Reconstruction of an Avar horseman warrior from Derecske-Bikás-dűlő; Deri Muzeum, Debrecen.
Image: Saxony-Anhalt State Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archeology/Andrea Hörentrup
The State Museum of Prehistory in Halle displays the treasures of the Huns, Avars and Hungarians. It becomes clear that the empires of the equestrian nomads only survived if their ruling class settled down.
DThe dead man lay stretched out in an oak coffin with his head to the north-east. His weapons, a long iron sword with a gilded scabbard and a broken composite bow, accompanied him. Beside him his charger rested prone in a shallow pit, fully bridled and ready for the ride into the underworld. The most spectacular object of the burial site, however, was the base on which the dead had been laid: a lamellar armor made of more than five hundred perforated iron plates, which were connected with leather straps and cords to form a movable armor. This armor and the speed of his horse made the rider almost invincible on a battlefield in the early Middle Ages.
The tomb of the cavalry warrior was discovered in 2017 during the construction of the highway in the eastern Hungarian city of Derecske. Even younger, namely only three years old, are finds from a burial mound in Mamai-Gora on the lower reaches of the Dnipro, from which arrowheads, a short sword and an amphora of the Scythian culture of the sixth century BC were recovered. The exhibition in the Halle State Museum of Prehistory, in which the plate armor from Derecske makes its grand appearance, while the objects from Mamai-Gora had to remain in Ukrainian bunkers for reasons of war, is therefore historically and contemporary up to date. At the same time, she names with desirable clarity what connects the warrior from East Hungary and the dead from the Dnipro: They were horsemen, they were nomads – and they went to Europe.
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