thing that would let anyone check it, the place where it lay in the ground.\n\nIt is not alone. Three similar cones are known. The first was dug out of a field near Schifferstadt in Germany in 1835 by a labourer with a spade. A second, found near Poitiers in western France nine years later, was once taken for a quiver abandoned by Attila the Hun. A third, from Ezelsdorf in Bavaria, was beaten seamlessly from a single lump of gold. For 150 years scholars argued over what they were: pieces of armour, vases, offering bowls. The prehistorian Peter Schauer proposed they were ornaments set on top of ritual posts, and that became the textbook view. The Berlin cone, the best preserved of the four, changed the argument. It showed signs of an inner lining, and the Schifferstadt example once had a chin strap. These were hats, Menghin concluded, worn by people.\n\nThen came the counting. Menghin noticed that the bosses and crescents on the shaft totalled 1,739. Later work found that the symbols seem to fall into deliberate sequences, with each ring standing for a day. Add the right run of neighbouring zones, take away a few special zones that act as corrections, and you reach periods in both the moon's calendar and the sun's. The cone can count spans of up to 57 months. One worked example: add zones 3 to 21 and you get 1,739 days; subtract the three correction zones, worth 142, and you are left with 1,597 days, almost exactly 54 months of the moon.\n\nThis matters because the moon and the sun do not agree. A year of twelve lunar months runs about 354 days, eleven short of the solar year of 365.24. Any people who timed their festivals by the moon and their sowing by the sun had to reconcile the two. The answer the Greeks later credited to Meton, in 432 BC, is that 19 solar years almost exactly equal 235 lunar months. Menghin argued that the Berlin hat encodes that same knowledge, calling its symbols a kind of table for calculating the lunisolar calendar. The museum describes it as a system for working out the drift between solar and lunar years and predicting eclipses of the moon. Its wearers, Menghin suggested, were \"lords of time\", priests who told their people when to sow and when to harvest.\n\nThat is the mainstream reading, and it comes from inside the museum. It also has doubters. Some prehistorians question whether the patterns are a calendar at all, and the system has not been fully deciphered. Without a find spot, there is no grave, no temple and no layer of earth to test the story against.\n\nBut consider what the reading asks us to accept. Centuries before Meton, in the forests of central Europe, among people long imagined as simple farmers, someone had watched the sun and moon long enough to measure their mismatch to within a couple of days, and had written the answer in gold, in a code of circles, on a hat meant to be seen.\n\nWho taught them to count the sky so precisely, and what did their people believe the wearer of that tall golden cone had become?"},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"c. 1000-800 BC","h":"Date","s":[245]},{"v":"height 74.5 cm","h":"Recorded dimensions: height 74.5 cm; 490 g","s":[245]},{"v":"Gold leaf","h":"Made of","s":[245]}],"hs":{"245":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Gold_Hat"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/ART023.webp","w":1280,"h":2530,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Cappello_d%27oro_di_berlino%2C_1000_ac_ca._01.jpg/1280px-Cappello_d%27oro_di_berlino%2C_1000_ac_ca._01.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}