Garrett Olmsted
I am a retired professor of anthropology and linguistics, specializing in the Iron-Age archaeology of France and the British Isles, and Celtic languages and epic literature. I have taught at Harvard (Phd), Cornell (Society for the Humanities), the University of Missouri, Columbia (Research Assistant), and Bluefield State College (Full Professor, now Emeritus). My interests are archaeology, art, culture, languages, and religions of ancient Europe and the ancient the Near East. My specializations are 50 years of researching and writing about the Gundestrup cauldron (produced in Armorica 80-55 BC) and what it tells us about Celtic religion (See my Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans Revised (1994-2019) on Academia), and about early Celtic Art (see my 2001 Celt Art in Transition during the First Century BC). My other major interest has been the Gaulish Calendar, about which I have published a great deal.
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Here in the present work, I take the opposite view and begin solely with the Gaulish material, much of which is pictorial. Portrayed scenes on decorated Armorican cauldrons and episodes of Celtic myths indicated in brief accounts of Celtic myth recorded by Classical authors are the items presented in this study. The interpretation of what is portrayed and what is recounted are based upon aligning this more ancient material with the corresponding accounts preserved in medieval Irish sources. Although the Irish texts are used to interpret the portrayed episodes, there is no need to compare varying versions of Irish texts.
What is portrayed on each cauldron is presented as a variant of the textual repertoire. For this reason, the ability to critique the Old Irish sources is of less significance to an analysis of the material presented. I trust that those who found my earlier publications daunting will find this work more appealing. The interested reader will find an analysis of the relevant Irish texts in detail in my previous works, now all available on academia.edu. These previous works are indicated in the Bibliography at the end of this present work, and the relevant topics, including a cursory analysis of the Irish sources, are discussed in the Appendix.
Although Ginoux recognized that the twin dragons as well as the palmette, another widespread symbol among the La Tène Celts, related to the spiritual realm, up till now the significance of what they implied has remained a mystery. Further iconographic detail about these early Celtic symbols is provided by Armorican coins and decorated cauldrons (from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee) created just before Caesar’s victory over the Veneti (56 BC). What I attempt here is to elucidate the significance of these motifs through an analysis of the early Irish narrative sources, ultimately deriving from the same Atlantic Iron Age culture as the silver and gold Armorican cauldrons, which enable a reconstruction of the mythology behind this symbolism.
Being in direct contact with Celtic-speaking peoples from the sixth-century BC on, it is also likely that Greek and Roman creators of anthologies of, or even those just noting down passing-references to, attention-grabbing mythic tales, such as Ovid (Metamorphoses) and Plutarch (Moralia), recorded elements of Celtic belief as integral aspects of what they chose to write down. Where early Irish tales describe similar characters and themes, Classical sources then can give verification to the likely presence of these themes in the contemporary early Celtic repertoire as well. Of course, the iconographic portrayal of these themes on preconquest repoussé-decorated cauldrons and on Romano-Gaulish stone monuments serves much the same purpose of sifting out the material relating to the Atlantic Iron Age from the early medieval Irish manuscript sources.
Alongside a belief in a heavenly paradise on an Island where the Sun Sets, as in the seventh century Irish Immram Brain, which is manifest even to this day in the Hebrides and in Brittany, the Celts of Gaul also believed in a cycle of rebirth, returning the soul substance to a new more mundane life. Julius Caesar in de Bello Gallico (BG: VI, 14) indicates that “the cardinal doctrine which they (druides) seek to teach is souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another” (non interire animas, sed ab aliis post mortem transire ad alios) (Edwards 1917: 338-9). In this crediting the Gauls with a belief in metempsychosis (Watson 2020: 1), Caesar followed Poseidonius (Diodorus Siculus: BH: V.38.6) and was followed by Ammianus Marcellinus (RGL: XXXI, XV.ix.4). Thus, at the time of Caesar’s conquest of the Veneti and the creation of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons, reincarnation was a major doctrine of Gaulish religious belief, and this belief is likely reflected in some aspect of the symbolic iconography.
Les poèmes eux-mêmes donnent de brèves descriptions de la nature de la ou des divinités en question et de brefs aperçus des mythes autour desquels ils ont été composés. Ils proposent ainsi une introduction à la religion celtique en utilisant les paroles de poètes qui adoraient encore les sujets de leurs compositions comme des dieux, ou du moins considéraient encore les sujets de leurs compositions comme des esprits surhumains qui hantaient encore le lieu dans lequel le poète décrivait les événements, comme ayant lieu. Le lecteur est ainsi initié à la religion celtique à partir de sources originales, plutôt qu’à partir de l’interprétation académique d’un érudit. Pour des raisons similaires, j'ai placé une seule planche à la fin de chaque chapitre qui illustre certains aspects du ou des poèmes du chapitre précédent, mais dans laquelle l'image a également été créée par un artiste qui adorait les dieux ou les déesses représentés. Que le poème et l'image aient été créés par des artistes adorant les mêmes divinités, je laisse au lecteur le soin de décider.
Die ursprünglichen Gedichte wurden größtenteils auf Altirisch verfasst, aber ich habe eines auf Schottisch-Gälisch verfasst, und mehrere wurden auf Mittelirisch verfasst. Es gibt auch mehrere andere Gedichte, die in nicht-keltischen Sprachen verfasst wurden und Gottheiten beschreiben, die den keltischen Gottheiten in ihrer Handlung und ihrem Mythos ähneln, aber zu einer Zeit und an einem Ort verfasst wurden, an dem ähnliche verwandte Gottheiten noch verehrt wurden. Daher füge ich hier meine eigenen Versübersetzungen von Gedichten hinzu, die ursprünglich in Latein, Griechisch, Sanskrit, Akkadisch, Sumerisch und einigen aus dem Gallischen und Keltiberischen verfasst wurden. Aber denn muss ich meine Englische Übersetzung auf Deutsch transformieren. Meine deutsche Übersetzung ist dann inhaltlich korrekt, aber ob sie poetisch bleibt oder nicht, bleibt Glückssache. Wenn Sie Verse wünschen, müssen Sie die englische Version dieses Artikels konsultieren, die auch auf academia.edu zu finden ist, oder, noch besser, die Gedichte in der Originalsprache lesen. Ich gebe hier auch das Original im Anschluss an die Übersetzung.
Die Gedichte selbst geben kurze Beschreibungen der Natur der betreffenden Gottheit oder Gottheiten und kurze Umrisse der Mythen, um die sie herum verfasst wurden. Sie stellen somit eine Einführung in die keltische Religion dar und verwenden dabei die Worte von Dichtern, die die Themen ihrer Kompositionen immer noch als Götter verehrten oder die Themen ihrer Kompositionen zumindest noch immer für übermenschliche Geister hielten, die immer noch den Ort heimsuchten, an dem der Dichter die Ereignisse beschrieb als stattfindend. Der Leser wird dadurch anhand von Originalquellen in die keltische Religion eingeführt und nicht anhand der akademischen Interpretation eines Gelehrten. Aus ähnlichen Gründen habe ich am Ende jedes Kapitels eine einzelne Tafel angebracht, die einige Aspekte des Gedichts oder der Gedichte im vorhergehenden Kapitel illustriert, auf der das Bild jedoch auch von einem Künstler geschaffen wurde, der die dargestellten Götter oder Göttinnen verehrte. Dass sowohl das Gedicht als auch das Bild von Künstlern geschaffen wurden, die dieselben Gottheiten verehren, überlasse ich dem Leser.
The poems themselves give brief descriptions of the nature of the deity or deities in question and brief outlines of the myths they were composed around. They thus provide an introduction to Celtic religion using the words of poets who still worshiped the subjects of their compositions as gods, or at least still thought of the subjects of their compositions as superhuman spirits who still haunted the place in which the poet described the events as taking place. The reader is thereby introduced to Celtic religion from original sources, rather than from some scholar’s academic interpretation. For similar reasons, I have placed a single plate at the end of each chapter which illustrates some aspect of the poem or poems in the preceding chapter, but in which the image also was created by an artist who worshipped the gods or goddesses portrayed. That both the poem and the image were created by artists worshipping the same deities I leave to the reader to decide.
Without some means of sifting the kernel of truth about Celtic myth from the chaff of unverified guesses, little could be stated about the true nature of pre-Christian Celtic religion, at least very little which is accurate. Even worse than inaccurate, what passes for scholarship is often totally misleading. The Celts definitely did not worship trees and totem animals any more than did the Greeks or Romans. Indeed, Celtic mystery cults had the same subtility as those found in contemporary Greece, Rome, and India, with the same object in mind: to pass to a better existence at death than the gloomy dreariness of the grave or again the repetition of the whole round of plagues, famine, and war through the cycle of rebirth.
Inner plate 3 of the Chiemsee cauldron depicts two horsemen, each holding a severed head in the left hand while waving a sword held in the right hand. The scene depicts an event which crops up later in the Irish tale Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (Ní Shéaghdha 1967). When Finn sends warriors up the tree to bring down Diarmaid, thinking each descending comrade in turn is Diarmaid, the warriors waiting below behead each one when he reaches the ground. Each rider on inner plate 3 holds a sword, even though behind each rider there is the clear portrayal of a sword still in its scabbard attached to the rear horn of the saddle.
Chiemsee inner plate 3 now can be seen to depict actual contemporary Gaulish examples of sword mounts. Furthermore, just such a Knollenknaufschwert also is portrayed on Chiemsee outer plate 6. Verifying its genuine nature, the Chiemsee cauldron predicts that such saddle-fastened Knollenknaufschwert mounts should have existed in Gaul. Until August of 2023 (but for an indication of one of three possibilities in the Appendix to Krämer 1962), neither I nor anyone else ever suspected that the mountings on these swords were used to fasten them to the rear horns of saddles. Thus, the depiction on the Chiemsee cauldron portrays an actually-utilized mounting system.
The function of the rapier-like Knollenknaufschwerter was to penetrate armor like that depicted on Chiemsee outer plates 2 and 6. In tests even 20-layer-thick laminated-linen armor, which protected the wearer from arrows, sling bolts, and sword slashes, could be penetrated by a strong thrust from a narrow-pointed rapier-like weapon. Thus, the Chiemsee cauldron teaches us about the use intended for the sword shape and unusual mountings of the Knollenknaufschwerter, the subject of much debate since first being adequately studied by Krämer in 1962.
The objective of this monograph is to present, alongside the source material from which the myths were derived, the 16 pages of reconstructed Gaulish-myth to be found in sections B0-B10. It is clear that the pre-Christian Celts of the Atlantic-Iron-Age culture possessed a religion and supporting body of myth and ritual as rich as that found in contemporary Greece or India. They also looked forward after death either toward reincarnation through the locus of the moon or, if worthy, toward attaining on the Island where the Sun sets, a physical body identical to the one they had at youthful maturity, but one as uncorruptible as the gold torcs the warriors wore to show their adherence to the concept of vīros “truth and loyalty”.
At the stage they were first written down, Ireland, the Atlantic Celtic culture that best preserved the myths, had recently adopted the new religion of Christianity. The earlier gods were euhemerized into the key players of pseudo-history. Before the euhemerized myths first entered manuscript tradition, they were recorded earlier in iconographic portrayal in Armorica, the Atlantic Celtic culture that first adopted narrative portrayal. Like myth recorded in language, the language of iconography has its own systematic units of portrayal. Aside from the coinage, the earliest recording of Celtic myth is the narrative portrayal in repousse metalwork, such as that depicted on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons.
The association of the Gundestrup cauldron with Irish myth is limited to the Táin and the Remscéla “Fore Tales”. The Gundestrup cauldron commemorates the vernal equinox festival, making clear the original role of the Gaulish myth giving rise to the Táin. My discovery that the Chiemsee cauldron was genuine in April of 2019 was the key to filling in the missing half of Gaulish mythology: the Medieval Irish tales that developed from the Gaulish myths associated with the autumnal equinox.
Just as the Rosetta Stone provided a means to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, so too the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons provide the pictural narration of earlier versions of myth-based epics and tales. Beginning in the sixth century AD, these narrations began to be transferred to manuscript preservation from oral preservation through repeated recitation by a professional class of priests, poets, and lawyers: the veletes “seers” composed of druidēs, bardi, vātīs, and britovii. Like the later Irish filid, Caesar in de Bello Gallico (vi.14.3) records that the druidēs spent twenty years attending recitation classes where they learned many lines in verse.
