An Avar warrior in full gear must have been a frightening sight 1,300 years ago: the rider and horse were covered in armor, and the fighters wielded heavy lances and shot three-bladed arrows from composite bows. For 200 years, from the middle of the 6th century, the equestrian people dominated an area that stretched from the Hungarian Carpathian Basin to the borders of what is now Bavaria.
Of course, when an Aware got off his horse, everything had to be in place. So the warriors valued not only weapons, but also their belts, as Jiří Macháček, head of the Institute of Archeology at the University of Brno, explains. Together with colleagues from Vienna and Mannheim, he recently discovered and examined an extremely strange belt buckle from this period. The one in Journal of Archaeological Science described find also sheds new light on the early Middle Ages in Central Europe.
In the south of the Czech Republic in the border triangle with Austria and Slovakia, researchers excavating a Slavic settlement discovered a bronze belt tongue from the 8th century, roughly the size of a modern belt buckle. This part probably didn’t hold a belt together, but instead hung down at the hip on a leather strap attached to the main belt. It shows a snake-like creature eating some kind of reptile, perhaps a frog. “There are thousands of graves with such decorations in the Carpathian Basin – but this motif was completely new to us,” says Macháček.
At first, researchers believed it was unique. But in their investigation, they discovered four other belt tongues with the same motif, all discovered within the past decade, scattered across a vast area. Two come from what is now Hungary, one from Bohemia and one from Iffelsdorf in Upper Palatinate.
“Fastest long-distance migration in human history ever reconstructed”
So could it be the remnants of a long-forgotten cult? The interpretation is difficult because the Avars left no written records; most of what is known about them comes from Byzantine and Frankish authors.
Only last year an international team of researchers managed to clarify the origins of the Avars. The researchers compared DNA samples from Avar graves with the genomes of people living in Asia today. This enabled them to determine that the Avars, like the Huns centuries before, originally came from the Mongolian steppe. After a defeat against the Turks in 552, a military leader probably fled west at the head of a large squad. Five years later, the Avars appeared north of the Caucasus and in 567 they conquered what is now Hungary. “This is the fastest long-distance migration in human history that has been reconstructed to date,” explained one of the authors of the studyChoongwon Jeong from the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena.
So is the snake motif an import from Asia? This is supported by the fact that the Avars at least temporarily identified themselves mythologically as snakes or worms. According to this interpretation, the eaten frog could represent the Slavs who settled north of the Avars. However, the most recently excavated snake buckle from Lány in the south of the Czech Republic speaks against this: the site can be clearly identified as Slavic based on the buildings and was therefore probably outside the Avar Empire – the same applies to the finds in Bohemia and Iffelsdorf.
The archaeologist Jiří Macháček at the Lány site in the south of the Czech Republic.
(Photo: University of Brno)
In addition, the strap tongues were probably made in Lány. The craftsmen of the time poured the liquid metal into wax molds, which did not survive the manufacturing process. However, the researchers came across an erroneous form that was presumably discarded – effectively the negative of the snake motif. “That was a huge surprise for us,” says Macháček, because so far not a single workshop has been discovered, even in the core area of the Avars. Using 3D scanners, the archaeologists also discovered a great similarity between the individual strap tongues. Furthermore, the metal for the bronzes appears to come from the same region, probably present-day Slovakia. “That’s why we believe that they were either produced in the same workshop or by the same traveling craftsman,” says Macháček.
The creation of the world was often depicted as a battle with a snake
The researchers conclude from all this that the snake motifs probably had more meaning for people outside the Avar Khaganate. Just which one? Some deities have come down to us from the Slavic pantheon that can be considered cult objects. The snake could represent Veles, a male god of the underworld who was said to occasionally appear as a snake. The mother goddess Mokosch is associated with water and moisture – and can possibly be identified as the frog. It could therefore have been a fertility cult. The creation of the world is also often depicted in pre-Christian mythology as a fight with a snake, as a struggle between female and male elements.
Ultimately, however, this can no longer be clarified; too much of the mythology of the time has been lost. According to the archaeologists, the finds clearly show that the connections between the individual regions were probably more intense than expected. “The objects were made on Slavic territory, but with Avar technology, and the Slavs themselves chose the motif,” says Macháček. There were also contacts in other directions from Lány. At the same site two years ago, Brno archaeologists discovered an animal bone from the beginning of the 7th century, which was scrawled with a section of the Germanic runic alphabet, almost like a school notebook.
Cattle bone with runes carved into it.
(Photo: Christoph von Eichhorn)
Only 15 such pieces are known worldwide; the use of Germanic runes had never been proven in Slavic territory. According to the researchers, this find proves that there were also interactions with Germanic groups such as the Alemanni at the time.
The border region between today’s Czech Republic, Austria and Slovakia could have been a hub. “In these areas there could be a transfer of different knowledge and ideas and technologies,” says Macháček. For a long time it was assumed that only Christianization gave the starting signal for European networking. The finds now provide evidence that European merger could have begun in pagan times.
The Avars, on the other hand, disappeared from the scene as quickly as they appeared. Charlemagne destroyed their empire at the beginning of the 9th century.