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Ancient treasures on show reveal turbulent past
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AN arrowhead firmly lodged in the skull of an ancient fallen warrior, a voluptuous woman’s form carved from ivory and the mask of a Roman river god are among more than 1,000 major archeological discoveries being brought together for the first time.
The exhibition at Berlin’s Gropius Bau Museum reveals how war, art and migration have left their mark in Germany since the Stone Age.
The show spans more than 300,000 years, starting with a sleek wooden spear used by one of the pre-human species that once roamed the continent long before homo sapiens arrived.
Neanderthal hand axes show how our ancient cousins fled the approaching ice age southward — the first tangible evidence of climate refugees — while the ivory “Venus of Hohle Fels” and similar etchings on slate dated to between 40,000 and 35,000 BC attest to early Europeans’ fascination with the female form, pursued by artists ever since.
Often, the exact nature of the objects is unclear: The Nebra sky disk, a plate-size object of gold and bronze, depicting the sun, moon phases and the Pleiades star cluster, is considered one of the first astronomical depictions in history but may also have had religious significance. Dated to around 1600 BC, it is only a few hundred years older than three spectacular hats made from sheet gold first believed to have been worn by early Celtic priests, but which may also have served as primitive calendars. Many of the artifacts in the exhibition, which runs until January 6, show how strongly progress was linked to the movement of people, goods and ideas into and across Europe.
“Migration is not the mother of all problems. It is the beginning of all innovation,” said Matthias Wemhoff, director of Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History. Wemhoff cited the wealth of objects found during the recent construction of a new subway line in Cologne, where artifacts from all over the Roman Empire prove the city was an early melting pot of cultures.
Some of the objects on display, all of which were found in the past two decades in what is now Germany, are still shrouded in mystery. The skull with the arrowhead is part of a massive trove of bones and weapons that archaeologists believe could be the earliest known remains from a large-scale battle in human history.
(AP)
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