The Nebra Sky Disc
The Nebra Sky Disc, a bronze disk inlaid with gold symbols depicting the sun, moon, and stars, buried in Germany around 1600 BC.
Looters using metal detectors dug the Nebra Sky Disc out of a hilltop near the German town of Nebra in 1999 and tried to sell it on the black market, but a sting operation by police and archaeologists recovered it in 2002, along with the bronze axes and swords it had been buried with. Its gold inlay depicts a crescent moon, a cluster of stars almost certainly meant as the Pleiades, and what may be a full moon or the sun — making it, at roughly 3,600 years old, the oldest surviving concrete depiction of astronomical phenomena anywhere in the world. Some researchers believe golden arcs added later mark the sunrise and sunset points at the solstices, suggesting the disc functioned as a working calendar to reconcile the solar and lunar year, a sophisticated feat for early Bronze Age Europe.
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