A 2,700-12 months-Outdated Figurine Revives a Weighty Thriller

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

Poking round within the peat, he picked up a six-inch-tall bronze figurine with an egg-shaped head, looped arms, knobby breasts and a nostril that will make an anteater envious.

The statuette, sporting a belt and a neck ring, was solely the second of its sort unearthed in Germany, although the Thirteenth discovered close to the Baltic Sea. The primary turned up round 1840. All are comparable in form and proportion.

“The latest statuette poses an archaeological riddle,” stated Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and head of analysis on the Decrease Saxony State Workplace for Cultural Heritage, in Germany. “What was it, how did it get there and what was it used for?”

Remarkably, 24 years earlier, whereas paddling by way of the identical swamp, Mr. Borgwardt’s father had spied a bunch of bones jutting from a financial institution. He fetched his son and collectively they scavenged within the muck. Amongst their finds had been a human arm bone pierced by a flint arrowhead, and a two-and-a-half-foot-long wood membership that resembled a Louisville Slugger.

Extra exploration of the realm yielded the skeletons of a half-dozen horses, scores of army artifacts and the stays of greater than 140 people, most of them males between the ages of 20 and 40 who confirmed indicators of blunt trauma. Nearly all of the relics have been traced to round 1,250 B.C., suggesting that they stemmed from a violent episode which will have performed out over a single day.

A 2013 geomagnetic survey revealed that this slim stretch of the Tollense Valley was as soon as a part of a commerce route bisected by a 400-foot stone-and-wood causeway that had been used to move amber to factors on the Mediterranean and Adriatic Sea. The amber highway predated the bloodshed by no less than 5 centuries.

In the present day the realm is taken into account Europe’s oldest battlefield web site. “Though the area was sparsely populated 3,270 years in the past, upward of two,000 folks had been concerned within the battle,” stated Dr. Terberger, who helped begin a sequence of excavations based mostly on the Borgwardts’ authentic discoveries.

In a paper printed Feb. 12 in the archaeological journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift, Dr. Terberger and 5 colleagues suggest that the statuette discovered by the youthful Mr. Borgwardt dated to the seventh century B.C. and was both a steadiness weight, an object of worship or a mix of each.

“The unanswered query is why the figurine wound up in a river valley alongside a commerce route tons of of years after a big battle happened there,” Dr. Terberger stated. “Did this occur by chance, or was the setting a spot of commemoration for a Thirteenth-century B.C. battle nonetheless current within the oral historical past of the Late Bronze Age folks? And if the statuette depicted a goddess, did she play a task in a primitive weight system?”

Eat your coronary heart out

Lorenz Rahmstorf, a professor of Prehistoric Archaeology on the College of Göttingen and a co-author of the research, stated weights and scales first got here into use round 3,000 B.C. as commerce developed in Egypt and Mesopotamia; the primary weighing gadgets had been a easy system to evaluate the worth of products, consisting of two plates hooked up to an overhead beam fastened on a central pole. Sumerian texts function the earliest mentions of a weight unit, the mina, which tipped the scales at about 500 grams, or 18 ounces.

Steadiness scales unfold to the Aegean within the west and to the Indus Valley tradition of South Asia within the east. By the center of the second millennium B.C., weight programs turned up in Italy, and, by 1,350 B.C., north of the Alps.

“Units of small bronze weights and steadiness beams in bone had been combined collectively in baggage, and positioned subsequent to the lifeless in quite a few graves from Japanese France and Southern Germany,” Dr. Rahmstorf stated. “We don’t but have clear proof for when weighing gear was launched to North Germany and Scandinavia.”

No historic civilization hooked up stronger symbolic and non secular significance to scales than the Egyptians from the second millennium B.C. to the Roman Interval. Their most solemn otherworldly second was the Weighing of the Coronary heart.

It was the Egyptian perception that after an individual died, Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming, led the deceased to the judgment corridor of Osiris, the place the lifeless coronary heart was weighed towards a feather of Maat, the personification of reality, justice and the cosmic order.

If a coronary heart was pure, it will be as gentle because the feather, and the deceased was deemed worthy to enter the afterlife. Thoth, grasp of data and patron of scribes, stood by to report the ultimate verdict, and below the steadiness, Ammut the devourer — head of a crocodile, forepart of a lion, hindquarters of a hippopotamus — sat able to devour the damned.

