Decorative disk

This silver decorative disk was found in the middle of the 19th century by peat diggers in de Peel, in the Kessel fields near the Dutch village of Helden. In 1890 the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden bought the disk from the estate of Mr. Guillon, a notary public from Roermond, paying 1550 Dutch guilders for it, quite a hefty sumat the time. Disks like these were used to decorate shields or horse trappings. They were also worn as insignia, on the breast plates of military men.
After tooling, the silver disk was gilded with gold. The decoration shows a kneeling man fighting a lion. Above him, a ramis depicted, flanked by two lions with gaping maws. At the bottom, there are two dogs sitting across from each other, with a cow’s head in between. The scene is framed by a series of rope bands and wave bands and features four little holes to fasten it by, two still containing a little rivet.
The style of the artefact betrays a Thracian origin, i.e. from the area covered by present-day Bulgaria and Rumania. It may have ended up in Helden in various ways: as war booty of Celts who raided Thracia at the time; as a piece of merchandise acquired in the course of the intensive relations between Celts and Thracians during the 1st century B.C.; as the possession of a member of the Thracian auxiliary troops forming part of the Roman legions which invaded the Netherlands in 12 B.C. It is possible the disk was entrusted to the bog by the Celts as a votive offering.