Danish Bronze Age glass beads traced to Egypt
Posted by TANN
An international collaboration between Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and Institut de Recherche sur les Archéomatériaux (IRAMAT) at Orléans, France, has resulted in a sensational discovery about the trade routes between Denmark and the ancient civilisations in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age 3,400 years ago. The discovery also gives us new knowledge about the sun cult in the Nordic Bronze Age.
Above: The women from the Ølby site. The site was excavated in 1880 by Sophus Müller.
Next to the woman's left arm was a blue glass bead (from Egypt), two amber beads,
and two small bronze spirals; Below: Hesselagergård-pit excavated 1878-81.
On the neck lay a blue (Egyptian) glass bead and five amber beads
Archaeologists Jeanette Varberg from Moesgaard Museum and Flemming Kaul from the National Museum, and Bernard Gratuze, director of IRAMAT, analysed the composition of some blue glass beads found on buried Bronze Age women in Denmark.
The analyses revealed that the glass originate from the same glass workshops in Egypt that supplied the glass that the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun took with him to his grave in 1323 BC.
The study was recently published in SKALK.
Globalisation in the Bronze Age
Twenty-three glass beads from Denmark were analysed using plasma-spectrometry. Without destroying the fragile beads, this technique makes it possible to compare the chemical composition of trace elements in the beads with reference material from Amarna in Egypt and Nippur in Mesopotamia, about 50 km south east of Baghdad in Iraq. The comparison showed that the chemical composition of the two sets of trace elements match.
The analyses of the Danish glass beads (•), here zirconium / titanium and chrome compared
with analytical results from Egypt (orange) and Mesopotamia (purple). A similar split pattern
resulted from the examination of other elements such as cobalt and boron
The researchers' first object for comparison was a bead from a wealthy woman's grave at Ølby, about 40 km south of Copenhagen. The woman had been buried in a more extravagant fashion, lying in a hollowed-out oak trunk and wearing a beautiful belt disc, a smart string skirt with tinkling, shining small bronzes tubes, and an overarm bracelet made of amber beads, and a single blue glass bead.
Two early Mesopotamian gems found in Denmark
[Credit: Denmark National Museum]
The glass bead turned out to be Egyptian. This is the first time that typical Egyptian cobalt glass has been discovered outside the Mediterranean area. The archaeologists can now also substantiate that there is a connection between the amber beads and the glass beads.