While the Gundestrup cauldron was recognized as ancient upon its discovery in 1891, the gold Chiemsee cauldron was misjudged to be a recent production when it was first scrutinized by a Munich museum-curator unfamiliar with the art style and the mythology preserved on its close silver cousin, the Gundestrup cauldron. The golden Chiemsee cauldron portrays motifs depicted in the same Armorican-coin art-style to be found on the Gundestrup cauldron. However, the Chiemsee cauldron art style duplicates that found on Armorican coins minted a couple of decades later than the Armorican coins duplicating the art style of the Gundestrup cauldron. Thus, the museum curator was wrong in asserting that the Chiemsee cauldron is a fake inspired by the Gundestrup cauldron. The Chiemsee cauldron does not copy the style of the Gundestrup cauldron, but rather it copies the art-style found in the same Armorican culture a few decades earlier. Also, the Chiemsee cauldron depicts motifs for the most part different from those depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron, again motifs found on Armorican coins but not found on the Gundestrup cauldron.
Some who have condemned the cauldron as fake would suffer embarrassment if the cauldron should prove to be genuine, since it would be the greatest single treasure from the ancient world ever found. Until the discovery of the Chiemsee cauldron, the Gundestrup cauldron was the unique witness to pre-Roman Celtic religious iconographic narration. Because of the Gundestrup cauldron’s uniqueness it is has been difficult to place it in its proper cultural perspective. Because of its uniqueness there has been a great deal of debate about its nature. With the finding of the Chiemsee cauldron, we have a doubling of the information about these pieces. Both cauldrons fit within the cultural milieu of an origin in Armorica just before Caesar’s conquest, the Gundestrup cauldron being constructed 10 to 20 years before the Chiemsee cauldron. Only with the recognition that the Chiemsee Cauldron is a genuine witness alongside the Gundestrup cauldron to the art and religion of the Veneti can we begin to incorporate the vast amount of information these two time-capsules convey to us about this hitherto lost culture.
Nonetheless, the trace mineral analysis, especially as concerns the Chiemsee cauldron’s low level of lead (ave. 80% Au, 20% Ag, 1.3 ppm Pb) definitely fits Cornish gold/silver nuggets from Tresillian (ave. 80% Au, 20% Ag, and 1.3 ppm Pb) better than it does more-readily-available modern sources of gold and silver. If as Northover contended the 8.8 kg of gold in the cauldron came from electrolytic gold, the 2.2 kg of silver would have had to come from electrolytic silver which contains 250 ppm lead, giving 50 ppm lead for the cauldron’s proposed electrolytic sources. Given the 11 kg weight of the cauldron, it would be more difficult today to obtain that weight of Cornish nuggets than it would have been 2000 years ago.
In contrast to the almost non-existent investigation of the Chiemsee cauldron (other than its metal content) conducted in 2002, I have spent three-and-one-half years engaging in research full-time on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron (see Olmsted 2021, as relates to the metal analysis consult pp. 139-158). Such a time period is minimally adequate to investigate a piece containing iconography, artistic style, narrative portrayal, culturally-significant items, in addition to its metallurgical content. I may note that it was 50 years ago that I began to research and write about the silver Gundestrup cauldron, the topic of my PhD dissertation in linguistics and archaeology at Harvard University, published in 1979 by Collection Latomus.
All admit the Chiemsee cauldron closely resembles the Gundestrup cauldron. I would submit that studying the Gundestrup cauldron is a prerequisite for investigating the Chiemsee cauldron. Celtic decorated cauldrons are complex, containing vast amounts of information to unravel, as Rolf Hachmann’s massive 1990 work on the displayed items (among a sea of other publications) would indicate. Beside this present work on the metal analysis, my many studies on all the above aspects of the gold and silver Celtic cauldrons are now freely available under my profile on academia.edu.
From a determination that the solder used to fasten the plates contained around 5% zinc, Ludwig Wamser and Rupert Gebhard concluded that the Chiemsee cauldron was made after 1600 AD, when zinc became available in its metallic form. From the Chiemsee cauldron’s close similarity to the Gundestrup cauldron, they went on to conclude that the Chiemsee cauldron would have to have been made after that item was found in Denmark in 1891. However, recent studies indicate that rudimentary small-batch cementation techniques can produce brass with a two-to-one ratio of copper to zinc as found in the Chiemsee solder, a necessary level of the zinc in the brass, in an item containing 10% copper, for the zinc in the solder to reach 5% (a ratio of copper to zinc of 2/1). Thus, it is now clear that the zinc in the solder could have come from Gaulish-produced brass containing 2/3 copper and 1/3 zinc. New investigations demonstrate that not only was brass being produced in north Gaul by 70 BC, but that the small-batch methods utilized were capable of producing brass with such high-levels of zinc, especially as relates to foil-like paillons for the solder. Since ancient techniques could reach this 2/1 ratio of copper to zinc, the 5% zinc in the solder cannot be used to rule out the possibility of the cauldron’s ancient production by the same culture which produced the Gundestrup cauldron. Both cauldrons being made by the same culture would explain the close resemblance in the art style and engraving technique of the gold cauldron to the silver cauldron (see Olmsted 2022b).
Since the Chiemsee cauldron contains three-quarters gold and one quarter silver, the Bavarian Ministry found the ratio suspiciously close to that of dental gold, which might have been obtained during the NS-regime. This suspicion of NSDAP-production ultimately led to the National Geographic’s 2012 documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. Fortunately, from 2004 to 2007 the Chiemsee cauldron was the subject of intensive metal-content analysis by some of the world’s most-gifted metallurgists. Literally, we know the Chiemsee cauldron inside and out. Because of low levels of platinum and palladium, the cauldron cannot have been made from dental gold, which contains high amounts of these elements to harden it.
The similarities between the art style of the motifs in the Chiemsee cauldron and those in the Gundestrup cauldron are so blatant, either the Chiemsee cauldron was made by ancient craftsmen working in the same style as those who created the Gundestrup cauldron, or it is a copy created after the discovery of the Gundestrup cauldron in Denmark in 1891. If the Chiemsee cauldron is not a recent copy, both it and the Gundestrup cauldron must have been produced in the same region during the same period. If the Chiemsee cauldron is real, then a determination of the find spot of the Gundestrup cauldron will determine that of the Chiemsee cauldron and vice-versa.
The research for the original 2001 edition of this work utilized a high-resolution scanner and Adobe Photoshop to generate plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size, enabling one easily to examine and compare, side-by-side, pieces of similar style and technique, no matter what the original scale of the image. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork items, such as phalerae and cauldrons. A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the decorative imagery on both eastern and western European metalwork during the first-century BC, apart from Greece and Rome, was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find distributions, these coins enable one to determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory.
In this revised edition a detailed analysis of the artistic technique behind the Chiemsee cauldron has been added to that of the Gundestrup cauldron. This revised study of the art of the Celtic cauldrons, in relation to each other as well as to that on coins, utilized around 50 high-resolution 80-megabyte digitalized images of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to examine the artists techniques in greater detail. Furthermore, in 2003-4 the Danish National Museum conducted a detailed study of the techniques used to construct the Gundestrup cauldron, which was published in Acta Archeologica: 76 (Nielsen et al: 2005) and is now available on academia.edu. The conclusions of this study included the important result the Gundestrup-cauldron silver came from two sources: one used to mint north Gaulish quinars and the other to mint Armorican Coriosolite staters, demonstrating that the Gundestrup cauldron was made from western, not eastern, sources of silver. The results of this Danish-National-Museum study have been incorporated into the present work as well as into my other more recent studies of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published in academia.edu.
After a cursory inspection, the National Museum in Munich decided not to accept the Chiemsee cauldron, suspecting that it might have been made of dental gold during WW2. This suspicion was based upon a vague similarity in the gold and silver percentages in dental gold to the percentages of these metals in the cauldron. This horrifying suggestion finally culminated in the National Geographic documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. After being at the center of a fraud trial in Switzerland, ending in a bankruptcy sale in 2012, the cauldron made its way to a new vault in Houston, Texas. Again, the cauldron became the centerpiece of a lawsuit.
Because of all of this negative publicity, aside from an analysis of the composition of the Chiemsee-cauldron metals, I seem to be the only scholar who has attempted a serious examination of the motifs on the cauldron. The low levels of 7 ppm of either platinum or palladium determined in 2007 by Peter Northover, compared to a minimum of 5000 ppm of each metal for dental gold, proves the fallacy of this dental-gold surmise, removing a lot of the stigma associated with the cauldron. The 1.3 ppm lead in the cauldron also demonstrates that it cannot have been made from an amalgam of electrolytic gold (as Northover then suggested). Aside from the 70-80% gold, the cauldron also contains 20-25% silver. If the gold came from electrolytic gold, electrolytic silver would then be the purest source of silver which could have been added to create the amalgam. However, such an amalgam would still contain a minimum of at least 50 ppm lead, since electrolytic silver contains 250 ppm lead.
Gold/silver nuggets from Cornwall show a similar composition to the Chiemsee cauldron amalgam in gold and silver as well as similar trace elements of lead and platinum, and they are the likely source for the metal used to construct the cauldron. The zinc, which Northover found in the solder to fasten the cauldron plates, could have come from cementation-produced brass, which was being created in north Gaul as early as 80 BC, twenty years before the probable construction-date of the Chiemsee cauldron. The presence of zinc in the solder cannot be used to deny the ancient origin of the cauldron. The ancient nature of the Chiemsee cauldron then rests upon an examination of the motifs portrayed on it.
In 2019 the then-owner requested that I examine the Chiemsee cauldron. After an initial study of the photos and Northover’s metallurgical analysis of the cauldron, the late Ralph Rowlett and I concluded that the cauldron might indeed be late Iron Age in date. The likely genuine nature of the cauldron was confirmed by a careful inspection of the piece in Houston. Three years of research and writing about the cauldron have followed that initial inspection. It is my firm belief that there is no possibility whatsoever that the Chiemsee cauldron is fake. Ralph Rowlett and I presented our initial findings in a joint lecture to the Archaeological Institute of America in St Louis (“Tale of Two Kettles”, November 11, 2019). Earlier, I had presented these findings to the Celtic Congress in Bangor, Wales (July, 2019).
In 1995 a mint-master metalsmith’s workshop was uncovered in Swabia. However, the finds were not published until 2011. The finds include a hammer for finishing small objects, files, chisels, eight iron piece-punches with different faces: a fine line, two sorts of dots, an oval, a fine curve and a broader curve. The find also included the iron dies for silver quinarii produced by these punches (Ziegaus 2011: 289-294). We now know the exact techniques used to produce the coin images. The analysis of Gaulish coins also has been revised to incorporate the conclusions of John Sills’s 2003 study Gaulish and Early British Gold Coinage as well as Philip de Jersey’s series published in academia.edu on the Câtillon-II hoard.
This work, which includes a detailed analysis of the art style of the Chiemsee cauldron (as well as that of the Gundestrup and Rynkeby cauldrons), thus, completes three years of research and writing on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron. This work also completes fifty years of research and writing about all aspects of the Gundestrup cauldron. Other works on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published by me on academia.edu as a result of this research include: Celtic Gods who Control Rejuvenation, Rebirth, and the Island where the Sun Sets (2021a); The Armorican Origins of the Silver and Gold Celtic Cauldrons from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee (2021b); A History of the Chiemsee Cauldron (2021d), and The Myths Portrayed on the Chiemsee Cauldron (2022). A revised edition of my earlier work on the gods and myths portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron is also available on academia.edu: The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans (1992-2019). One may also find on academia.edu all my works of the Coligny calendar.
The original research, conducted in 1999-2000, begun after viewing, for comparison with western European items, the important pieces of Thracian silverwork housed in Romanian and Bulgarian museums. The research required the computer-generation of around 1500 four-megabyte images of the motifs under study to be projected onto 142 plates. The original study was made available in a joint publication of Archaeolingua and Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. By combining plates from the original edition and eliminating those which were of lesser importance, I have limited the number of plates in this addition to 82. Where plates have been eliminated from the current edition, I have provided references to the earlier edition. By transforming the images for this addition from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, I was able to divide the work into four sections, each containing around twenty 450-kilobyte plates (with 10 to 12 comparable items per plate), keeping each section under 10 megabytes for ease of downloading.
The similarities between the art style of the motifs in the Chiemsee cauldron and those in the Gundestrup cauldron are so blatant, either the Chiemsee cauldron was made by ancient craftsmen working in the same style as those who created the Gundestrup cauldron, or it is a copy created after the discovery of the Gundestrup cauldron in Denmark in 1891. If the Chiemsee cauldron is not a recent copy, both it and the Gundestrup cauldron must have been produced in the same region during the same period. If the Chiemsee cauldron is real, then a determination of the find spot of the Gundestrup cauldron will determine that of the Chiemsee cauldron and vice-versa.
