Big building projects in the countryside tend to make a lot of people unhappy, but archeologists love them. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany saw an enormous amount of infrastructure development, and in the process, excavations and unrelated discoveries completely upended the traditional view of Bronze Age Central Europe. Much of the story around these finds is speculative, but it has become much more solid lately. It is a tale of power and its abuse, pride before the fall, gold, amber, armies, and some legitimately humongous millstones.
The most famous object in this story was not discovered in excavations, but by grave robbers: the Nebra sky disc. This bronze and gold disc, about the size of a dinner plate, shows sun, moon, and stars and has been convincingly interpreted as depicting a formula for reconciling solar and lunar calendars. It was this that drew tourists, funding, and global attention, but many of the other things coming to light put together an even more intriguing picture.
We have, by definition, no written records of prehistory, so our terminology is fuzzy and unwieldy. The area of East Central Germany in the Middle Bronze Age was part of what we call the Unetice culture (in German: Aunjetitzer Kultur). Its settlements and cemeteries are tracked by a specific kind of handled cup, presumably a drinking vessel. The people farmed and raised cattle, pigs, and sheep, lived in wooden longhouses and seem to have been led by local chieftains. It was a warlike society, at least in appearances (The modern United States is an example of a relatively peaceful society that still values weapons as markers of masculinity, and so may these people have for all we know). Men were buried with bronze weapons, chieftains in richly appointed graves, and settlements were fortified with palisades.
Except that sometimes, they weren’t. About 1800 BCE, in exactly the area where the sky disc was buried, the chieftain and warrior graves stop. Instead, we find a series of truly gigantic individual burial mounds. The men in them – kings, in all likelihood – were given rich sets of gold jewelry and decorated bronze weapons, more than previous chiefs had, and no doubt the burial chambers had been richly furnishedl with perishable wealth as well. Settlements without fortifications show up, and so does a strange kind of longhouse without stables.
While weapons no longer show up in graves, there are several hoards of bronze axes that are absolutely fascinating. They are largely identical, made around the same time, some show signs of wear, and they were buried together with a smaller number of daggers and dagger-axes. At least one of these hoards is associated with one of the stable-less halls, and archeologists now interpret them as military equipment. The dagger-axes indicated leaders, the axeheads regular troops, and the halls, at least part of the time, probably served as their accommodation. Without written sources, scholars are reticent to call it an army, but it really looks a lot like one.
This is also where another of the strange things showing up in the archeological record becomes interesting: the grindstones. In various places, but notably as part of the enormous burial mound called the Bornhöck, grindstones for grain were found. They basically looked the same as they had since the beginning of agriculture: a large, flat stone underneath, a smaller rider moved back and forth on top, and small, round hammerstones to periodically roughen the surface. There were no rotary millstones yet, so this was how flour was produced, and similar tools, usually made of granite, were found in Unetice culture homes everywhere. People ground spelt and barley on them and baked it into bread.
But these were huge. They were far too large to serve a single household, so heavy that they were most likely worked by two persons, and they are clearly associated with the ruler. We can easily envision them used to feed an army, the workforce of the giant construction sites, retainers, and foreign guests. They may have been operated by captives or slaves – at least that was how they did things in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Along with bread, usually baked in the household, people ate meat, fish, legumes (probably not a lot), nuts, and fruit, but very prominently dairy products. Cattle was important as a source of traction and a measure of wealth, and along with the milk of sheep and goats, they provided the basis for what was probably mainly a domestic cheese production. Of course we have no recipes, just the evidence of pottery strainers, residue analysis, and an unbroken tradition of cottage cheese as far back as written records survive. Tacitus describes lac concretum as the food of the Germans in the first century CE, and throughout the middle ages, this kind of fresh cheese, often known as ziger, was a staple of everyday diet. Unfortunately, as with many basic foods, we do not have recipes surviving until very late. Everyone knew how to make the stuff, why write it down? In German, the first really good description comes from Anna Wecker in 1598:
Preparing the zueger
All zueger of plain milk, be it of sheep, goats or cows, are made as is written of the almond zueger before. And the scheidmolck (acidic whey) is best which you obtain from those who make cheese and churn butter, just as you can sometimes get the zueger from those people. But if not (if you cannot get it) and you must separate it with wine or vinegar, do not do too much so that it does not become sour. Vinegar also affects it harder than wine which is why you quickly add too much of it.
If you have made such a zueger or one as described after, pour the whey into a clean dish until it settles well. Pour off the clear (liquid) above into a pitcher or small pot that is new. Keep it in a place that is not too warm, well closed. When you wish to use it, remove the skin if it has formed one and pour of it into that (liquid) which you want to separate. It does not matter if the skin is grey or yellow, the (liquid) underneath stays good. You may salt it, that way it keeps all the better. It becomes like a vinegar. Always refill the pot again.
The process is described in more detail for almond milk which was a late medieval affectation:
… Hang it over the fire and stir it until it is just about to begin boiling. Then add a little rennet (Lab oder Renne) as though you would make another kind of cheese. Or add seydmilchen (acidic whey), or if you do not have that either, take wine or vinegar enough to make it curdle. … Let it curdle like a zueger or cheese and take it off the fire then.
Set it on a ring (a wooden coaster), sprinkle water all around it with your hand, and cover it with a white cloth as you do an egg zueger (hard custard). Take it up soon with a spoon that has many holes, into baskets or other moulds.
