Sun dancer of the Nordic Bronze Age

Sun dancer girl from the NORDIC BRONZE AGE, roughly based on the clothes and artifacts found in the burial of the Egtved girl, who died in her late teens in Denmark in 1370 BC (for chronological reference, some 30 years before the birth of Tutankhamun), although the girl depicted here could be any other random girl, as such an outfit would have been very common in Bronze Age Scandinavia. The acidic soil of the bog completely disintegrated her bones, but other organic materials were well-preserved. The coffin was cut from a single tree trunk, and the short blond hair and well-trimmed nails are all what’s left of the girl. The inside of the coffin was covered with an ox pelt, which still has the silhouette of the girl’s disintegrated slim body imprinted in the fur. The clothes consisted of a kind of crop top and a short string skirt that would have been slightly see-through when dancing. All the clothes were made of wool. Similar skirts are represented in bronze figurines that are interpreted as female ritual dancers, apparently topless, who probably took part in a Sun cult. The Egtved girl was also buried with a bronze disk attached to the waist with a woollen belt. Such disks have also been found in other female graves, in one case with preserved, less revealing clothes and another one where many small decorative bronze tubes suggest the presence of a string skirt like that of the Egtved girl, which hasn’t survived. I also added a necklace of amber beads and a hair comb, also based on burial finds.

THE NORDIC BRONCE AGE lasted from 2000 BC to 500 BC. For comparison, it started when the last mammoths went extinct in Siberia and ended around the time of the Persian invasion of Greece. During the Bronze Age, Scandinavians exported Baltic amber to the rest of Europe, as far as Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, pharaonic Egypt, and Mesopotamia. In return, Scandinavians imported blue glass beads from the eastern Mediterranean. The Nordic Bronze Age was followed by the Pre-Roman Iron Age, known in archaeology as the Jastorf culture, period at the end of which the Roman author Tacitus referred to the tribes of northern Europe as “Germani” and their land as “Germania”.