{"it":{"id":"NX-A33","name":"Trundholm sun chariot","kind":"artifact","sub":"Authenticated","place":"Trundholm Mose, Zealand, Denmark (find-spot)","lat":55.88661,"lon":11.57239,"date":"c. 1400 BC","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Trundholm sun chariot","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot"},{"t":"Wikidata Q1137682","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1137682"}],"tags":[],"nfacts":5,"coord_basis":"find-spot (coordinate of discovery-place entity): Trundholm Mose","sum":"A bronze horse on wheels pulls a disc standing on its edge. One face of the disc is covered in gold, bright as day. The other is plain bronze. It is the Trundholm sun chariot, from the Nordic Bronze Age.\n\nIt was found in 1902 in a peat bog in Denmark, and in 1998 another 21 parts were recovered from the same place. It is about 54 by 35 by 29 cm, and the disc is about 25 cm across, gilded on one side only. It dates from about 1400 BC, is held by the National Museum of Denmark, and appears on the 1,000-krone banknote.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is the meaning of the two sides. A gilded face and a dark face suggest the sun by day and its unseen journey by night, but no text survives to say so.\n\nThe archaeologist Christoph Sommerfeld holds that the decoration on both sides encodes the 19-year Metonic cycle, the period after which the phases of the moon fall on the same days of the solar year. The caution is that decoration can be counted in many ways, and a sun cult object need not be a calendar. The same cycle has been claimed for the later Berlin Gold Hat.\n\nThe open question is how much astronomy people without writing kept in their objects, and whether we can count it back out.","nsrc":2,"new":1,"qs":["A bronze model of the sun's journey from 1400 BC. Were Bronze Age Europeans better astronomers than we credit?","Day side and night side? If the disc tracks the sun's full journey, what did its makers understand about the sky?","With no writing, how do you think Bronze Age people stored and passed on knowledge of the sun's movements?"],"why":"A Bronze Age image of the sun's journey, and an open debate about whether it also counts time.","yt":"Check disc gilding sides.","rel":["W11A25"],"hook":"A bronze horse pulls a gilded sun disc on wheels. Some see a calendar in its decoration."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"NX-A33","qs":["A bronze model of the sun's journey from 1400 BC. Were Bronze Age Europeans better astronomers than we credit?","Day side and night side? If the disc tracks the sun's full journey, what did its makers understand about the sky?","Without writing, how do you think Bronze Age people stored and passed on knowledge of the sun's movements?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/Solvognen_DO-6865_2000.jpg/1280px-Solvognen_DO-6865_2000.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solvognen_DO-6865_2000.jpg","title":"Solvognen DO-6865 2000.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Nationalmuseet, John Lee","cap":"Photo of Trundholm sun chariot","alt":"Photo of Trundholm sun chariot"}],"ms":[{"a":"Size","v":"54 x 35 x 29 cm","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikipedia: Trundholm sun chariot","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot"},{"a":"Disc","v":"25 cm","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikipedia: Trundholm sun chariot","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot"},{"a":"material (Wikidata)","v":"bronze","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikidata Q1137682","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1137682"},{"a":"length (Wikidata)","v":"50 centimetre","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikidata Q1137682","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1137682"},{"a":"collection (Wikidata)","v":"National Museum of Denmark","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikidata Q1137682","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1137682"}],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Trundholm sun chariot","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot"},{"t":"Wikidata Q1137682","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1137682"}],"sum":"On the golden face of a bronze disc from a Danish bog, one band of looping lines does something odd. The loops link concentric circles, but instead of flowing in one direction, in the words of one description, they \"progress like the steps of the dance, twice forward and once back.\" The disc is about 25 centimetres across. It stands on its edge on a pair of small wheels, and in front of it a bronze horse, on four wheels of its own, is ready to pull it. This is the Trundholm sun chariot, made in the Nordic Bronze Age, around 1400 BC.