The research for the original 2001 edition of this work utilized a high-resolution scanner and Adobe Photoshop to generate plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size, enabling one easily to examine and compare, side-by-side, pieces of similar style and technique, no matter what the original scale of the image. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork items, such as phalerae and cauldrons. A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the decorative imagery on both eastern and western European metalwork during the first-century BC, apart from Greece and Rome, was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find distributions, these coins enable one to determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory.
In this revised edition a detailed analysis of the artistic technique behind the Chiemsee cauldron has been added to that of the Gundestrup cauldron. This revised study of the art of the Celtic cauldrons, in relation to each other as well as to that on coins, utilized around 50 high-resolution 80-megabyte digitalized images of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to examine the artists techniques in greater detail. Furthermore, in 2003-4 the Danish National Museum conducted a detailed study of the techniques used to construct the Gundestrup cauldron, which was published in Acta Archeologica: 76 (Nielsen et al: 2005) and is now available on academia.edu. The conclusions of this study included the important result the Gundestrup-cauldron silver came from two sources: one used to mint north Gaulish quinars and the other to mint Armorican Coriosolite staters, demonstrating that the Gundestrup cauldron was made from western, not eastern, sources of silver. The results of this Danish-National-Museum study have been incorporated into the present work as well as into my other more recent studies of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published in academia.edu.
After a cursory inspection, the National Museum in Munich decided not to accept the Chiemsee cauldron, suspecting that it might have been made of dental gold during WW2. This suspicion was based upon a vague similarity in the gold and silver percentages in dental gold to the percentages of these metals in the cauldron. This horrifying suggestion finally culminated in the National Geographic documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. After being at the center of a fraud trial in Switzerland, ending in a bankruptcy sale in 2012, the cauldron made its way to a new vault in Houston, Texas. Again, the cauldron became the centerpiece of a lawsuit.
Because of all of this negative publicity, aside from an analysis of the composition of the Chiemsee-cauldron metals, I seem to be the only scholar who has attempted a serious examination of the motifs on the cauldron. The low levels of 7 ppm of either platinum or palladium determined in 2007 by Peter Northover, compared to a minimum of 5000 ppm of each metal for dental gold, proves the fallacy of this dental-gold surmise, removing a lot of the stigma associated with the cauldron. The 1.3 ppm lead in the cauldron also demonstrates that it cannot have been made from an amalgam of electrolytic gold (as Northover then suggested). Aside from the 70-80% gold, the cauldron also contains 20-25% silver. If the gold came from electrolytic gold, electrolytic silver would then be the purest source of silver which could have been added to create the amalgam. However, such an amalgam would still contain a minimum of at least 50 ppm lead, since electrolytic silver contains 250 ppm lead.
Gold/silver nuggets from Cornwall show a similar composition to the Chiemsee cauldron amalgam in gold and silver as well as similar trace elements of lead and platinum, and they are the likely source for the metal used to construct the cauldron. The zinc, which Northover found in the solder to fasten the cauldron plates, could have come from cementation-produced brass, which was being created in north Gaul as early as 80 BC, twenty years before the probable construction-date of the Chiemsee cauldron. The presence of zinc in the solder cannot be used to deny the ancient origin of the cauldron. The ancient nature of the Chiemsee cauldron then rests upon an examination of the motifs portrayed on it.
In 2019 the then-owner requested that I examine the Chiemsee cauldron. After an initial study of the photos and Northover’s metallurgical analysis of the cauldron, the late Ralph Rowlett and I concluded that the cauldron might indeed be late Iron Age in date. The likely genuine nature of the cauldron was confirmed by a careful inspection of the piece in Houston. Three years of research and writing about the cauldron have followed that initial inspection. It is my firm belief that there is no possibility whatsoever that the Chiemsee cauldron is fake. Ralph Rowlett and I presented our initial findings in a joint lecture to the Archaeological Institute of America in St Louis (“Tale of Two Kettles”, November 11, 2019). Earlier, I had presented these findings to the Celtic Congress in Bangor, Wales (July, 2019).
In 1995 a mint-master metalsmith’s workshop was uncovered in Swabia. However, the finds were not published until 2011. The finds include a hammer for finishing small objects, files, chisels, eight iron piece-punches with different faces: a fine line, two sorts of dots, an oval, a fine curve and a broader curve. The find also included the iron dies for silver quinarii produced by these punches (Ziegaus 2011: 289-294). We now know the exact techniques used to produce the coin images. The analysis of Gaulish coins also has been revised to incorporate the conclusions of John Sills’s 2003 study Gaulish and Early British Gold Coinage as well as Philip de Jersey’s series published in academia.edu on the Câtillon-II hoard.
This work, which includes a detailed analysis of the art style of the Chiemsee cauldron (as well as that of the Gundestrup and Rynkeby cauldrons), thus, completes three years of research and writing on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron. This work also completes fifty years of research and writing about all aspects of the Gundestrup cauldron. Other works on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published by me on academia.edu as a result of this research include: Celtic Gods who Control Rejuvenation, Rebirth, and the Island where the Sun Sets (2021a); The Armorican Origins of the Silver and Gold Celtic Cauldrons from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee (2021b); A History of the Chiemsee Cauldron (2021d), and The Myths Portrayed on the Chiemsee Cauldron (2022). A revised edition of my earlier work on the gods and myths portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron is also available on academia.edu: The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans (1992-2019). One may also find on academia.edu all my works of the Coligny calendar.
The original research, conducted in 1999-2000, begun after viewing, for comparison with western European items, the important pieces of Thracian silverwork housed in Romanian and Bulgarian museums. The research required the computer-generation of around 1500 four-megabyte images of the motifs under study to be projected onto 142 plates. The original study was made available in a joint publication of Archaeolingua and Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. By combining plates from the original edition and eliminating those which were of lesser importance, I have limited the number of plates in this addition to 82. Where plates have been eliminated from the current edition, I have provided references to the earlier edition. By transforming the images for this addition from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, I was able to divide the work into four sections, each containing around twenty 450-kilobyte plates (with 10 to 12 comparable items per plate), keeping each section under 10 megabytes for ease of downloading.
The similarities between the art style of the motifs in the Chiemsee cauldron and those in the Gundestrup cauldron are so blatant, either the Chiemsee cauldron was made by ancient craftsmen working in the same style as those who created the Gundestrup cauldron, or it is a copy created after the discovery of the Gundestrup cauldron in Denmark in 1891. If the Chiemsee cauldron is not a recent copy, both it and the Gundestrup cauldron must have been produced in the same region during the same period. If the Chiemsee cauldron is real, then a determination of the find spot of the Gundestrup cauldron will determine that of the Chiemsee cauldron and vice-versa.
The research for the original 2001 edition of this work utilized a high-resolution scanner and Adobe Photoshop to generate plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size, enabling one easily to examine and compare, side-by-side, pieces of similar style and technique, no matter what the original scale of the image. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork items, such as phalerae and cauldrons. A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the decorative imagery on both eastern and western European metalwork during the first-century BC, apart from Greece and Rome, was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find distributions, these coins enable one to determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory.
In this revised edition a detailed analysis of the artistic technique behind the Chiemsee cauldron has been added to that of the Gundestrup cauldron. This revised study of the art of the Celtic cauldrons, in relation to each other as well as to that on coins, utilized around 50 high-resolution 80-megabyte digitalized images of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to examine the artists techniques in greater detail. Furthermore, in 2003-4 the Danish National Museum conducted a detailed study of the techniques used to construct the Gundestrup cauldron, which was published in Acta Archeologica: 76 (Nielsen et al: 2005) and is now available on academia.edu. The conclusions of this study included the important result the Gundestrup-cauldron silver came from two sources: one used to mint north Gaulish quinars and the other to mint Armorican Coriosolite staters, demonstrating that the Gundestrup cauldron was made from western, not eastern, sources of silver. The results of this Danish-National-Museum study have been incorporated into the present work as well as into my other more recent studies of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published in academia.edu.
After a cursory inspection, the National Museum in Munich decided not to accept the Chiemsee cauldron, suspecting that it might have been made of dental gold during WW2. This suspicion was based upon a vague similarity in the gold and silver percentages in dental gold to the percentages of these metals in the cauldron. This horrifying suggestion finally culminated in the National Geographic documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. After being at the center of a fraud trial in Switzerland, ending in a bankruptcy sale in 2012, the cauldron made its way to a new vault in Houston, Texas. Again, the cauldron became the centerpiece of a lawsuit.
Because of all of this negative publicity, aside from an analysis of the composition of the Chiemsee-cauldron metals, I seem to be the only scholar who has attempted a serious examination of the motifs on the cauldron. The low levels of 7 ppm of either platinum or palladium determined in 2007 by Peter Northover, compared to a minimum of 5000 ppm of each metal for dental gold, proves the fallacy of this dental-gold surmise, removing a lot of the stigma associated with the cauldron. The 1.3 ppm lead in the cauldron also demonstrates that it cannot have been made from an amalgam of electrolytic gold (as Northover then suggested). Aside from the 70-80% gold, the cauldron also contains 20-25% silver. If the gold came from electrolytic gold, electrolytic silver would then be the purest source of silver which could have been added to create the amalgam. However, such an amalgam would still contain a minimum of at least 50 ppm lead, since electrolytic silver contains 250 ppm lead.
Gold/silver nuggets from Cornwall show a similar composition to the Chiemsee cauldron amalgam in gold and silver as well as similar trace elements of lead and platinum, and they are the likely source for the metal used to construct the cauldron. The zinc, which Northover found in the solder to fasten the cauldron plates, could have come from cementation-produced brass, which was being created in north Gaul as early as 80 BC, twenty years before the probable construction-date of the Chiemsee cauldron. The presence of zinc in the solder cannot be used to deny the ancient origin of the cauldron. The ancient nature of the Chiemsee cauldron then rests upon an examination of the motifs portrayed on it.
In 2019 the then-owner requested that I examine the Chiemsee cauldron. After an initial study of the photos and Northover’s metallurgical analysis of the cauldron, the late Ralph Rowlett and I concluded that the cauldron might indeed be late Iron Age in date. The likely genuine nature of the cauldron was confirmed by a careful inspection of the piece in Houston. Three years of research and writing about the cauldron have followed that initial inspection. It is my firm belief that there is no possibility whatsoever that the Chiemsee cauldron is fake. Ralph Rowlett and I presented our initial findings in a joint lecture to the Archaeological Institute of America in St Louis (“Tale of Two Kettles”, November 11, 2019). Earlier, I had presented these findings to the Celtic Congress in Bangor, Wales (July, 2019).
In 1995 a mint-master metalsmith’s workshop was uncovered in Swabia. However, the finds were not published until 2011. The finds include a hammer for finishing small objects, files, chisels, eight iron piece-punches with different faces: a fine line, two sorts of dots, an oval, a fine curve and a broader curve. The find also included the iron dies for silver quinarii produced by these punches (Ziegaus 2011: 289-294). We now know the exact techniques used to produce the coin images. The analysis of Gaulish coins also has been revised to incorporate the conclusions of John Sills’s 2003 study Gaulish and Early British Gold Coinage as well as Philip de Jersey’s series published in academia.edu on the Câtillon-II hoard.
This work, which includes a detailed analysis of the art style of the Chiemsee cauldron (as well as that of the Gundestrup and Rynkeby cauldrons), thus, completes three years of research and writing on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron. This work also completes fifty years of research and writing about all aspects of the Gundestrup cauldron. Other works on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published by me on academia.edu as a result of this research include: Celtic Gods who Control Rejuvenation, Rebirth, and the Island where the Sun Sets (2021a); The Armorican Origins of the Silver and Gold Celtic Cauldrons from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee (2021b); A History of the Chiemsee Cauldron (2021d), and The Myths Portrayed on the Chiemsee Cauldron (2022). A revised edition of my earlier work on the gods and myths portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron is also available on academia.edu: The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans (1992-2019). One may also find on academia.edu all my works of the Coligny calendar.
The original research, conducted in 1999-2000, begun after viewing, for comparison with western European items, the important pieces of Thracian silverwork housed in Romanian and Bulgarian museums. The research required the computer-generation of around 1500 four-megabyte images of the motifs under study to be projected onto 142 plates. The original study was made available in a joint publication of Archaeolingua and Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. By combining plates from the original edition and eliminating those which were of lesser importance, I have limited the number of plates in this addition to 82. Where plates have been eliminated from the current edition, I have provided references to the earlier edition. By transforming the images for this addition from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, I was able to divide the work into four sections, each containing around twenty 450-kilobyte plates (with 10 to 12 comparable items per plate), keeping each section under 10 megabytes for ease of downloading.