The variety is interesting and may go back a long way. Rennet, an enzyme from the stomachs of calves, would have been available to cattle-raising farmers, vinegar could well already have been in use, and the acidic bacterial cultures of the scheidmolck Wecker describes, like brewing yeast and sourdough, can be captured wild and continued in use. Quite possibly the people of the king under Bornhoeck already used all three, though they probably had no wine yet.
Bronze Age finds routinely include cooking pots and cheese strainers. The people knew how to make cheesecloth from nettle or linen fibre and presumably sieves from horsehair, and they had a tradition of centuries to draw on processing their milk, not least because they had to. Lactose intolerance was common in the population, so drinking fresh milk was not an option. Varying the temperature and treatment of the curds allowed for a lot of variation, from yoghurt-like spoonable dishes to firm feta- or peynir-like preparations to hard cheeses that in turn could be salted or air-dried, brined, smoked, or wrapped in leaves and aged. We cannot know (yet), but the Unetice people could easily have enjoyed a variety of fresh and mature cheeses flavoured with salt, herbs, and fruit with their bread and stew. A comparison of size and dental status shows that the people of Unetice culture on average were taller, better nourished, and had better teeth than their neolithic forebears.
Studying the skeleton found in the barrow of Helmsdorf showed that the elite enjoyed a very meat-rich diet, especially the meat of immature animals – lamb, veal, and kid. This suggests they preferred tender meat and likely roasted it. The same skeleton also revealed massive, lethal injuries from being stabbed at close range with a dagger. Traditions, it seems, run deep in both the culinary and the political sphere.
If this is indeed the first known tyrannicide in European history, the attempt was unsuccessful. The system was stable enough to continue after the death of one ruler, at least for some time. There were more rich graves with the same set of jewelry, more axehead hoards, more of the same. In detail, we know little about how this kingdom functioned. It is possible that the rulers’ power was based on spiritual or religious authority, possibly linked to the sky disc itself, but they might equally have been able to monopolise local copper mining, control the amber trade, export enslaved people, or simply led a particularly successful warband to military dominance. These things have happened in societies literate scholars labelled ‘primitive’, the most famous case being the rise of Shaka and the Zulu kingdom which was observed by British officials and eventually turned into 1980s TV.
However it came into being, this kingdom produced a notable amount of social stratification. A small number of exceptionally large and rich graves exist alongside many that are poorer in grave goods than those of other Unetice settlements. There is also an interesting pattern in the way copper and amber are distributed around it, suggesting it dominated and blocked exchange systems. To its north and west, copper and bronze did not appear in anything like similar quantity for centuries while amber becomes rare to its south and east. Perhaps controlling the supply was what made them rich, or perhaps the rulers simply claimed these goods for themselves. Either way, it would take some considerable time until new routes developed going around them to the east, bringing coveted amber south.
In the way archeology will – and in this case with some likelihood – the end of the ‘rulers of Nebra’ is linked to a natural disaster, in this case the aftermath of the eruption of Thera. At this point, the system was simply unstable enough to collapse in the way neighbouring chiefdoms did not. A study of the sky disc suggests that the astronomical knowledge encoded in it was either lost or became irrelevant. The disc was modified, first to include a stylised ship, then holes for mounting on some sort of display. It was too precious to ever have served a purely practical purpose, but towards the end, an artifact of celestial knowledge was turned into a mere symbol of power for its own sake. If it really was owned by the princes, this suggests nothing good about their rule.
The sky disc was buried with a set of objects looking remarkably like princely grave goods. It clearly was deliberate and may have been the final act of some power elite hoping to turn away divine wrath or lay to rest an era best forgotten. In the aftermath, the pattern familiar from nearby regions continues. We find weapons in graves again, chieftains buried with smaller amounts of jewelry, and metal goods in many more burials. Copper and bronze flowed northeast. No more gigantic barrows were raised.
That is all we know, and much of it could still be upended by a new excavation any day. Still, the story looks solid, and it raises the question how this felt to the people who lived through it. Did the people raising the Bornhöck hill feel proud to contribute, or were they forced into corvée labour by axe-bearing thugs? Were farmers grateful for the safety of unfortified villages, or feel defenceless in the face of royal exactions? Clearly, though this power structure outlasted its founders, it was not embraced as a cosmic necessity by its subjects. They did not choose a new king after they were rid of the old one. Perhaps this state had less to offer them than other Bronze Age polities, or just leakier borders that allowed the discontent to simply leave and set up elsewhere. Or perhaps, they actually decided to take matters into their own hands and remove their useless prince, just as it seems other subjects did around this time. We have not found the palace of the ‘Nebra rulers’ and cannot say whether it decayed back into the soil or perished in a blaze. If we ever find it, it could be fascinating indeed.
As it is, the legacy of this vanishing kingdom stands as a warning, or encouraging, example. We can easily envision how, having built up control on the strength of genuine abilities, offering their subjects identification and probably some real benefit, a dynasty of rulers increasingly embraced their power as a given. Their grave goods, though functionally the same – a set of weapons, arm rings, and elaborate pins suggesting a traditional royal garment – the amount of gold used rose from extravagant to genuinely staggering. There is, by the way, every reason to believe they knew, at least through second-hand accounts, of Mycenean Greece, Minoan Crete, the Hittites, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. When excavators their barrows ‘northern pyramids’, they may have been more accurate than they imagined. A king trying to copy the example of New Kingdom pharaohs, or even the more modest Mycenean tumuli, could well have made himself thoroughly unpopular. If you want to run a state for your personal benefit – and who wouldn’t? – it is important to give your subjects something valuable in return. Otherwise, they might just decide a king is not worth the bother and expense.