Armor made of hundreds of small iron plates, a quiver full of arrows, a bow and a sword. The Avar warrior was buried with his full equipment 1,300 years ago on the edge of what is now the municipal area of a small town called Ebes, in eastern Hungary.
The solitary tomb was discovered last November and quickly caught the attention of archaeologists at the Déri Museum in nearby Debrecen, who are studying the site. Nothing more and nothing less than the entire body of his horse had been placed on top of the deceased.
Beyond the presence of the horse, researchers have given a lot of value to this discovery due to the presence of the lamellar armor, only the second that they have discovered intact and complete. With the exception of the horse bones, the entire complex was excavated in blocks and is being dismantled and documented in a restoration workshop.
The first analyzes have determined that its owner lived in the first half of the 7th century. The Avars, a nomadic people of Asian origin, created a multiethnic empire in Central and Southeastern Europe from the late 6th to early 9th centuries, when internal conflicts and the expansion of rival powers ended their rule.
The Avars settled in the Carpathian Basin region, now shared by the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine, around 567 AD. Initially they had a nomadic and pastoral lifestyle and lived in yurts and tents, a system poorly suited to the geographical environment. That's why little by little they became more sedentary.
Researchers found the warrior resting in a relatively shallow grave. Laminar armor was an important part of the equipment of the Avar heavy cavalry. It was made of hundreds of small iron plates of different types sewn together.
"Although there are written sources and pictorial representations of this type of defensive clothing, only archaeological finds are suitable for an accurate reconstruction of the structure," the Hungarian archaeologists say in a statement.
Burying soldiers in their armor was not a common practice in the Avar period, although some graves of men, women and children have been discovered that did have them. “In most cases, however, only a few plates or fragments are recovered. There are very few graves in which a complete lamellar armor was buried with the deceased and none of these had been found since 2017,” they add.
By chance, it appeared on the outskirts of the city of Derecske, also located in eastern Hungary and which is just 20 minutes by car from Ebes, where the burial was found during excavations related to the construction of a highway. .
"Since these pieces of armor were custom-made and were not uniform, the more we find, and the more thoroughly they are restored and documented, the more complete the picture we get not only of these types of objects, but also of the Avar heavy cavalry," say the archaeologists.
Once all the material has arrived at the laboratory, the structure of the armor can now be interpreted and reconstructed, in addition to being able to detect and study the organic remains, something that would have been impossible during field work. Perhaps the grave still holds more hidden secrets.
