The oldest picture of the sky, dug up by looters on a German hilltop
On the Mittelberg, a hilltop ringed by a prehistoric enclosure in the Ziegelroda Forest, two detectorists with no licence dug up a bronze disc in 1999, damaged it with their spade, and the next day sold it with the swords and axes buried beside it for 31,000 marks. It changed hands on the black market until the state archaeologist recovered it in a police sting in Basel in 2002. What they had found is the oldest concrete picture of the sky known anywhere: a disc about 30 centimetres across, made around 1800 to 1600 BC, with a gold sun or full moon, a crescent and stars, seven of them clustered like the Pleiades. Gold arcs added later span 82 degrees, exactly the angle between the midsummer and midwinter sunsets at this latitude, and a curved gold boat rides along the bottom. From the enclosure the midsummer sun sets behind the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz, 80 kilometres away. The looters were sentenced, and the disc is in the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle.
Mittelberg, near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
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