The world of images will be awakened to new life in an exhibition by the Archaeological Museum in Frankfurt. With outstanding, world-famous items from Austrian, Slovenian, Italian and Hungarian museums, large-scale illustrations and settings as well as through the use of modern audio- and video-technology, one can get a feeling for the living environment of the elite of the Eastern Alp region. The exhibition is complemented by the inclusion of the Early Iron Age chief’s grave from Frankfurt’s city woodlands, which indicates the new aristocratic way of life as early as circa 700 B.C., as well as selected Etruscan objects from the museum’s own collection. It is the world of princes, of feast and of rituals, the world of the old European aristocracy, as we meet it in the realms of the Etruscans and the Celts. The cult of the dead, and carousing, chariot races and competitions, priests and processions, high kings and high priests, sacrificial cults and the erotic, hunting and fabulous beasts – these are the themes reproduced in powerful pictures on the sides of bronze banqueting-ware and decorated weaponry. In these pictures from a time when there was no writing, we see the revels of a highly-stylised sensuous culture of the nobility. Some elements of these pictures are immediately accessible to us, others are obscure, encrypted in a code which has now been forgotten.
