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RARE GALLIC ARMILLUS
A substantial copper alloy bracelet comprising three sections with raised sections, intricately engraved and hinged.
France, Iron Age, early Gallic period, circa 500 BC.
Height: 5.4 cm – Inner diameter: 9 cm
(Visible damage and missing sections)
Included is a fragment of another bracelet from the same group bearing the old handwritten label: "Tumulus d'Attancourt / Hte Marne".
Height: 4.3 cm - Length: 8.4 cm
A substantial copper alloy bracelet comprising three sections with raised sections, intricately engraved and hinged.
France, Iron Age, early Gallic period, circa 500 BC.
Height: 5.4 cm – Inner diameter: 9 cm
(Visible damage and missing sections)
Included is a fragment of another bracelet from the same group bearing the old handwritten label: "Tumulus d'Attancourt / Hte Marne".
Height: 4.3 cm - Length: 8.4 cm
A substantial copper alloy bracelet comprising three sections with raised sections featuring engraved designs and hinges.
France, Iron Age, early Gallic period, circa 500 BC.
Height: 5.4 cm – Internal diameter: 9 cm
(Visible damage and missing sections)
Also included is a fragment of another bracelet from the same group bearing the old handwritten label: ‘Tumulus d’Attancourt / Haute-Marne’.
Height: 4.3 cm – Length: 8.4 cm
– Excavated from the Attancourt burial mound in
1865 – Auguste Nicaise Collection (1828–1900)
– Julien Bessoneau Collection (1842–1916)
– Léveilley Collection, sold at the Chauviré & Courant auction on 26 May 2025, lot no.
108.– Private collection, France.
– Proceedings of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Vol. 27, No. 4, 1883. Session No. V, pp. 437 ff.: “The Attancourt Tumulus” by Auguste Nicaise.
– Denise Bretz-Mahler, “The Nicaise Collection, Early and Middle Iron Age”, Memoirs of the Society of Agriculture, Commerce, Sciences and Arts of the Marne Department, vol. 75, 1960, pp. 7–23.
– Louis Lepage, “An Iron Age Tumulus: the Attancourt Mound”, Mémoires de la Société des lettres, des sciences, des arts, de l’agriculture et de l’industrie de Saint-Dizier, 1974.
– Jean-Jacques Thévenard (ed.), Archaeological Map of Gaul, 52: Haute-Marne, Paris, 1996.
The armilla we are presenting can be definitively linked to the grave goods recovered from the Attancourt burial mound, which was excavated in 1865. An old illustration of the grave goods from this tomb confirms that it belongs to this archaeological collection. The Archaeological Map of Gaul dedicated to the Haute-Marne includes this documentation and notes that casts of the objects from the burial are, moreover, held at the National Archaeological Museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, under inventory numbers 27.940 for our arm ring and 27.941 for the accompanying fragment of a bracelet.
From Auguste Nicaise, the object then passed into the collection of Julien Bessoneau, an industrialist from Angers, a significant part of whose archaeological collection was subsequently acquired in the 1970s and 1980s by Jean-Pierre Léveilley. The sale of this latter collection by Chauviré & Courant in May 2025 included numerous objects bearing old labels from the Nicaise collection, reinforcing the consistency of this provenance.
Through its rediscovered provenance and the quality of its decoration, this armilla constitutes an important and well-documented example of aristocratic funerary objects from the Gallic period.