The Cape Cod Museum of Natural History presents Curiosity Stream’s The Nebra Sky Disc Presented by CCMNH

The Nebra Sky Disc dated 1800 B.C. is the oldest sky map in the world, predating Babylonian and Egyptian sky maps. Found in Germany in 1999, the Nebra Sky Disk is an archaeological mystery.  When it was buried, it had already been in use for 200 years. While its raw materials, bronze and gold, were imported from as far away as Cornwall, the knowledge required to create the object was entirely local, drawn from observing the heavens from atop Mittelberg, a mountain near the modern village of Nebra.
 
The bronze disc had five phases over its history. In the first phase, the disc showed the night sky with 32 gold stars, including the Pleiades, a gold orb representing the sun or a full moon, and a crescent moon. It served as a reminder of when it was necessary to synchronize the lunar and solar years by inserting a leap month. This phenomenon occurred when the
three-and-a-half-day-old moon—the crescent moon on the disc—was visible at the same time as the Pleiades.
 
“The astronomical rules that are depicted wouldn’t be imaginable without decades of intensive observation,” says Harald Meller, director of the State Museum for Prehistory in Halle. “Until the Sky Disc was discovered, no one thought prehistoric people capable of such precise astronomical knowledge.”
 
Who were the people who designed this beautiful and functional ancient artifact with exact proportions? The mystery remains.