“Steadiness needed to be reached in order that your coronary heart didn’t get eaten by expensive Ammut,” stated Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian artwork and structure on the College of California, Los Angeles.

The primary definitive weights are pebbles from the Second Dynasty of historic Egypt, which lasted from 2,890 B.C. to 2,686 B.C. “A few of the stones had been engraved with parallel incisions, some with hieroglyphic inscriptions,” Dr. Rahmstorf stated. “Steel weights grew to become frequent solely within the following millennium.”

A wealth of goddesses

A majority of the 13 bronze collectible figurines had been recovered in or round rivers close to the Baltic coast — six turned up on the Öresund, a strait that separates the Danish island of Zealand from the Swedish province of Scania. The statuette discovered within the Tollense by Mr. Borgwardt is the biggest and, at 155 grams, or about 5.5 ounces, the heaviest.

It was lengthy believed that the financial system of northern Europe throughout the Bronze Age had been based mostly on present alternate somewhat than commerce. The concept that the bronze collectible figurines represented measurements of an early Scandinavian weight system was superior in 1992 by the Swedish archaeologist Mats Malmer.

After figuring in erosion and weight reduction, Dr. Malmer analyzed the 12 current “Goddesses of Wealth” for weight consistency and proportionality. His calculations indicated that the burden of the statuettes might be expressed in grams as multiples of a standard denominator, 26.

On a current afternoon in his workplace on the College of Göttingen, Dr. Terberger reeled off the weights of a number of the collectible figurines: 55 grams, 85 grams, 102 grams, 103 grams, 103 grams, 104 grams, 106 grams, 110 grams, 132 grams, 133 grams. From throughout the room, his departmental colleague Dr. Rahmstorf stated, “Not each figurine match the scheme completely, however most had been fairly shut.”

Though the items of weight appear to have been standardized, Dr. Rahmstorf doubts that the statuettes had been used as weights. “It’s attainable that they had been weight-regulated,” he stated. “By which I imply the quantity of steel used might have been weighed out.”

Nonetheless, the pattern of collectible figurines is small. And to this point, unambiguous weights and scales from Northern Germany and Southern Scandinavia are lacking. However some objects from the Late Bronze Age in these areas are attainable candidates for weights: stone discs with a horizontal groove.

Dr. Rahmstorf’s preliminary analyses along with his colleague Nicola Ialongo are promising, however he cautioned, “these can be heavy weights of over 100 to a number of thousand grams.” As a result of there aren’t any texts and inscriptions from that period of northern Europe, “at present, the existence of weights and scales in that space is probably going however nonetheless solely hypothetical.”

Weight watchers

Again when Dr. Malmer got here out along with his idea, the statuettes had been broadly dismissed as artistically inferior to different collectible figurines from the Late Bronze Age. “The speculation has been put ahead that these statuettes are low-cost mass merchandise, owned by poor folks as family gods,” he wrote within the journal Antiquity.

Dr. Terberger demurs. “All in all, 13 figures of this sort don’t assist the concept that the statuettes had been low-cost family gods,” he stated. “Up to now they had been interpreted as goddesses, however they don’t match any deities broadly worshiped at the moment.”

Alternatively, Flemming Kaul, a senior researcher on the Nationwide Museum of Denmark, is just not persuaded that the statuettes had been weight-regulated. “For me, the gram numbers appear a lot too random, and the ‘statistical materials’ too low to attract any such conclusion,” he stated.

Dr. Kaul speculated that the statuettes had been divinities, though not essentially a part of an outlined pantheon. “These collectible figurines might have possessed magical powers tied to the power to supply offspring,” he stated. “They may very nicely be seen as charms or votive items associated to childbirth — probably the most harmful time in a lady’s life.”

How may the Borgwardt figurine have ended up on the backside of the river? “On the Tollense commerce route, with Nordic amber, a traveler supplied up her amulet to the native water nymphs for additional good luck on the voyage,” Dr. Kaul stated. “Maybe she parted with the talisman as a token of friendship or maybe to advertise life, fertility and cosmological order within the — for us — mysterious world of Bronze Age faith.”

For now, the riddle stays unsolved.