The similarities between the art style of the motifs in the Chiemsee cauldron and those in the Gundestrup cauldron are so blatant, either the Chiemsee cauldron was made by ancient craftsmen working in the same style as those who created the Gundestrup cauldron, or it is a copy created after the discovery of the Gundestrup cauldron in Denmark in 1891. If the Chiemsee cauldron is not a recent copy, both it and the Gundestrup cauldron must have been produced in the same region during the same period. If the Chiemsee cauldron is real, then a determination of the find spot of the Gundestrup cauldron will determine that of the Chiemsee cauldron and vice-versa.
The research for the original 2001 edition of this work utilized a high-resolution scanner and Adobe Photoshop to generate plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size, enabling one easily to examine and compare, side-by-side, pieces of similar style and technique, no matter what the original scale of the image. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork items, such as phalerae and cauldrons. A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the decorative imagery on both eastern and western European metalwork during the first-century BC, apart from Greece and Rome, was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find distributions, these coins enable one to determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory.
In this revised edition a detailed analysis of the artistic technique behind the Chiemsee cauldron has been added to that of the Gundestrup cauldron. This revised study of the art of the Celtic cauldrons, in relation to each other as well as to that on coins, utilized around 50 high-resolution 80-megabyte digitalized images of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to examine the artists techniques in greater detail. Furthermore, in 2003-4 the Danish National Museum conducted a detailed study of the techniques used to construct the Gundestrup cauldron, which was published in Acta Archeologica: 76 (Nielsen et al: 2005) and is now available on academia.edu. The conclusions of this study included the important result the Gundestrup-cauldron silver came from two sources: one used to mint north Gaulish quinars and the other to mint Armorican Coriosolite staters, demonstrating that the Gundestrup cauldron was made from western, not eastern, sources of silver. The results of this Danish-National-Museum study have been incorporated into the present work as well as into my other more recent studies of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published in academia.edu.
After a cursory inspection, the National Museum in Munich decided not to accept the Chiemsee cauldron, suspecting that it might have been made of dental gold during WW2. This suspicion was based upon a vague similarity in the gold and silver percentages in dental gold to the percentages of these metals in the cauldron. This horrifying suggestion finally culminated in the National Geographic documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. After being at the center of a fraud trial in Switzerland, ending in a bankruptcy sale in 2012, the cauldron made its way to a new vault in Houston, Texas. Again, the cauldron became the centerpiece of a lawsuit.
Because of all of this negative publicity, aside from an analysis of the composition of the Chiemsee-cauldron metals, I seem to be the only scholar who has attempted a serious examination of the motifs on the cauldron. The low levels of 7 ppm of either platinum or palladium determined in 2007 by Peter Northover, compared to a minimum of 5000 ppm of each metal for dental gold, proves the fallacy of this dental-gold surmise, removing a lot of the stigma associated with the cauldron. The 1.3 ppm lead in the cauldron also demonstrates that it cannot have been made from an amalgam of electrolytic gold (as Northover then suggested). Aside from the 70-80% gold, the cauldron also contains 20-25% silver. If the gold came from electrolytic gold, electrolytic silver would then be the purest source of silver which could have been added to create the amalgam. However, such an amalgam would still contain a minimum of at least 50 ppm lead, since electrolytic silver contains 250 ppm lead.
Gold/silver nuggets from Cornwall show a similar composition to the Chiemsee cauldron amalgam in gold and silver as well as similar trace elements of lead and platinum, and they are the likely source for the metal used to construct the cauldron. The zinc, which Northover found in the solder to fasten the cauldron plates, could have come from cementation-produced brass, which was being created in north Gaul as early as 80 BC, twenty years before the probable construction-date of the Chiemsee cauldron. The presence of zinc in the solder cannot be used to deny the ancient origin of the cauldron. The ancient nature of the Chiemsee cauldron then rests upon an examination of the motifs portrayed on it.
In 2019 the then-owner requested that I examine the Chiemsee cauldron. After an initial study of the photos and Northover’s metallurgical analysis of the cauldron, the late Ralph Rowlett and I concluded that the cauldron might indeed be late Iron Age in date. The likely genuine nature of the cauldron was confirmed by a careful inspection of the piece in Houston. Three years of research and writing about the cauldron have followed that initial inspection. It is my firm belief that there is no possibility whatsoever that the Chiemsee cauldron is fake. Ralph Rowlett and I presented our initial findings in a joint lecture to the Archaeological Institute of America in St Louis (“Tale of Two Kettles”, November 11, 2019). Earlier, I had presented these findings to the Celtic Congress in Bangor, Wales (July, 2019).
In 1995 a mint-master metalsmith’s workshop was uncovered in Swabia. However, the finds were not published until 2011. The finds include a hammer for finishing small objects, files, chisels, eight iron piece-punches with different faces: a fine line, two sorts of dots, an oval, a fine curve and a broader curve. The find also included the iron dies for silver quinarii produced by these punches (Ziegaus 2011: 289-294). We now know the exact techniques used to produce the coin images. The analysis of Gaulish coins also has been revised to incorporate the conclusions of John Sills’s 2003 study Gaulish and Early British Gold Coinage as well as Philip de Jersey’s series published in academia.edu on the Câtillon-II hoard.
This work, which includes a detailed analysis of the art style of the Chiemsee cauldron (as well as that of the Gundestrup and Rynkeby cauldrons), thus, completes three years of research and writing on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron. This work also completes fifty years of research and writing about all aspects of the Gundestrup cauldron. Other works on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published by me on academia.edu as a result of this research include: Celtic Gods who Control Rejuvenation, Rebirth, and the Island where the Sun Sets (2021a); The Armorican Origins of the Silver and Gold Celtic Cauldrons from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee (2021b); A History of the Chiemsee Cauldron (2021d), and The Myths Portrayed on the Chiemsee Cauldron (2022). A revised edition of my earlier work on the gods and myths portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron is also available on academia.edu: The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans (1992-2019). One may also find on academia.edu all my works of the Coligny calendar.
The original research, conducted in 1999-2000, begun after viewing, for comparison with western European items, the important pieces of Thracian silverwork housed in Romanian and Bulgarian museums. The research required the computer-generation of around 1500 four-megabyte images of the motifs under study to be projected onto 142 plates. The original study was made available in a joint publication of Archaeolingua and Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. By combining plates from the original edition and eliminating those which were of lesser importance, I have limited the number of plates in this addition to 82. Where plates have been eliminated from the current edition, I have provided references to the earlier edition. By transforming the images for this addition from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, I was able to divide the work into four sections, each containing around twenty 450-kilobyte plates (with 10 to 12 comparable items per plate), keeping each section under 10 megabytes for ease of downloading.
My motivation for examining and demonstrating the interrelated development of these Old Irish, Middle Welsh, and Classical narrative accounts is that early versions of several Old Irish tales seem to be depicted in the narrative portrayals on the silver cauldron found at Gundestrup in 1891 and on the gold cauldron found in the Chiemsee in 2001. However, the portrayals on the cauldrons are not a necessary part of the demonstration that these later stories developed from common prototypes. The literary connections do not depend upon establishing that the stories are portrayed on the cauldrons. Thus, this comparative literary analysis (though much of the material had oral beginnings) is of vital importance to anyone interested in the origins of Gawain and the Green Knight and of Tristan and Isolde (Tristan). The origins of GGK in the Irish tale Fled Bricrend and the origins of the prototype Tristan in Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Gráinne is firmly established here, apart from the depictions of even earlier versions of these tales on the Chiemsee cauldron.
The iconographic depictions on the cauldrons are of vital importance in determining the original nature of the characters in these stories as deities. In the medieval tales which developed out of these myths, the original Gaulish deities, for the most part, have been euhemerized into kings and queens or warriors and their concubines. I demonstrate in this work that the stories associated with these cauldrons arose as myths about deities. In the Chiemsee depictions recalling Classical tales, such as some of those preserved by Ovid in Metamorphoses, the original Gaulish deities have been replaced by their Roman or Greek equivalents. The mythic nature of these Classical stories is still apparent. Here I connect the Classical deities utilized as characters in these stories with their Irish and Gaulish equivalents.
The fragmentary calendar plate from Coligny (near Lyons) apparently dates to the second-century AD, although the Gaulish calendar engraved on this plate is plainly the result of a long transmission process. The 25-year-cycle calendar, the final system of this transmission process, probably originated early in the first-century BC, before Caesar’s conquest. It is within this late pre-Roman period that the calendar took on its final form and notation to enter a two-century long transmission process during which many copying errors were introduced. Embedded within the notation of the 25-year-cycle Coligny calendar is a 30-year-cycle calendar. The notation on the Coligny plate indicates that the original constant-lunar 30-year-cycle calendar system (from which the later shifting lunar calendar developed) had each month begin on the first day of the new moon.
Using a photo-processing program (Adobe Photoshop V) to create the month for my 2001 work, segments duplicating the missing notation were copied from surviving fragments of the Coligny calendar and then were utilized to fill in the missing sequences on the calendar maintaining the original spatial integrity of the fragmentary mosaic (taken from RIG: III at ¾ scale, but shown in plates 2 and 3 at about ¼ scale and elsewhere at ½ scale). Indeed, the original fragmentary mosaic (plate 2) is still embedded in the digitally-reconstructed whole calendar (plate 3). Thus, the fragmentary calendar was brought to photographic completion utilizing the original wording and engraving to be found on the surviving fragments. Pinault, one of the coauthors along with Duval of RIG: III: Les Calendriers, has also accepted my reconstruction of the original pattern in the distribution of these TII marks and their associated terminology (in a review in Gnomen (1996), vol. 68: 706-710).
First, I wish to state unequivocally that the gold Chiemsee cauldron is not a fake produced in Weimar or NSDAP Germany, nor is its close cousin the silver Gundestrup a product of the intermixing of Celts and Thracians who occupied the region of the lower Danube bordering on the Black Sea. Both these cauldrons are the products of the same school of metalsmiths who produced the billon Armorican coins attributed to the Coriosolites, Osismii, Redones, and the Veneti during the period 75-55 BC. Thus, the Chiemsee cauldron resembles the Gundestrup cauldron, not because the gold cauldron was inspired by the silver cauldron but because both were produced within the same cultural milieu and perhaps even in the same workshop.
Here in the present work, I take the opposite view and begin solely with the Gaulish material, much of which is pictorial. Portrayed scenes on decorated Armorican cauldrons and episodes of Celtic myths indicated in brief accounts of Celtic myth recorded by Classical authors are the items presented in this study. The interpretation of what is portrayed and what is recounted are based upon aligning this more ancient material with the corresponding accounts preserved in medieval Irish sources. Although the Irish texts are used to interpret the portrayed episodes, there is no need to compare varying versions of Irish texts.
What is portrayed on each cauldron is presented as a variant of the textual repertoire. For this reason, the ability to critique the Old Irish sources is of less significance to an analysis of the material presented. I trust that those who found my earlier publications daunting will find this work more appealing. The interested reader will find an analysis of the relevant Irish texts in detail in my previous works, now all available on academia.edu. These previous works are indicated in the Bibliography at the end of this present work, and the relevant topics, including a cursory analysis of the Irish sources, are discussed in the Appendix.
Although Ginoux recognized that the twin dragons as well as the palmette, another widespread symbol among the La Tène Celts, related to the spiritual realm, up till now the significance of what they implied has remained a mystery. Further iconographic detail about these early Celtic symbols is provided by Armorican coins and decorated cauldrons (from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee) created just before Caesar’s victory over the Veneti (56 BC). What I attempt here is to elucidate the significance of these motifs through an analysis of the early Irish narrative sources, ultimately deriving from the same Atlantic Iron Age culture as the silver and gold Armorican cauldrons, which enable a reconstruction of the mythology behind this symbolism.
Being in direct contact with Celtic-speaking peoples from the sixth-century BC on, it is also likely that Greek and Roman creators of anthologies of, or even those just noting down passing-references to, attention-grabbing mythic tales, such as Ovid (Metamorphoses) and Plutarch (Moralia), recorded elements of Celtic belief as integral aspects of what they chose to write down. Where early Irish tales describe similar characters and themes, Classical sources then can give verification to the likely presence of these themes in the contemporary early Celtic repertoire as well. Of course, the iconographic portrayal of these themes on preconquest repoussé-decorated cauldrons and on Romano-Gaulish stone monuments serves much the same purpose of sifting out the material relating to the Atlantic Iron Age from the early medieval Irish manuscript sources.
