Gold Reliefs Found in Norway

Aftenposten
Eleven small, golden reliefs have been unearthed at an archaeological dig somewhere in eastern Norway. Officials won't say where, because they think more of the 1,400-year-old gold objects will be found at the site.

that looks well sweeeeet, i want to buy one

hey wow, thats the first time I heard about excavations in norway!...the standard is the middle east..and egypt..

Lol, these officials are very avaricious..

thanks for the info!

regards

dc

That looks awsome, but friggin' small. How did they find them at that small, I mean really!?

I would imagine like all archeologists, they used a seive. This is amazing. I want one too.

I could put it in my tooth and grin! No, heh. I want one too!

Wow....

That is some detail on that. I mean for being that old it has been kept really detailed. And to think American coins can't last more than 10 years usually....

WOW im amazed people could carve that much detail into something that small hundreds of years ago. They must have been pretty advanced to do something like that.

Gold is a soft metal, its relatively easy to carve, and its easy to find because it allways looks like gold.

For me, the dificult part is not the carving but the drawing of the figures, because I am useless has an artist.

Great find, I am glad that people do not forget that humans have been all around the Earth and not only in some famous archeologic regions

I found another link that gives a little bit more specific info on the location, although its doesn't say exactly where www.iol.co.za...

anyone want to take a trip to Norway?

This site should be very close to the swedish "borders" i found a map on approx wich area this should be inmap of south east area of olso

I hope this link will work for you

Scuba

Here's a little more info on the figures. Seems like they might have been used as tokens of some sort. Definitely shows some style.

www.historiska.se...

word, this is a cool find...i wonder when the post office there (or here) will issue commemorative (gold plated?) stamps?

on a serious note, there's not to my knowledge a whole lot of super-mysterious archeological stuff out of norway (or scandinavia for that matter) so this is a nice change from the endless threads on egypt, the pyramids, mesopotamia, the indus valley nuclear wars, and china's ancient pyramids...

One thing, though: I have pictures from a trip to Norway I took a few years back that are kind of interesting...they're from a medieval cathedral (i think 1200-1400 construction date, could be off on that) that has a floor tile inlay with a lot of zodiac tiles. It's nothing super special, but it was just weird -- I don't usually put medieval Christianity and astrology together in my mind, but maybe they were more commonly associated then (at least in Norway) than I thought...I can post the pictures if anyone's interested.

Wow! Beautiful!

The goldsmith's art was fairly well developed by this period of time, and those of you who are familiar with Celtic jewelry can probably recall some British Isle objects from the same time preiod that make use of similar techniques and styles.

Making gold foil is pretty easy (i've done it) ... you just get a little piece of gold and some calfskin (flexible and smooth) and start squashing it by hammering it. You'd be amazed how much gold foil you can get out of a small piece of pure gold. And with iron tools, engraving and shaping gold foil really is a piece of cake (you can try it on copper from one of those crafts stores... copper and gold that's that thin can be worked with wood, actually).

But man, they had GOOD eyes!

Byrd,

Can you make any statements about the image on that? Does it represent or resemble anything you are familiar with. Isn't it in wonderful condition?!? This is really neat.

That is very beautiful. Amazing how skilled the craftsmen were. Its reminiscent of some Norse stuff i have seen, if its a coin then perhaps its a depiction of the ruler of the time? The tradition of depicting the image of who ever was in charge on coinage dates back to at least Roman times.
Doesn't look Celtic to me but i may be wrong.
Still a beautiful piece of work.

Originally posted by Janus
That is very beautiful. Amazing how skilled the craftsmen were. Its reminiscent of some Norse stuff i have seen, if its a coin then perhaps its a depiction of the ruler of the time? The tradition of depicting the image of who ever was in charge on coinage dates back to at least Roman times.
Doesn't look Celtic to me but i may be wrong.
Still a beautiful piece of work.

I doubt that is the case... No one would see the person
If you read in one of the links above, they think its mythological and religious and include various sorts of images (1 person, 2 person, animals).

Originally posted by ArMaP
Gold is a soft metal, its relatively easy to carve, and its easy to find because it allways looks like gold.

For me, the dificult part is not the carving but the drawing of the figures, because I am useless has an artist.

Even though gold is a soft metal it would still be really hard to carve details that small. Im a fairly good artist and I tried to carve figures that small into clay much softer and still found it very hard, I couldnt get close to that size.

Not saying it cant be done but it would take great skill to work on such a small scale considering they likely didnt use any magnification to do it either.

OK, they are very nicely made but , what do you think they were used for? Very nice 'subway token', chit to the stairway to heaven, in to a cool brothel, wedding present??

If I had to vote as to the use of it, I'd say currency, would be interesting to know if all the tokens had a similar weight though. Coins aren't always round. The intrinisic value of gold and other gemstones in ancient history has always intrigued me, as they are pretty much useless in pratical life. Interesting to note though is the unique electromagnetic properties of the things man valued in ancient times.