The Hildesheim Treasure

On 17 October 1868 soldiers of a Prussian infantry regiment were cutting a rifle range into the western slope of the Galgenberg, a low hill south-east of Hildesheim, when their spades hit decorated sheet metal. What came out of the pit, much of it crushed and blackened, turned out to be a Roman silver dinner service of the finest quality, buried about two metres down. The soldiers wheeled most of it back to barracks in a cart to be cleaned, and a local silversmith's workshop helped with the first treatment.

The recovery was not tidy. Townspeople at the site pocketed fragments; some were handed back and some apparently stayed in Hildesheim homes, so the find is almost certainly incomplete. The local newspaper first guessed it was Renaissance plate from a princely household. Within days the antiquary Colonel August von Cohausen, who knew the Roman camps of the Rhineland, questioned the soldiers about how the pieces had lain, and in 1869 he dug a small area around the findspot. Because the land belonged to the Prussian state, the silver went to Berlin within weeks of its discovery.

The hoard is all tableware: cups, bowls, plates, trays, ladles, an egg dish, a bucket and big mixing vessels, together with a folding tripod table and a candelabrum. The finest pieces are relief bowls whose centres carry figures beaten up almost into the round, among them Athena (Minerva) enthroned and the infant Hercules throttling the serpents. Dionysiac vines, masks and cupids wind around the drinking cups. Much of it is Augustan, from the decades either side of the birth of Christ, and some pieces are older.

The service was assembled, not commissioned in one go. Owners' names scratched on different pieces show it passed through several hands, and some vessels are heavily worn. Ancient numbers and weights punched on the silver suggest that what lay in the pit was only half of a set: for several types exactly half the recorded number was found, which has led some scholars to think the ensemble had been deliberately divided.

Who buried it is the great open question. Hildesheim enthusiasts long linked it to Publius Quinctilius Varus and his army's destruction in AD 9, but finds since 1987 place that battle at Kalkriese near Osnabrück, and the mixed, worn service hardly suits a nobleman of the imperial family. Other suggestions are booty from a Roman camp, the property of an officer in Augustan Germany, or an offering by a Germanic leader. The orderly way the vessels were packed, with smaller vessels apparently set inside a bucket, a krater and a kantharos, points to deliberate concealment or a ritual deposit rather than panic.

The silver was restored between 1895 and 1901, when Erich Pernice and Franz Winter published the standard monograph. One large krater decorated with cupids among vine tendrils went missing in 1945 and is now known from a copy. Electrotype and silver replicas made in the nineteenth century spread the treasure's fame to museums from London to Moscow, and its designs were copied for modern table silver.