Alongside a belief in a heavenly paradise on an Island where the Sun Sets, as in the seventh century Irish Immram Brain, which is manifest even to this day in the Hebrides and in Brittany, the Celts of Gaul also believed in a cycle of rebirth, returning the soul substance to a new more mundane life. Julius Caesar in de Bello Gallico (BG: VI, 14) indicates that “the cardinal doctrine which they (druides) seek to teach is souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another” (non interire animas, sed ab aliis post mortem transire ad alios) (Edwards 1917: 338-9). In this crediting the Gauls with a belief in metempsychosis (Watson 2020: 1), Caesar followed Poseidonius (Diodorus Siculus: BH: V.38.6) and was followed by Ammianus Marcellinus (RGL: XXXI, XV.ix.4). Thus, at the time of Caesar’s conquest of the Veneti and the creation of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons, reincarnation was a major doctrine of Gaulish religious belief, and this belief is likely reflected in some aspect of the symbolic iconography.
Les poèmes eux-mêmes donnent de brèves descriptions de la nature de la ou des divinités en question et de brefs aperçus des mythes autour desquels ils ont été composés. Ils proposent ainsi une introduction à la religion celtique en utilisant les paroles de poètes qui adoraient encore les sujets de leurs compositions comme des dieux, ou du moins considéraient encore les sujets de leurs compositions comme des esprits surhumains qui hantaient encore le lieu dans lequel le poète décrivait les événements, comme ayant lieu. Le lecteur est ainsi initié à la religion celtique à partir de sources originales, plutôt qu’à partir de l’interprétation académique d’un érudit. Pour des raisons similaires, j'ai placé une seule planche à la fin de chaque chapitre qui illustre certains aspects du ou des poèmes du chapitre précédent, mais dans laquelle l'image a également été créée par un artiste qui adorait les dieux ou les déesses représentés. Que le poème et l'image aient été créés par des artistes adorant les mêmes divinités, je laisse au lecteur le soin de décider.
Die ursprünglichen Gedichte wurden größtenteils auf Altirisch verfasst, aber ich habe eines auf Schottisch-Gälisch verfasst, und mehrere wurden auf Mittelirisch verfasst. Es gibt auch mehrere andere Gedichte, die in nicht-keltischen Sprachen verfasst wurden und Gottheiten beschreiben, die den keltischen Gottheiten in ihrer Handlung und ihrem Mythos ähneln, aber zu einer Zeit und an einem Ort verfasst wurden, an dem ähnliche verwandte Gottheiten noch verehrt wurden. Daher füge ich hier meine eigenen Versübersetzungen von Gedichten hinzu, die ursprünglich in Latein, Griechisch, Sanskrit, Akkadisch, Sumerisch und einigen aus dem Gallischen und Keltiberischen verfasst wurden. Aber denn muss ich meine Englische Übersetzung auf Deutsch transformieren. Meine deutsche Übersetzung ist dann inhaltlich korrekt, aber ob sie poetisch bleibt oder nicht, bleibt Glückssache. Wenn Sie Verse wünschen, müssen Sie die englische Version dieses Artikels konsultieren, die auch auf academia.edu zu finden ist, oder, noch besser, die Gedichte in der Originalsprache lesen. Ich gebe hier auch das Original im Anschluss an die Übersetzung.
Die Gedichte selbst geben kurze Beschreibungen der Natur der betreffenden Gottheit oder Gottheiten und kurze Umrisse der Mythen, um die sie herum verfasst wurden. Sie stellen somit eine Einführung in die keltische Religion dar und verwenden dabei die Worte von Dichtern, die die Themen ihrer Kompositionen immer noch als Götter verehrten oder die Themen ihrer Kompositionen zumindest noch immer für übermenschliche Geister hielten, die immer noch den Ort heimsuchten, an dem der Dichter die Ereignisse beschrieb als stattfindend. Der Leser wird dadurch anhand von Originalquellen in die keltische Religion eingeführt und nicht anhand der akademischen Interpretation eines Gelehrten. Aus ähnlichen Gründen habe ich am Ende jedes Kapitels eine einzelne Tafel angebracht, die einige Aspekte des Gedichts oder der Gedichte im vorhergehenden Kapitel illustriert, auf der das Bild jedoch auch von einem Künstler geschaffen wurde, der die dargestellten Götter oder Göttinnen verehrte. Dass sowohl das Gedicht als auch das Bild von Künstlern geschaffen wurden, die dieselben Gottheiten verehren, überlasse ich dem Leser.
The poems themselves give brief descriptions of the nature of the deity or deities in question and brief outlines of the myths they were composed around. They thus provide an introduction to Celtic religion using the words of poets who still worshiped the subjects of their compositions as gods, or at least still thought of the subjects of their compositions as superhuman spirits who still haunted the place in which the poet described the events as taking place. The reader is thereby introduced to Celtic religion from original sources, rather than from some scholar’s academic interpretation. For similar reasons, I have placed a single plate at the end of each chapter which illustrates some aspect of the poem or poems in the preceding chapter, but in which the image also was created by an artist who worshipped the gods or goddesses portrayed. That both the poem and the image were created by artists worshipping the same deities I leave to the reader to decide.
Without some means of sifting the kernel of truth about Celtic myth from the chaff of unverified guesses, little could be stated about the true nature of pre-Christian Celtic religion, at least very little which is accurate. Even worse than inaccurate, what passes for scholarship is often totally misleading. The Celts definitely did not worship trees and totem animals any more than did the Greeks or Romans. Indeed, Celtic mystery cults had the same subtility as those found in contemporary Greece, Rome, and India, with the same object in mind: to pass to a better existence at death than the gloomy dreariness of the grave or again the repetition of the whole round of plagues, famine, and war through the cycle of rebirth.
Inner plate 3 of the Chiemsee cauldron depicts two horsemen, each holding a severed head in the left hand while waving a sword held in the right hand. The scene depicts an event which crops up later in the Irish tale Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (Ní Shéaghdha 1967). When Finn sends warriors up the tree to bring down Diarmaid, thinking each descending comrade in turn is Diarmaid, the warriors waiting below behead each one when he reaches the ground. Each rider on inner plate 3 holds a sword, even though behind each rider there is the clear portrayal of a sword still in its scabbard attached to the rear horn of the saddle.
Chiemsee inner plate 3 now can be seen to depict actual contemporary Gaulish examples of sword mounts. Furthermore, just such a Knollenknaufschwert also is portrayed on Chiemsee outer plate 6. Verifying its genuine nature, the Chiemsee cauldron predicts that such saddle-fastened Knollenknaufschwert mounts should have existed in Gaul. Until August of 2023 (but for an indication of one of three possibilities in the Appendix to Krämer 1962), neither I nor anyone else ever suspected that the mountings on these swords were used to fasten them to the rear horns of saddles. Thus, the depiction on the Chiemsee cauldron portrays an actually-utilized mounting system.
The function of the rapier-like Knollenknaufschwerter was to penetrate armor like that depicted on Chiemsee outer plates 2 and 6. In tests even 20-layer-thick laminated-linen armor, which protected the wearer from arrows, sling bolts, and sword slashes, could be penetrated by a strong thrust from a narrow-pointed rapier-like weapon. Thus, the Chiemsee cauldron teaches us about the use intended for the sword shape and unusual mountings of the Knollenknaufschwerter, the subject of much debate since first being adequately studied by Krämer in 1962.
The objective of this monograph is to present, alongside the source material from which the myths were derived, the 16 pages of reconstructed Gaulish-myth to be found in sections B0-B10. It is clear that the pre-Christian Celts of the Atlantic-Iron-Age culture possessed a religion and supporting body of myth and ritual as rich as that found in contemporary Greece or India. They also looked forward after death either toward reincarnation through the locus of the moon or, if worthy, toward attaining on the Island where the Sun sets, a physical body identical to the one they had at youthful maturity, but one as uncorruptible as the gold torcs the warriors wore to show their adherence to the concept of vīros “truth and loyalty”.
At the stage they were first written down, Ireland, the Atlantic Celtic culture that best preserved the myths, had recently adopted the new religion of Christianity. The earlier gods were euhemerized into the key players of pseudo-history. Before the euhemerized myths first entered manuscript tradition, they were recorded earlier in iconographic portrayal in Armorica, the Atlantic Celtic culture that first adopted narrative portrayal. Like myth recorded in language, the language of iconography has its own systematic units of portrayal. Aside from the coinage, the earliest recording of Celtic myth is the narrative portrayal in repousse metalwork, such as that depicted on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons.
The association of the Gundestrup cauldron with Irish myth is limited to the Táin and the Remscéla “Fore Tales”. The Gundestrup cauldron commemorates the vernal equinox festival, making clear the original role of the Gaulish myth giving rise to the Táin. My discovery that the Chiemsee cauldron was genuine in April of 2019 was the key to filling in the missing half of Gaulish mythology: the Medieval Irish tales that developed from the Gaulish myths associated with the autumnal equinox.
Just as the Rosetta Stone provided a means to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, so too the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons provide the pictural narration of earlier versions of myth-based epics and tales. Beginning in the sixth century AD, these narrations began to be transferred to manuscript preservation from oral preservation through repeated recitation by a professional class of priests, poets, and lawyers: the veletes “seers” composed of druidēs, bardi, vātīs, and britovii. Like the later Irish filid, Caesar in de Bello Gallico (vi.14.3) records that the druidēs spent twenty years attending recitation classes where they learned many lines in verse.
While the Gundestrup cauldron was recognized as ancient upon its discovery in 1891, the gold Chiemsee cauldron was misjudged to be a recent production when it was first scrutinized by a Munich museum-curator unfamiliar with the art style and the mythology preserved on its close silver cousin, the Gundestrup cauldron. The golden Chiemsee cauldron portrays motifs depicted in the same Armorican-coin art-style to be found on the Gundestrup cauldron. However, the Chiemsee cauldron art style duplicates that found on Armorican coins minted a couple of decades later than the Armorican coins duplicating the art style of the Gundestrup cauldron. Thus, the museum curator was wrong in asserting that the Chiemsee cauldron is a fake inspired by the Gundestrup cauldron. The Chiemsee cauldron does not copy the style of the Gundestrup cauldron, but rather it copies the art-style found in the same Armorican culture a few decades earlier. Also, the Chiemsee cauldron depicts motifs for the most part different from those depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron, again motifs found on Armorican coins but not found on the Gundestrup cauldron.
Some who have condemned the cauldron as fake would suffer embarrassment if the cauldron should prove to be genuine, since it would be the greatest single treasure from the ancient world ever found. Until the discovery of the Chiemsee cauldron, the Gundestrup cauldron was the unique witness to pre-Roman Celtic religious iconographic narration. Because of the Gundestrup cauldron’s uniqueness it is has been difficult to place it in its proper cultural perspective. Because of its uniqueness there has been a great deal of debate about its nature. With the finding of the Chiemsee cauldron, we have a doubling of the information about these pieces. Both cauldrons fit within the cultural milieu of an origin in Armorica just before Caesar’s conquest, the Gundestrup cauldron being constructed 10 to 20 years before the Chiemsee cauldron. Only with the recognition that the Chiemsee Cauldron is a genuine witness alongside the Gundestrup cauldron to the art and religion of the Veneti can we begin to incorporate the vast amount of information these two time-capsules convey to us about this hitherto lost culture.
Nonetheless, the trace mineral analysis, especially as concerns the Chiemsee cauldron’s low level of lead (ave. 80% Au, 20% Ag, 1.3 ppm Pb) definitely fits Cornish gold/silver nuggets from Tresillian (ave. 80% Au, 20% Ag, and 1.3 ppm Pb) better than it does more-readily-available modern sources of gold and silver. If as Northover contended the 8.8 kg of gold in the cauldron came from electrolytic gold, the 2.2 kg of silver would have had to come from electrolytic silver which contains 250 ppm lead, giving 50 ppm lead for the cauldron’s proposed electrolytic sources. Given the 11 kg weight of the cauldron, it would be more difficult today to obtain that weight of Cornish nuggets than it would have been 2000 years ago.
In contrast to the almost non-existent investigation of the Chiemsee cauldron (other than its metal content) conducted in 2002, I have spent three-and-one-half years engaging in research full-time on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron (see Olmsted 2021, as relates to the metal analysis consult pp. 139-158). Such a time period is minimally adequate to investigate a piece containing iconography, artistic style, narrative portrayal, culturally-significant items, in addition to its metallurgical content. I may note that it was 50 years ago that I began to research and write about the silver Gundestrup cauldron, the topic of my PhD dissertation in linguistics and archaeology at Harvard University, published in 1979 by Collection Latomus.
