Calendars of the Trundholm Sun Chariot

Abstract

The article develops K. Randsborg’s idea, according to which the decorative elements of the Trundholm disc have the character of calendar symbols. When considering these elements in their structural and numerical groupings, astronomical and calendar significance is found for all belts of both sides of the disk, and the proposed interpretations are consistently contextual. One discloses on the right side of the disk an 8-year cycle connecting the counting of days according to the sun and to the moon, 16 transitions of the sun from winter solstice to summer solstice, and 27 weeks of the summer half of the year. The patterns represented on the left side of the disk are relevant to the night sky: the same 8-year cycle, since it refers to the counting of days not only according to the sun, but also according to the moon; either division of a year into 10 months or the 19-year cycle of the return of both the moon and sun to their common position with respect to the stars; 25 weeks of the darker, winter half of the year. One concludes that in Denmark of the Bronze Age two types of calendars were used: lunisolar, which regulated the timing of religious festivals, and a solar, so to speak, civil, with a year made up of two not quite equal half-years, 52 weeks and 364 days (probably coexisting with knowledge of a year of 365 ¼ days). The data concerning the medieval Scandinavian calendars, on the one hand, and ancient calendars of Greece and the Near East, on the other, are in perfect agreement with the above conclusions.