A History Ofthe World Objects
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A HISTORY OFTHE WORLD IN100 OBJECTS Neil MacGregor TheB ntis• • h IIIIIIIRADIOQ Museum 92-95FM PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London wc2R ORL,England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y 3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) 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This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council™ certifiedpaper. 19 Mold Gold Cape Finelyworked gold cape,found in Mold, north Wales 1900-1600 BC For the local workmen, it must have seemed as if the old Welsh leg ends were true. They'd been sent to quarry stone in a field known as Bryn-yr-Ellyllon, which translates as the Fairies' Hill or the Goblins' Hill. Sightings of a ghostly boy, clad in gold, a glittering apparition in the moonlight, had been reported frequently enough for travellers to avoid the hill after dark. As the workmen dug into a large mound, they uncovered a stone-lined grave. In it were hundreds of amber beads, several bronze fragments and the remains of a skeleton. And wrapped around the skeleton was a mysterious crushed object - a large and finelydecorated broken sheet of pure gold. This breathtaking object is a gold cape or, perhaps more accurately, a short golden poncho. But we call it a cape. It's a wrapping in punched gold, for the shoulders of a human being. It's about 4 5 centimetres ( r. 5 feet) wide and about 30 centimetres ( r foot) deep, and it would have been put over the head and lowered on to the shoulders, coming down to about the middle of the chest. When you look at it closely you can see that it has been made out of a single sheet of astonishingly thin gold. The whole thing was made 100 19 : MOLD GOLD CAPE from an ingot about the size of a ping-pong ball. The sheet has then been worked from the inside and punched out - so that the overall effect is of strings of beads, carefully spaced and graduated, running from one shoulder to another and going all the way round the body. Looking at it now, you're struck with a sense of enormous complexity and ultimate luxury. It must have astonished the stone-breakers who uncovered it. The workmen made the discovery at Bryn-yr-Ellyllon in 1833. Undeterred by thoughts of ghosts or goblins, and exhilarated by the dazzling wealth of their find,the workmen eagerly shared out chunks of the gold sheet, with the tenant farmer taking the largest pieces. It would have been easy for the story to end there. In 1833, burials from a distant past, however exotic, enjoyed little legal protection. The loca tion of the burial site, near the town of Mold, not far from the north coast of Wales, meant that the wider world could easily have con tinued in ignorance of its existence. That this didn't happen owes everything to the curiosity of a local vicar, Reverend C. B. Clough, who wrote an account of the findthat aroused the interest of the Society of Antiquaries, hundreds of miles away in London. Three years after the spoils from the burial had been divided, the British Museum bought from the tenant farmer the firstand the largest of the fragments of gold, which had been his share of the booty. Much that the vicar recorded had disappeared by then, including virtually the whole skeleton. This left only three large and twelve small crushed and flattened fragments of the decorated gold object. It took another hundred years for the British Museum to gather together enough of the remaining fragments (some are still missing) to begin a complete reconstruction of this divided treasure. What sort of object was it that these fragments had once com posed? When had it been made? Who had worn it? As more archaeo logical discoveries were made in the nineteenth century, it became clear that the Mold burial dated to the newly identifiedBronze Age - around 4,000 years ago. But it was not until the 1960s that the gold pieces were put together for the first time. All the conservators had were flattened fragments of paper-thin gold; some large, some small, with cracks, splits and holes all over them, altogether weighing about half a kilo, or just over a pound. It was like a three-dimensional jigsaw IOI THE BEGINNINGS OF SCIENCE AND LITERATURE puzzle, and solving it took nothing less than the relearning of ancient gold-working techniques that had been lost for millennia. We don't know who made this cape, but it's clear that they were very highly skilled. These were the Carriers or the Tiffanys of Bronze Age Europe. What kind of society could have produced such an object? Its sheer opulence and intricate details suggest that it must have come from a centre of great wealth and power, perhaps comparable to the contemporary courts of the pharaohs of Egypt or the palaces of Minoan Crete. And the careful drawing and planning necessary for such elaborate design suggests a long tradition of luxury production. But archaeology has revealed no obvious palaces, cities or king doms anywhere in Britain at this time. There are the vast ceremonial monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, and there are hundreds of stone circles and thousands of burial mounds which would have dom inated the landscape, but little survives of any dwelling places, and what does remain indicates that these were extremely modest - thatched wooden houses that would normally suggest tribal farming societies, led by chiefs. In the past, it was easy to dismiss British prehistoric societies as primitive people existing before recognizable civilizations emerged; and with few settlements and only burials to work from, it was often entirely reasonable to make such assumptions. But, partly through the discovery of rare objects like the Mold Gold Cape, in recent years we have come to see these societies very differently. For, while it's unique in its complexity, the cape is just one example of several precious objects that tell us that societies in Britain must then have been extremely sophisticated, both in their manufacture and in their social structure. They also tell us, like the jade axe from Canterbury (Chapter 14), that these societies were not isolated but part of a larger European trade network. For example, the collection of small amber beads that was found with the cape must have come from the Baltic - many hun dreds of miles away from Mold. By studying these precious objects - gold, amber and, above all, bronze - we can track a web of trade and exchange that reaches from north Wales to Scandinavia, and even to the Mediterranean. We can also identify the source of the wealth which made this trade possible. The Mold Cape was buried relatively close to the largest Bronze Age I02 I9 : MOLD GOLD CAPE copper mine in north-west Europe, the Great Orme. The copper from there, and tin from Cornwall, would have provided the ingredients for the vast majority of British bronze objects. A peak of activity at the Great Orme mine has been dated between 1900 BC and 1600 BC. Recent analysis of the gold-working techniques, and the decorative style of the cape, dates the burial to this very period. So although we can only guess, it's likely that the wearers of this extraordinary object were in some way linked to the mine, which would have been a source of great wealth, and a major trading centre for the whole of north west Europe.