The sun disc. Courtesy Wiltshire Museum, photo by Jo Hutchins.
Posted on 06/23/2015 11:48:41 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Rare Bronze Age gold artifact found in burial mound in Wiltshire, U.K.
For the first time, an early Bronze Age sun-disc from Monkton Farleigh in Wiltshire, U.K., is being exhibited for public view at the Wiltshire Museum, in time for this year's summer solstice. It is one of only 6 sun-disc finds and is one of the earliest metal objects found in Britain. Made in about 2,400 BC, soon after the sarsen stones were erected at Stonehenge, it is thought to represent the sun.
The sun-disc was initially found in 1947 in a burial mound at Monkton Farleigh, just over 20 miles from Stonehenge, during excavations conducted by Guy Underwood. With it were found a pottery beaker, flint arrowheads and fragments of the skeleton of an adult male. It was kept safe by the landowner since its discovery and has only now been given to the Museum after careful cleaning by the Wiltshire Council Conservation Service.
The sun-disc is a thin embossed sheet of gold with a cross at the center, surrounded by a circle. Between the lines of both the cross and the circle are fine dots which glint in sunlight. The disc is pierced by two holes that may have been used to sew the disc to a piece of clothing or a head-dress, and may have been used in pairs. Until recently it has been thought that early Bronze Age gold may have come from Ireland, but a new scientific technique developed at Southampton University is suggesting that the gold may have come from Cornwall.
(Excerpt) Read more at popular-archaeology.com ...
The sun disc. Courtesy Wiltshire Museum, photo by Jo Hutchins.
Monkton?...............how ironic......................B^)
the holes held the magnet
the disk is a compass
It bears a cross and yet they claim it was made in 2400 B.C.
Things that make you go, hmmmmm...
What is its relative size?
Quarter? Silver Dollar? Frisbee?..................
Maybe it’s a railroad crossing sign.
This merely indicates that the symbol has acquired a different meaning from whatever it had (if anything) before.
The ORIGINAL Bit coin.
Doesn’t it make sense that if you lived in the British Isles you’d worship the sun?
;’)
Now that made me laugh.
It was likely a button.
Who says it’s a cross? It could just as easily be an X or just a happy happenstance of the designer. It’s easy to pound out a circle around the edge but not so easy toward the middle so just make two intersecting lines and be done with it.
Great object.
There were “X”s around BEFORE Christ...
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