The Berlin Gold Hat: A Calendar Worn on the Head?

It stands in a dark room of the Neues Museum in Berlin, lit from above: a tall cone of beaten gold, 74.5 centimetres high, with a small brim at the bottom and a star at the tip. It weighs only about 490 grams; the gold is thinner than paper. Every centimetre is covered with bands of stamped ornament: rows of circles, discs, crescents and almond-shaped eyes, applied with small punches and wheels. Nobody knows where it was found. The museum bought it in 1996, from the art market.

The four hats

The Berlin hat is the best preserved of four cone-shaped gold hats of the "Schifferstadt type", all from the Late Bronze Age of central and western Europe:

• Schifferstadt (near Speyer, Germany), found in 1835; short and without its point preserved; Historisches Museum der Pfalz, Speyer.
• Avanton (near Poitiers, France), found in 1844, incomplete; Musée d'Archéologie nationale, Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
• Ezelsdorf-Buch (near Nuremberg), found in 1953, crushed but restored to about 88 cm; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.
• Berlin, bought in 1996; Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Neues Museum.

The calendar reading

The Berlin archaeologist Wilfried Menghin argued that the numbers of circles in the rows are not random: counted in certain ways, they give the number of days in lunar and solar years, and allow a lunisolar calendar to be kept, reconciling the two, even across the 19-year cycle in which the phases of the Moon return to the same dates. On this reading the hats were worn by priest-astronomers as sacred symbols of calendrical knowledge, and the star at the tip is the Sun.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The circle and the Sun. Circles, wheels and discs are the most common sun signs of the European Bronze Age, from the Trundholm sun chariot to the Nebra sky disc.

Counting in ornament. If Menghin is right, the ornament is the calendar: number encoded in pattern, readable by those who knew how to count it.

The cone. Its shape suggests a ceremonial headdress rather than a vessel; the brim and the inner fittings of the Berlin example are consistent with its being worn, perhaps over an organic cap.

Connections

The Neolithic (ch42) for the European sky-watching tradition it continues, Celtic & Germanic (ch14) for the later religion of the same lands, and Creation & the First Order (ch46). Compare the Nebra Sky Disc (V45), another Bronze Age object read as an astronomical instrument, and the Gundestrup Cauldron (V37) for later Celtic metalwork.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/berlin-gold-hat.html