\n\nIt was found in 1902 in a peat bog on the Trundholm moor in Odsherred, in the north-west of Zealand. Nothing else lay with it. Nearly a century later, in 1998, archaeologists and metal detectorists went back to the same place and recovered 21 more pieces of it, among them wheels and spokes. It is now in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and it appears on the 1,000-krone banknote of the 2009 series. In Danish it is Solvognen.\n\nThe whole object measures about 54 centimetres long, 35 high and 29 wide; Wikidata gives the length as 50 centimetres. It was cast by the lost-wax method. The horse stands on a bronze rod carried by four wheels, and the rod runs back to the disc, which rides on two more. Every wheel has four spokes. The horse itself is richly decorated. Some details of the ornament suggest an influence from the Danube region, though the chariot was made locally.\n\nThe disc is the heart of it. It is built from two bronze discs joined by an outer bronze ring, with a thin sheet of gold laid over one face only: the right-hand side, seen from behind the horse. Both faces were worked with punches and gravers into zones of concentric circles, with bands of zigzags between borders. The gold side has an extra outer zone that may represent rays, and the band of looping, dance-step lines.\n\nWhy gild only one face? The usual reading is that the makers believed the sun was drawn across the sky from east to west by day, showing its bright side to the earth, and came back from west to east by night, showing its dark side. A journey around a globe would have the same result. Many think the chariot was pulled around during religious ritual, to act out the motion of the sun across the heavens. No text survives to say so. The people who made it left no writing at all.\n\nThe chariot is placed at about 1400 BC, in what archaeologists call Montelius period II, about 1500 to 1300 BC. Horse-drawn chariots first appear in Scandinavia some three centuries earlier, around 1700 BC, in rock carvings, bits and whip handles. So a horse pulling a wheeled vehicle was a familiar idea by the time someone chose to show the sun being pulled the same way.\n\nIt may not have been the only one. Two similar discs have been found in Ireland, the Lattoon gold disc and the bronze Cooke disc, the second dated to about 1500 to 1300 BC. The Cooke disc has fittings like those on the Trundholm chariot, which suggests it too was once joined to a sun horse and set on wheels. If so, the image of a horse drawing the sun was shared across a wide stretch of Bronze Age Europe.\n\nThen there is the question of the numbers. Some writers have proposed that the decoration on the disc encodes a calendar. The archaeologist Christoph Sommerfeld argues that the patterns on both sides encode knowledge of the 19-year Metonic cycle, the period after which the phases of the moon fall again on the same days of the solar year. The same cycle has been claimed for the Berlin Gold Hat, from around 900 BC, centuries later.\n\nThe caution is real. Decoration can be counted in many ways, and anyone looking for a number in a set of rings, dots and zigzags may well find one. A sun cult object need not be a calendar. But a sun disc with two faces, one for day and one for night, already carries the idea of a cycle, and it would not be strange for its makers to put what they knew about the sky's timing into it as well.\n\nThe image the chariot shows reaches far in time and space. It has been read as a Bronze Age forerunner of Skinfaxi, the horse that in Norse myth draws Dagr, the day, across the sky. In Greek myth the sun god Helios crosses the sky in a horse-drawn chariot, wearing a radiant crown. The Celtic sky god Taranis is usually shown with a spoked wheel. And in the Rigveda, a hymn describes the sun's bride, Surya, seated in a chariot drawn by two bright steeds, its wheels clean as it goes, with wind for the axle. Across these related traditions, from India to Scandinavia, people pictured the sun's daily journey in much the same way, and an object made more than three thousand years ago and found in a Danish bog shows that picture made in bronze and gold.\n\nSomeone made this with great care, and at some point it ended up alone in a bog. If its makers really did count the moon's long cycle into its golden face, how much more did people without writing know about the sky than we have yet been able to read back out of what they left?"},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/NX-A33.webp","w":1280,"h":920,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/Solvognen_DO-6865_2000.jpg/1280px-Solvognen_DO-6865_2000.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}