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A bracteate (from the Latin bractea, a thin piece of metal) is a flat, thin, single-sided gold coin produced in Northern Europe predominantly during the Migration Period of the Germanic Iron Age (in Sweden this includes the Vendel era), but the name is also used for later produced coins of silver produced in central Europe during the early Middle Ages. There are also described piece's from the Hun caucases and the Hunnic invasion of India, in the style of Gupta and Roman coinage.
Gold bracteates from the migration period Gold bracteates commonly denote a certain type of jewelry, made mainly in the 5th to 7th century AD, represented by some spectacular gold specimens. Pierced or fitted with an eye, most were intended to be worn suspended by a string around the neck, supposedly as an amulet (alu). The bracteates are believed to have started as one-sided copies of Roman coins but soon developed into jewelry. The native proto-Norse term, from the evidence of the Tjurkö bracteate inscription, appears to have been walha-kurn, "Welsh (i.e. Roman) grain (for coin)". The motifs are commonly those of Norse mythology and are believed to be Norse pagan icons for protection or divination. For this reason the bracteates are a target of iconographic studies by scholars interested in Norse belief systems. Several bracteates also feature runic alphabet inscriptions (a total of 133 inscriptions on bracteates are known, amounting to more than a third of the entire Elder Futhark corpus). The study of migration period bracteates are considered an interdisciplinary field of Germanic art, Norse art, numismatics, archaeology, iconography, Norse mythology and runology. Typology The typology for bracteates divides them into several letter-named categories, a system introduced in a 1855 treatise by the Danish numismatist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen named Om Guldbracteatene og Bracteaternes tidligeste Brug som Mynt and finally defined formally by the Swedish numismatist Oscar Montelius in his 1869 treatise Från jernåldern: Corpus More than 1,200 bracteates are known in total. Of these, 135 (ca. 11%) bear Elder Futhark inscriptions. The German Karl Hauck, archaeologist Morten Axboe and runologist Klaus Düwel have worked since the 1960s to create a complete corpus of the early Germanic bracteates from the migration period, complete with large scale photographs and drawings. This has been published in three volumes in German named Die Goldbrakteaten der Völkerwanderungszeit. Ikonographischer Katalog. Early medieval bracteates
Indian style bracteates These coins were made by the invading Hunnic tribes as they entered India, from 635 ad they seen to have issued gold coins to the weight of half a gram to one gram in the style of Gupta and Roman coinage. Notes Literature | ||||||||||
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