All admit the Chiemsee cauldron closely resembles the Gundestrup cauldron. I would submit that studying the Gundestrup cauldron is a prerequisite for investigating the Chiemsee cauldron. Celtic decorated cauldrons are complex, containing vast amounts of information to unravel, as Rolf Hachmann’s massive 1990 work on the displayed items (among a sea of other publications) would indicate. Beside this present work on the metal analysis, my many studies on all the above aspects of the gold and silver Celtic cauldrons are now freely available under my profile on academia.edu.
From a determination that the solder used to fasten the plates contained around 5% zinc, Ludwig Wamser and Rupert Gebhard concluded that the Chiemsee cauldron was made after 1600 AD, when zinc became available in its metallic form. From the Chiemsee cauldron’s close similarity to the Gundestrup cauldron, they went on to conclude that the Chiemsee cauldron would have to have been made after that item was found in Denmark in 1891. However, recent studies indicate that rudimentary small-batch cementation techniques can produce brass with a two-to-one ratio of copper to zinc as found in the Chiemsee solder, a necessary level of the zinc in the brass, in an item containing 10% copper, for the zinc in the solder to reach 5% (a ratio of copper to zinc of 2/1). Thus, it is now clear that the zinc in the solder could have come from Gaulish-produced brass containing 2/3 copper and 1/3 zinc. New investigations demonstrate that not only was brass being produced in north Gaul by 70 BC, but that the small-batch methods utilized were capable of producing brass with such high-levels of zinc, especially as relates to foil-like paillons for the solder. Since ancient techniques could reach this 2/1 ratio of copper to zinc, the 5% zinc in the solder cannot be used to rule out the possibility of the cauldron’s ancient production by the same culture which produced the Gundestrup cauldron. Both cauldrons being made by the same culture would explain the close resemblance in the art style and engraving technique of the gold cauldron to the silver cauldron (see Olmsted 2022b).
Since the Chiemsee cauldron contains three-quarters gold and one quarter silver, the Bavarian Ministry found the ratio suspiciously close to that of dental gold, which might have been obtained during the NS-regime. This suspicion of NSDAP-production ultimately led to the National Geographic’s 2012 documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. Fortunately, from 2004 to 2007 the Chiemsee cauldron was the subject of intensive metal-content analysis by some of the world’s most-gifted metallurgists. Literally, we know the Chiemsee cauldron inside and out. Because of low levels of platinum and palladium, the cauldron cannot have been made from dental gold, which contains high amounts of these elements to harden it.
The similarities between the art style of the motifs in the Chiemsee cauldron and those in the Gundestrup cauldron are so blatant, either the Chiemsee cauldron was made by ancient craftsmen working in the same style as those who created the Gundestrup cauldron, or it is a copy created after the discovery of the Gundestrup cauldron in Denmark in 1891. If the Chiemsee cauldron is not a recent copy, both it and the Gundestrup cauldron must have been produced in the same region during the same period. If the Chiemsee cauldron is real, then a determination of the find spot of the Gundestrup cauldron will determine that of the Chiemsee cauldron and vice-versa.
The research for the original 2001 edition of this work utilized a high-resolution scanner and Adobe Photoshop to generate plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size, enabling one easily to examine and compare, side-by-side, pieces of similar style and technique, no matter what the original scale of the image. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork items, such as phalerae and cauldrons. A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the decorative imagery on both eastern and western European metalwork during the first-century BC, apart from Greece and Rome, was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find distributions, these coins enable one to determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory.
In this revised edition a detailed analysis of the artistic technique behind the Chiemsee cauldron has been added to that of the Gundestrup cauldron. This revised study of the art of the Celtic cauldrons, in relation to each other as well as to that on coins, utilized around 50 high-resolution 80-megabyte digitalized images of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to examine the artists techniques in greater detail. Furthermore, in 2003-4 the Danish National Museum conducted a detailed study of the techniques used to construct the Gundestrup cauldron, which was published in Acta Archeologica: 76 (Nielsen et al: 2005) and is now available on academia.edu. The conclusions of this study included the important result the Gundestrup-cauldron silver came from two sources: one used to mint north Gaulish quinars and the other to mint Armorican Coriosolite staters, demonstrating that the Gundestrup cauldron was made from western, not eastern, sources of silver. The results of this Danish-National-Museum study have been incorporated into the present work as well as into my other more recent studies of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published in academia.edu.
After a cursory inspection, the National Museum in Munich decided not to accept the Chiemsee cauldron, suspecting that it might have been made of dental gold during WW2. This suspicion was based upon a vague similarity in the gold and silver percentages in dental gold to the percentages of these metals in the cauldron. This horrifying suggestion finally culminated in the National Geographic documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. After being at the center of a fraud trial in Switzerland, ending in a bankruptcy sale in 2012, the cauldron made its way to a new vault in Houston, Texas. Again, the cauldron became the centerpiece of a lawsuit.
Because of all of this negative publicity, aside from an analysis of the composition of the Chiemsee-cauldron metals, I seem to be the only scholar who has attempted a serious examination of the motifs on the cauldron. The low levels of 7 ppm of either platinum or palladium determined in 2007 by Peter Northover, compared to a minimum of 5000 ppm of each metal for dental gold, proves the fallacy of this dental-gold surmise, removing a lot of the stigma associated with the cauldron. The 1.3 ppm lead in the cauldron also demonstrates that it cannot have been made from an amalgam of electrolytic gold (as Northover then suggested). Aside from the 70-80% gold, the cauldron also contains 20-25% silver. If the gold came from electrolytic gold, electrolytic silver would then be the purest source of silver which could have been added to create the amalgam. However, such an amalgam would still contain a minimum of at least 50 ppm lead, since electrolytic silver contains 250 ppm lead.
Gold/silver nuggets from Cornwall show a similar composition to the Chiemsee cauldron amalgam in gold and silver as well as similar trace elements of lead and platinum, and they are the likely source for the metal used to construct the cauldron. The zinc, which Northover found in the solder to fasten the cauldron plates, could have come from cementation-produced brass, which was being created in north Gaul as early as 80 BC, twenty years before the probable construction-date of the Chiemsee cauldron. The presence of zinc in the solder cannot be used to deny the ancient origin of the cauldron. The ancient nature of the Chiemsee cauldron then rests upon an examination of the motifs portrayed on it.
In 2019 the then-owner requested that I examine the Chiemsee cauldron. After an initial study of the photos and Northover’s metallurgical analysis of the cauldron, the late Ralph Rowlett and I concluded that the cauldron might indeed be late Iron Age in date. The likely genuine nature of the cauldron was confirmed by a careful inspection of the piece in Houston. Three years of research and writing about the cauldron have followed that initial inspection. It is my firm belief that there is no possibility whatsoever that the Chiemsee cauldron is fake. Ralph Rowlett and I presented our initial findings in a joint lecture to the Archaeological Institute of America in St Louis (“Tale of Two Kettles”, November 11, 2019). Earlier, I had presented these findings to the Celtic Congress in Bangor, Wales (July, 2019).
In 1995 a mint-master metalsmith’s workshop was uncovered in Swabia. However, the finds were not published until 2011. The finds include a hammer for finishing small objects, files, chisels, eight iron piece-punches with different faces: a fine line, two sorts of dots, an oval, a fine curve and a broader curve. The find also included the iron dies for silver quinarii produced by these punches (Ziegaus 2011: 289-294). We now know the exact techniques used to produce the coin images. The analysis of Gaulish coins also has been revised to incorporate the conclusions of John Sills’s 2003 study Gaulish and Early British Gold Coinage as well as Philip de Jersey’s series published in academia.edu on the Câtillon-II hoard.
This work, which includes a detailed analysis of the art style of the Chiemsee cauldron (as well as that of the Gundestrup and Rynkeby cauldrons), thus, completes three years of research and writing on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron. This work also completes fifty years of research and writing about all aspects of the Gundestrup cauldron. Other works on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published by me on academia.edu as a result of this research include: Celtic Gods who Control Rejuvenation, Rebirth, and the Island where the Sun Sets (2021a); The Armorican Origins of the Silver and Gold Celtic Cauldrons from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee (2021b); A History of the Chiemsee Cauldron (2021d), and The Myths Portrayed on the Chiemsee Cauldron (2022). A revised edition of my earlier work on the gods and myths portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron is also available on academia.edu: The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans (1992-2019). One may also find on academia.edu all my works of the Coligny calendar.
The original research, conducted in 1999-2000, begun after viewing, for comparison with western European items, the important pieces of Thracian silverwork housed in Romanian and Bulgarian museums. The research required the computer-generation of around 1500 four-megabyte images of the motifs under study to be projected onto 142 plates. The original study was made available in a joint publication of Archaeolingua and Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. By combining plates from the original edition and eliminating those which were of lesser importance, I have limited the number of plates in this addition to 82. Where plates have been eliminated from the current edition, I have provided references to the earlier edition. By transforming the images for this addition from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, I was able to divide the work into four sections, each containing around twenty 450-kilobyte plates (with 10 to 12 comparable items per plate), keeping each section under 10 megabytes for ease of downloading.
The similarities between the art style of the motifs in the Chiemsee cauldron and those in the Gundestrup cauldron are so blatant, either the Chiemsee cauldron was made by ancient craftsmen working in the same style as those who created the Gundestrup cauldron, or it is a copy created after the discovery of the Gundestrup cauldron in Denmark in 1891. If the Chiemsee cauldron is not a recent copy, both it and the Gundestrup cauldron must have been produced in the same region during the same period. If the Chiemsee cauldron is real, then a determination of the find spot of the Gundestrup cauldron will determine that of the Chiemsee cauldron and vice-versa.
The research for the original 2001 edition of this work utilized a high-resolution scanner and Adobe Photoshop to generate plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size, enabling one easily to examine and compare, side-by-side, pieces of similar style and technique, no matter what the original scale of the image. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork items, such as phalerae and cauldrons. A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the decorative imagery on both eastern and western European metalwork during the first-century BC, apart from Greece and Rome, was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find distributions, these coins enable one to determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory.
In this revised edition a detailed analysis of the artistic technique behind the Chiemsee cauldron has been added to that of the Gundestrup cauldron. This revised study of the art of the Celtic cauldrons, in relation to each other as well as to that on coins, utilized around 50 high-resolution 80-megabyte digitalized images of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to examine the artists techniques in greater detail. Furthermore, in 2003-4 the Danish National Museum conducted a detailed study of the techniques used to construct the Gundestrup cauldron, which was published in Acta Archeologica: 76 (Nielsen et al: 2005) and is now available on academia.edu. The conclusions of this study included the important result the Gundestrup-cauldron silver came from two sources: one used to mint north Gaulish quinars and the other to mint Armorican Coriosolite staters, demonstrating that the Gundestrup cauldron was made from western, not eastern, sources of silver. The results of this Danish-National-Museum study have been incorporated into the present work as well as into my other more recent studies of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published in academia.edu.
After a cursory inspection, the National Museum in Munich decided not to accept the Chiemsee cauldron, suspecting that it might have been made of dental gold during WW2. This suspicion was based upon a vague similarity in the gold and silver percentages in dental gold to the percentages of these metals in the cauldron. This horrifying suggestion finally culminated in the National Geographic documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. After being at the center of a fraud trial in Switzerland, ending in a bankruptcy sale in 2012, the cauldron made its way to a new vault in Houston, Texas. Again, the cauldron became the centerpiece of a lawsuit.
Because of all of this negative publicity, aside from an analysis of the composition of the Chiemsee-cauldron metals, I seem to be the only scholar who has attempted a serious examination of the motifs on the cauldron. The low levels of 7 ppm of either platinum or palladium determined in 2007 by Peter Northover, compared to a minimum of 5000 ppm of each metal for dental gold, proves the fallacy of this dental-gold surmise, removing a lot of the stigma associated with the cauldron. The 1.3 ppm lead in the cauldron also demonstrates that it cannot have been made from an amalgam of electrolytic gold (as Northover then suggested). Aside from the 70-80% gold, the cauldron also contains 20-25% silver. If the gold came from electrolytic gold, electrolytic silver would then be the purest source of silver which could have been added to create the amalgam. However, such an amalgam would still contain a minimum of at least 50 ppm lead, since electrolytic silver contains 250 ppm lead.
