Berlin Gold Hat

The Berlin Gold Hat or Berlin Golden Hat (German: Berliner Goldhut) is a Late Bronze Age artefact made of thin gold leaf. It served as the external covering on a long conical brimmed headdress, probably of an organic material. It is now in the Neues Museum on Museum Island in Berlin, in a room by itself with an elaborate explanatory display.

The Berlin Gold Hat is the best preserved specimen among the four known conical Golden hats known from Bronze Age Europe so far. Of the three others, two were found in southern Germany, and one in the west of France. All were found in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is generally assumed that the hats served as the insignia of deities or priests in the context of a sun cult that appears to have been widespread in Central Europe at the time. The hats are also suggested to have served astronomical/calendrical functions.

The Berlin Gold Hat was acquired in 1996 by the Berlin Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte as a single find without provenance. A comparative study of the ornaments and techniques in conjunction with dateable finds suggests that it was made in the Late Bronze Age, circa 1,000 to 800 BC.

The Berlin gold hat is a 490 g gold hat with a long and slender conical shaft and a differentiated convex foot, decorated all over with traced motifs, applied with small stamps and wheels. Its composition is very similar to the previously known Golden Cone of Ezelsdorf-Buch.

At the bottom of the cone, the sheet gold of the Berlin hat is reinforced by a 10 mm wide ring of sheet bronze. The external edge of the brim is strengthened by a twisted square-sectioned wire, around which the gold leaf is turned upwards.

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