Suddenly. A medieval buckle with a frog found by archaeologists in the Czech Republic turned out to be a pagan symbol – photo
January 7, 18:20 Share:
A mysterious buckle found in the Czech Republic may indicate the existence of a large-scale cult (Photo: Masaryk University)
Archaeologists have found an 8th-century bronze belt near Brno, Czech Republic, depicting a snake devouring a frog-like creature.. Researchers believe it may come from an unknown pagan cult.
Experts say that fighting a dragon or snake is one of the main motifs in the cosmogonic creation myths of many different cultures. However, the image on a medieval buckle found 60 kilometers from Brno illustrates not a struggle, but an interaction between a frog and a snake. According to experts, this image may be associated with the cult of fertility.
“The motif of the serpent devouring its prey appears in Germanic, Avar and Slavic mythology. It was a universally understood and important ideogram. When a belt depicting a snake eating a frog was discovered… we thought it was a rare find with unique decoration. However, we later discovered that other almost identical artifacts were also found in Germany, Hungary and Bohemia. I realized that we were looking at a previously unknown pagan cult that connected different regions of Central Europe in the early Middle Ages, before the advent of Christianity,” says Jiri Machacek, head of the department of archeology and museology at the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University in Brno, who participated in the excavations.
The buckle itself, according to archaeologists, belongs to a group of Avar belt products that were produced in Central Europe in the 7th-8th centuries and were part of the costume of the Avars, a nomadic people who eventually settled in the Carpathian Basin ( in the territory of modern Hungary). Their fashion was often adopted by neighboring peoples, such as the Slavs.
Earlier, at the same archaeological site, an animal rib covered with ancient Germanic runes was discovered. Studying the artifact, an international group of scientists from the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland and Australia came to the conclusion that in the territory inhabited by Slavic tribes, runes were used before the introduction of Cyrillic writing.
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