Gold/silver nuggets from Cornwall show a similar composition to the Chiemsee cauldron amalgam in gold and silver as well as similar trace elements of lead and platinum, and they are the likely source for the metal used to construct the cauldron. The zinc, which Northover found in the solder to fasten the cauldron plates, could have come from cementation-produced brass, which was being created in north Gaul as early as 80 BC, twenty years before the probable construction-date of the Chiemsee cauldron. The presence of zinc in the solder cannot be used to deny the ancient origin of the cauldron. The ancient nature of the Chiemsee cauldron then rests upon an examination of the motifs portrayed on it.
In 2019 the then-owner requested that I examine the Chiemsee cauldron. After an initial study of the photos and Northover’s metallurgical analysis of the cauldron, the late Ralph Rowlett and I concluded that the cauldron might indeed be late Iron Age in date. The likely genuine nature of the cauldron was confirmed by a careful inspection of the piece in Houston. Three years of research and writing about the cauldron have followed that initial inspection. It is my firm belief that there is no possibility whatsoever that the Chiemsee cauldron is fake. Ralph Rowlett and I presented our initial findings in a joint lecture to the Archaeological Institute of America in St Louis (“Tale of Two Kettles”, November 11, 2019). Earlier, I had presented these findings to the Celtic Congress in Bangor, Wales (July, 2019).
In 1995 a mint-master metalsmith’s workshop was uncovered in Swabia. However, the finds were not published until 2011. The finds include a hammer for finishing small objects, files, chisels, eight iron piece-punches with different faces: a fine line, two sorts of dots, an oval, a fine curve and a broader curve. The find also included the iron dies for silver quinarii produced by these punches (Ziegaus 2011: 289-294). We now know the exact techniques used to produce the coin images. The analysis of Gaulish coins also has been revised to incorporate the conclusions of John Sills’s 2003 study Gaulish and Early British Gold Coinage as well as Philip de Jersey’s series published in academia.edu on the Câtillon-II hoard.
This work, which includes a detailed analysis of the art style of the Chiemsee cauldron (as well as that of the Gundestrup and Rynkeby cauldrons), thus, completes three years of research and writing on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron. This work also completes fifty years of research and writing about all aspects of the Gundestrup cauldron. Other works on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published by me on academia.edu as a result of this research include: Celtic Gods who Control Rejuvenation, Rebirth, and the Island where the Sun Sets (2021a); The Armorican Origins of the Silver and Gold Celtic Cauldrons from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee (2021b); A History of the Chiemsee Cauldron (2021d), and The Myths Portrayed on the Chiemsee Cauldron (2022). A revised edition of my earlier work on the gods and myths portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron is also available on academia.edu: The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans (1992-2019). One may also find on academia.edu all my works of the Coligny calendar.
The original research, conducted in 1999-2000, begun after viewing, for comparison with western European items, the important pieces of Thracian silverwork housed in Romanian and Bulgarian museums. The research required the computer-generation of around 1500 four-megabyte images of the motifs under study to be projected onto 142 plates. The original study was made available in a joint publication of Archaeolingua and Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. By combining plates from the original edition and eliminating those which were of lesser importance, I have limited the number of plates in this addition to 82. Where plates have been eliminated from the current edition, I have provided references to the earlier edition. By transforming the images for this addition from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, I was able to divide the work into four sections, each containing around twenty 450-kilobyte plates (with 10 to 12 comparable items per plate), keeping each section under 10 megabytes for ease of downloading.
The similarities between the art style of the motifs in the Chiemsee cauldron and those in the Gundestrup cauldron are so blatant, either the Chiemsee cauldron was made by ancient craftsmen working in the same style as those who created the Gundestrup cauldron, or it is a copy created after the discovery of the Gundestrup cauldron in Denmark in 1891. If the Chiemsee cauldron is not a recent copy, both it and the Gundestrup cauldron must have been produced in the same region during the same period. If the Chiemsee cauldron is real, then a determination of the find spot of the Gundestrup cauldron will determine that of the Chiemsee cauldron and vice-versa.
The research for the original 2001 edition of this work utilized a high-resolution scanner and Adobe Photoshop to generate plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size, enabling one easily to examine and compare, side-by-side, pieces of similar style and technique, no matter what the original scale of the image. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork items, such as phalerae and cauldrons. A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the decorative imagery on both eastern and western European metalwork during the first-century BC, apart from Greece and Rome, was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find distributions, these coins enable one to determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory.
In this revised edition a detailed analysis of the artistic technique behind the Chiemsee cauldron has been added to that of the Gundestrup cauldron. This revised study of the art of the Celtic cauldrons, in relation to each other as well as to that on coins, utilized around 50 high-resolution 80-megabyte digitalized images of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to examine the artists techniques in greater detail. Furthermore, in 2003-4 the Danish National Museum conducted a detailed study of the techniques used to construct the Gundestrup cauldron, which was published in Acta Archeologica: 76 (Nielsen et al: 2005) and is now available on academia.edu. The conclusions of this study included the important result the Gundestrup-cauldron silver came from two sources: one used to mint north Gaulish quinars and the other to mint Armorican Coriosolite staters, demonstrating that the Gundestrup cauldron was made from western, not eastern, sources of silver. The results of this Danish-National-Museum study have been incorporated into the present work as well as into my other more recent studies of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published in academia.edu.
After a cursory inspection, the National Museum in Munich decided not to accept the Chiemsee cauldron, suspecting that it might have been made of dental gold during WW2. This suspicion was based upon a vague similarity in the gold and silver percentages in dental gold to the percentages of these metals in the cauldron. This horrifying suggestion finally culminated in the National Geographic documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. After being at the center of a fraud trial in Switzerland, ending in a bankruptcy sale in 2012, the cauldron made its way to a new vault in Houston, Texas. Again, the cauldron became the centerpiece of a lawsuit.
Because of all of this negative publicity, aside from an analysis of the composition of the Chiemsee-cauldron metals, I seem to be the only scholar who has attempted a serious examination of the motifs on the cauldron. The low levels of 7 ppm of either platinum or palladium determined in 2007 by Peter Northover, compared to a minimum of 5000 ppm of each metal for dental gold, proves the fallacy of this dental-gold surmise, removing a lot of the stigma associated with the cauldron. The 1.3 ppm lead in the cauldron also demonstrates that it cannot have been made from an amalgam of electrolytic gold (as Northover then suggested). Aside from the 70-80% gold, the cauldron also contains 20-25% silver. If the gold came from electrolytic gold, electrolytic silver would then be the purest source of silver which could have been added to create the amalgam. However, such an amalgam would still contain a minimum of at least 50 ppm lead, since electrolytic silver contains 250 ppm lead.
Gold/silver nuggets from Cornwall show a similar composition to the Chiemsee cauldron amalgam in gold and silver as well as similar trace elements of lead and platinum, and they are the likely source for the metal used to construct the cauldron. The zinc, which Northover found in the solder to fasten the cauldron plates, could have come from cementation-produced brass, which was being created in north Gaul as early as 80 BC, twenty years before the probable construction-date of the Chiemsee cauldron. The presence of zinc in the solder cannot be used to deny the ancient origin of the cauldron. The ancient nature of the Chiemsee cauldron then rests upon an examination of the motifs portrayed on it.
In 2019 the then-owner requested that I examine the Chiemsee cauldron. After an initial study of the photos and Northover’s metallurgical analysis of the cauldron, the late Ralph Rowlett and I concluded that the cauldron might indeed be late Iron Age in date. The likely genuine nature of the cauldron was confirmed by a careful inspection of the piece in Houston. Three years of research and writing about the cauldron have followed that initial inspection. It is my firm belief that there is no possibility whatsoever that the Chiemsee cauldron is fake. Ralph Rowlett and I presented our initial findings in a joint lecture to the Archaeological Institute of America in St Louis (“Tale of Two Kettles”, November 11, 2019). Earlier, I had presented these findings to the Celtic Congress in Bangor, Wales (July, 2019).
In 1995 a mint-master metalsmith’s workshop was uncovered in Swabia. However, the finds were not published until 2011. The finds include a hammer for finishing small objects, files, chisels, eight iron piece-punches with different faces: a fine line, two sorts of dots, an oval, a fine curve and a broader curve. The find also included the iron dies for silver quinarii produced by these punches (Ziegaus 2011: 289-294). We now know the exact techniques used to produce the coin images. The analysis of Gaulish coins also has been revised to incorporate the conclusions of John Sills’s 2003 study Gaulish and Early British Gold Coinage as well as Philip de Jersey’s series published in academia.edu on the Câtillon-II hoard.
This work, which includes a detailed analysis of the art style of the Chiemsee cauldron (as well as that of the Gundestrup and Rynkeby cauldrons), thus, completes three years of research and writing on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron. This work also completes fifty years of research and writing about all aspects of the Gundestrup cauldron. Other works on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published by me on academia.edu as a result of this research include: Celtic Gods who Control Rejuvenation, Rebirth, and the Island where the Sun Sets (2021a); The Armorican Origins of the Silver and Gold Celtic Cauldrons from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee (2021b); A History of the Chiemsee Cauldron (2021d), and The Myths Portrayed on the Chiemsee Cauldron (2022). A revised edition of my earlier work on the gods and myths portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron is also available on academia.edu: The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans (1992-2019). One may also find on academia.edu all my works of the Coligny calendar.
The original research, conducted in 1999-2000, begun after viewing, for comparison with western European items, the important pieces of Thracian silverwork housed in Romanian and Bulgarian museums. The research required the computer-generation of around 1500 four-megabyte images of the motifs under study to be projected onto 142 plates. The original study was made available in a joint publication of Archaeolingua and Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. By combining plates from the original edition and eliminating those which were of lesser importance, I have limited the number of plates in this addition to 82. Where plates have been eliminated from the current edition, I have provided references to the earlier edition. By transforming the images for this addition from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, I was able to divide the work into four sections, each containing around twenty 450-kilobyte plates (with 10 to 12 comparable items per plate), keeping each section under 10 megabytes for ease of downloading.
The similarities between the art style of the motifs in the Chiemsee cauldron and those in the Gundestrup cauldron are so blatant, either the Chiemsee cauldron was made by ancient craftsmen working in the same style as those who created the Gundestrup cauldron, or it is a copy created after the discovery of the Gundestrup cauldron in Denmark in 1891. If the Chiemsee cauldron is not a recent copy, both it and the Gundestrup cauldron must have been produced in the same region during the same period. If the Chiemsee cauldron is real, then a determination of the find spot of the Gundestrup cauldron will determine that of the Chiemsee cauldron and vice-versa.
The research for the original 2001 edition of this work utilized a high-resolution scanner and Adobe Photoshop to generate plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size, enabling one easily to examine and compare, side-by-side, pieces of similar style and technique, no matter what the original scale of the image. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork items, such as phalerae and cauldrons. A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the decorative imagery on both eastern and western European metalwork during the first-century BC, apart from Greece and Rome, was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find distributions, these coins enable one to determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory.
In this revised edition a detailed analysis of the artistic technique behind the Chiemsee cauldron has been added to that of the Gundestrup cauldron. This revised study of the art of the Celtic cauldrons, in relation to each other as well as to that on coins, utilized around 50 high-resolution 80-megabyte digitalized images of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to examine the artists techniques in greater detail. Furthermore, in 2003-4 the Danish National Museum conducted a detailed study of the techniques used to construct the Gundestrup cauldron, which was published in Acta Archeologica: 76 (Nielsen et al: 2005) and is now available on academia.edu. The conclusions of this study included the important result the Gundestrup-cauldron silver came from two sources: one used to mint north Gaulish quinars and the other to mint Armorican Coriosolite staters, demonstrating that the Gundestrup cauldron was made from western, not eastern, sources of silver. The results of this Danish-National-Museum study have been incorporated into the present work as well as into my other more recent studies of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published in academia.edu.
After a cursory inspection, the National Museum in Munich decided not to accept the Chiemsee cauldron, suspecting that it might have been made of dental gold during WW2. This suspicion was based upon a vague similarity in the gold and silver percentages in dental gold to the percentages of these metals in the cauldron. This horrifying suggestion finally culminated in the National Geographic documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. After being at the center of a fraud trial in Switzerland, ending in a bankruptcy sale in 2012, the cauldron made its way to a new vault in Houston, Texas. Again, the cauldron became the centerpiece of a lawsuit.
