Astralabe,asrtralobe

[Gary Fox]

Slight drift…….

What does the panel think about the Nebra Sky Disc about to be exhibited at the British Museum, on loan, courtesy of Germany?

I had a flick through the relevant non-academic media such as astronomy periodicals, and all vaguely knowledgable and serious commentators are unimpressed; the disc's exact age is unknown by a thousand years, nobody can agree even about what it is claimed to depict, and it might be a Piltdown Man type hoax. (By which I mean an old thing doctored to seem like something else, for ulterior motives.)
There has already been looting at the site where it was claimed to be found, and some archeo-fraudsters are presently on trial in court.
So, probably much ado about nothing is my take on it.
(I have a distant memory that the experts at the British Museum have been fooled before, and ended up with egg on their faces..)

 

[Skylark]

Thanks, Gary,

I read about it on the BBC non-academic media site and they, too, reported some skepticism. Notwithstanding, any non-academic media reporting of STEM subjects can't be all bad.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

I had a flick through the relevant non-academic media such as astronomy periodicals, and all vaguely knowledgable and serious commentators are unimpressed; the disc's exact age is unknown by a thousand years, nobody can agree even about what it is claimed to depict, and it might be a Piltdown Man type hoax. (By which I mean an old thing doctored to seem like something else, for ulterior motives.)
There has already been looting at the site where it was claimed to be found, and some archeo-fraudsters are presently on trial in court.
So, probably much ado about nothing is my take on it.
(I have a distant memory that the experts at the British Museum have been fooled before, and ended up with egg on their faces..)

Thanks, Gary,

I read about it on the BBC non-academic media site and they, too, reported some skepticism. Notwithstanding, any non-academic media reporting of STEM subjects can't be all bad.

What I've read suggests a) that the Nebra disc has been modified several times before being interred; b) that the identification of star patterns is EXTREMELY conjectural and c) that some of the "astronomical" elements were modifications added later. There are also issues because the burial context was not recorded properly; its dating is very vague and suspect.

The problem with a one-off object is that there's no context to interpret it. It's like other one-off objects like the Phaistos Disc; we don't know what the aim of the makers was, and all we can do is guess. The trouble is that we guess with a 21st-century mindset; these objects were made with the mindset of a person nearly 4000 years ago! We look at a plate with "sun" "moon" and "stars" and interpret it in terms of astronomy. That need not have been the intent of its maker or later modifiers. They may simply have thought it was a pretty pattern, or it might have been some imagined picture of the underworld, or a representation of a shamanic vision or.........