An astronomical table in gold
The hat's decoration is believed to calculate lunar and solar cycles.
Altera levatur — CC0 · Berthold Werner — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Rüdiger Stehn from Kiel, Deutschland — CC BY-SA 2.0 · GFreihalter — CC BY-SA 4.0
Four Bronze Age golden cones found in Germany and France, believed to have been headgear for priests or rulers. Their importance lies in the decoration: rows of circles and symbols that appear to encode astronomical cycles allowing prediction of lunar phases and eclipses. If that reading holds, it means Bronze Age societies in central Europe possessed systematic astronomical knowledge before writing.
By train in about forty-five minutes with a change, or by car in around forty minutes. The town is small and its centre walkable: the cathedral and the museum stand metres apart, and the town also holds a twelfth-century Jewish ritual bath, among the oldest surviving in Europe. A comfortable full day.
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A regional museum in Speyer beside the cathedral, covering the history of the Palatinate from prehistory to the present. Its most famous holding is the Golden Hat of Schifferstadt: a golden cone about twenty-nine centimetres high, made from a single thin sheet of gold some three and a half thousand years ago in the Bronze Age. Only four such objects exist in the world. The circular decoration on it is not ornament: researchers believe it is an astronomical table calculating lunar and solar cycles — meaning this object is a Bronze Age calendrical instrument. Also here is the Speyer wine bottle: a glass flask of the fourth century found in a Roman grave, still holding liquid. It is regarded as the oldest wine bottle in the world still sealed and liquid. Alongside them are sections on the cathedral and on the city's Jewish history. Speyer itself matters: its eleventh-century Romanesque cathedral is UNESCO-listed and is the largest surviving Romanesque church in the world.
The hat's decoration is believed to calculate lunar and solar cycles.
Fourth-century, found in a Roman grave and still sealed and liquid.
Eleventh-century Romanesque, and the largest surviving anywhere.
Beside Speyer Cathedral, the town centre