Because of all of this negative publicity, aside from an analysis of the composition of the Chiemsee-cauldron metals, I seem to be the only scholar who has attempted a serious examination of the motifs on the cauldron. The low levels of 7 ppm of either platinum or palladium determined in 2007 by Peter Northover, compared to a minimum of 5000 ppm of each metal for dental gold, proves the fallacy of this dental-gold surmise, removing a lot of the stigma associated with the cauldron. The 1.3 ppm lead in the cauldron also demonstrates that it cannot have been made from an amalgam of electrolytic gold (as Northover then suggested). Aside from the 70-80% gold, the cauldron also contains 20-25% silver. If the gold came from electrolytic gold, electrolytic silver would then be the purest source of silver which could have been added to create the amalgam. However, such an amalgam would still contain a minimum of at least 50 ppm lead, since electrolytic silver contains 250 ppm lead.
Gold/silver nuggets from Cornwall show a similar composition to the Chiemsee cauldron amalgam in gold and silver as well as similar trace elements of lead and platinum, and they are the likely source for the metal used to construct the cauldron. The zinc, which Northover found in the solder to fasten the cauldron plates, could have come from cementation-produced brass, which was being created in north Gaul as early as 80 BC, twenty years before the probable construction-date of the Chiemsee cauldron. The presence of zinc in the solder cannot be used to deny the ancient origin of the cauldron. The ancient nature of the Chiemsee cauldron then rests upon an examination of the motifs portrayed on it.
In 2019 the then-owner requested that I examine the Chiemsee cauldron. After an initial study of the photos and Northover’s metallurgical analysis of the cauldron, the late Ralph Rowlett and I concluded that the cauldron might indeed be late Iron Age in date. The likely genuine nature of the cauldron was confirmed by a careful inspection of the piece in Houston. Three years of research and writing about the cauldron have followed that initial inspection. It is my firm belief that there is no possibility whatsoever that the Chiemsee cauldron is fake. Ralph Rowlett and I presented our initial findings in a joint lecture to the Archaeological Institute of America in St Louis (“Tale of Two Kettles”, November 11, 2019). Earlier, I had presented these findings to the Celtic Congress in Bangor, Wales (July, 2019).
In 1995 a mint-master metalsmith’s workshop was uncovered in Swabia. However, the finds were not published until 2011. The finds include a hammer for finishing small objects, files, chisels, eight iron piece-punches with different faces: a fine line, two sorts of dots, an oval, a fine curve and a broader curve. The find also included the iron dies for silver quinarii produced by these punches (Ziegaus 2011: 289-294). We now know the exact techniques used to produce the coin images. The analysis of Gaulish coins also has been revised to incorporate the conclusions of John Sills’s 2003 study Gaulish and Early British Gold Coinage as well as Philip de Jersey’s series published in academia.edu on the Câtillon-II hoard.
This work, which includes a detailed analysis of the art style of the Chiemsee cauldron (as well as that of the Gundestrup and Rynkeby cauldrons), thus, completes three years of research and writing on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron. This work also completes fifty years of research and writing about all aspects of the Gundestrup cauldron. Other works on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published by me on academia.edu as a result of this research include: Celtic Gods who Control Rejuvenation, Rebirth, and the Island where the Sun Sets (2021a); The Armorican Origins of the Silver and Gold Celtic Cauldrons from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee (2021b); A History of the Chiemsee Cauldron (2021d), and The Myths Portrayed on the Chiemsee Cauldron (2022). A revised edition of my earlier work on the gods and myths portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron is also available on academia.edu: The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans (1992-2019). One may also find on academia.edu all my works of the Coligny calendar.
The original research, conducted in 1999-2000, begun after viewing, for comparison with western European items, the important pieces of Thracian silverwork housed in Romanian and Bulgarian museums. The research required the computer-generation of around 1500 four-megabyte images of the motifs under study to be projected onto 142 plates. The original study was made available in a joint publication of Archaeolingua and Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. By combining plates from the original edition and eliminating those which were of lesser importance, I have limited the number of plates in this addition to 82. Where plates have been eliminated from the current edition, I have provided references to the earlier edition. By transforming the images for this addition from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, I was able to divide the work into four sections, each containing around twenty 450-kilobyte plates (with 10 to 12 comparable items per plate), keeping each section under 10 megabytes for ease of downloading.
My motivation for examining and demonstrating the interrelated development of these Old Irish, Middle Welsh, and Classical narrative accounts is that early versions of several Old Irish tales seem to be depicted in the narrative portrayals on the silver cauldron found at Gundestrup in 1891 and on the gold cauldron found in the Chiemsee in 2001. However, the portrayals on the cauldrons are not a necessary part of the demonstration that these later stories developed from common prototypes. The literary connections do not depend upon establishing that the stories are portrayed on the cauldrons. Thus, this comparative literary analysis (though much of the material had oral beginnings) is of vital importance to anyone interested in the origins of Gawain and the Green Knight and of Tristan and Isolde (Tristan). The origins of GGK in the Irish tale Fled Bricrend and the origins of the prototype Tristan in Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Gráinne is firmly established here, apart from the depictions of even earlier versions of these tales on the Chiemsee cauldron.
The iconographic depictions on the cauldrons are of vital importance in determining the original nature of the characters in these stories as deities. In the medieval tales which developed out of these myths, the original Gaulish deities, for the most part, have been euhemerized into kings and queens or warriors and their concubines. I demonstrate in this work that the stories associated with these cauldrons arose as myths about deities. In the Chiemsee depictions recalling Classical tales, such as some of those preserved by Ovid in Metamorphoses, the original Gaulish deities have been replaced by their Roman or Greek equivalents. The mythic nature of these Classical stories is still apparent. Here I connect the Classical deities utilized as characters in these stories with their Irish and Gaulish equivalents.
The fragmentary calendar plate from Coligny (near Lyons) apparently dates to the second-century AD, although the Gaulish calendar engraved on this plate is plainly the result of a long transmission process. The 25-year-cycle calendar, the final system of this transmission process, probably originated early in the first-century BC, before Caesar’s conquest. It is within this late pre-Roman period that the calendar took on its final form and notation to enter a two-century long transmission process during which many copying errors were introduced. Embedded within the notation of the 25-year-cycle Coligny calendar is a 30-year-cycle calendar. The notation on the Coligny plate indicates that the original constant-lunar 30-year-cycle calendar system (from which the later shifting lunar calendar developed) had each month begin on the first day of the new moon.
Using a photo-processing program (Adobe Photoshop V) to create the month for my 2001 work, segments duplicating the missing notation were copied from surviving fragments of the Coligny calendar and then were utilized to fill in the missing sequences on the calendar maintaining the original spatial integrity of the fragmentary mosaic (taken from RIG: III at ¾ scale, but shown in plates 2 and 3 at about ¼ scale and elsewhere at ½ scale). Indeed, the original fragmentary mosaic (plate 2) is still embedded in the digitally-reconstructed whole calendar (plate 3). Thus, the fragmentary calendar was brought to photographic completion utilizing the original wording and engraving to be found on the surviving fragments. Pinault, one of the coauthors along with Duval of RIG: III: Les Calendriers, has also accepted my reconstruction of the original pattern in the distribution of these TII marks and their associated terminology (in a review in Gnomen (1996), vol. 68: 706-710).
First, I wish to state unequivocally that the gold Chiemsee cauldron is not a fake produced in Weimar or NSDAP Germany, nor is its close cousin the silver Gundestrup a product of the intermixing of Celts and Thracians who occupied the region of the lower Danube bordering on the Black Sea. Both these cauldrons are the products of the same school of metalsmiths who produced the billon Armorican coins attributed to the Coriosolites, Osismii, Redones, and the Veneti during the period 75-55 BC. Thus, the Chiemsee cauldron resembles the Gundestrup cauldron, not because the gold cauldron was inspired by the silver cauldron but because both were produced within the same cultural milieu and perhaps even in the same workshop.
At the end of this talk I will reconstruct plot outlines of the myths current in the region defined by the Atlantic Iron Age culture [1], a region which includes Armorican Gaul, Ireland, and Wales. The primary bases for these reconstructions are the following: (one) the discovery (which I made fifty years ago [2]) that the narrative portrayals on the inner plates of the silver Gundestrup cauldron align with the major episodes of the seventh-century poetic versions of the Irish Táin bó Cuailgne; (two) the discovery (which I made four years ago) that the narrative portrayals on the outer plates of the gold Chiemsee cauldron align with major episodes of the ninth-century Irish Fled Bricrend; and (three) the discovery (also four years ago) that the Chiemsee inner plates align with important episodes of the eighth-to-eleventh-century poetic descriptions of the events of Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (TDG), a romantic epic which survives in the Early Modern Irish of the sixteenth century. Since the imagery and art-style of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons also align with Armorican coins datable to 75-55 BC, the cauldron-portrayals demonstrate that mythic versions of these later euhemerized tales were current in Armorica during the decades before Caesar’s conquest.
This is a German version of the paper delivered at the July 2023 Celtic Congress in Utrecht. The paper explains the comparison of details on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to that of Armorican coins dating to ;just before Caesar's conquest. The paper demonstrates that both the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons were in created in Armorica during that same period.
What I attempt is to reconstruct plot outlines of the myths current in the region defined by the Atlantic Iron Age culture (see Cunliffe 1978, 1991, 2021), a region which includes Armorican Gaul, Ireland, and Wales. The primary bases for these reconstructions are the following: (1) the discovery (which I made fifty years ago) that the narrative portrayals on the inner plates of the silver Gundestrup cauldron align with the major episodes of the eighth-century Irish Táin bó Cuailgne; (2) the discovery (which I made four years ago) that the narrative portrayals on the outer plates of the gold Chiemsee cauldron align with major episodes of the ninth-century Irish Fled Bricrend; and (3) the discovery (also made four years ago) that the Chiemsee inner plates align with important episodes of the eighth-to-eleventh-century poetic descriptions of the events of Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (TDG), a romantic epic which survives in the early modern Irish of the sixteenth century. Since the imagery and art-style of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons align with Armorican coins datable to 75-55 BC, the portrayals on these cauldrons demonstrate that mythic versions of these later euhemerized tales were current in Armorica during the decades just prior to Caesar’s conquest. Since the same myths are to be found as narrative portrayals in pre-conquest Armorica and later as tales recited in early medieval Ireland, presumably they were current throughout the Atlantic Iron Age Culture. Such speaks forcefully against its production by a modern forger. It is also unlikely that a modern forger would have been so adept at working in the style of Armorican-coin art in producing the repousse figures to be found on the cauldrons. That one of the two narrations portrayed on the Chiemsee cauldron can be seen to line up with a story actually recorded in Gaul by Poseidonius during the same period in which the numismatic style of the portrayal was in fashion is the clincher in demonstrating its ancient origin.
The Chiemsee cauldron is so-close in style to the Gundestrup cauldron that either it is a copy made after the discovery in 1891 of the Gundestrup cauldron, or it was produced by the same early-Celtic culture. Metallurgical analysis of the Chiemsee cauldron in 2007 generated results inconsistent with modern dental gold or electrolytically-produced metal but which do fit Cornish gold/silver nuggets. The portrayed items and the art-style of both cauldrons are consistent with their having been produced in Armorica in the decades before Caesar’s conquest. The imagery of both cauldrons suggests they display Gaulish narrative-portrayals of later Irish tales, which, nonetheless, predate AD 1000.
To study the art-style and imagery displayed on the Chiemsee cauldron, I generated over 100 plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork, a technique I utilized previously (2001) to study the Gundestrup cauldron.
A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the imagery on first-century-BC decorative metalwork was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint-masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find-distributions, the coins can determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory.
Appendix C gives the derivation of the Olmsted minimum-induced-loss propeller equations. Appendix E compares the 1909 equations of Charles Olmsted to those corrected for Goldstein’s vortex induction as well as to Eugene Larrabee’s propellers. The two approaches to minimum-induced loss give identical results.
Between 1909 and 1912 Olmsted had completed the design of the perfect plane to be propelled by his perfect propellers (pl. 2). He had nearly completed constructing it as well. Olmsted had formed a syndicate with the Buffalo Pitts Company and some of Buffalo’s most prominent businessmen to develop a plane of solid construction, as opposed to the ultra-light type craft of the day. In his plane, which he called the Bird, every component part was constructed of wood and metal. The design of the plane was focused on achieving strength, low weight, and streamlining. The wings, fuselage, and tail, as well as their final assemblage were perfected by thorough testing of models in the wind-tunnel to achieve maximum efficiency, safety, and stability. The plane was years ahead of its time. The Buffalo Pitts Company, the country’s largest manufacturer of steam traction engines, wished to soar into the twentieth century rather than plod along at the cumbersome rate of their heavy steam engines.