In 1939, archaeologists excavating a burial mound in Suffolk uncovered something extraordinary: the ghost of a ship buried underground, and inside it, the richest treasure ever found in Britain.
The owner was probably Raedwald, King of East Anglia, who died around 625 AD.
The helmet is the centrepiece.
It had been crushed into more than 500 fragments, and what you see here is a reconstruction — painstakingly assembled, then reassembled again as understanding improved.
The face is formed by eyebrows, nose, and moustache working together to project absolute authority; the eyebrows themselves are set with garnets, so that in firelight the whole thing would have glittered.
Fun fact: the Anglo-Saxon period is often called the Dark Ages — a term historians now largely reject.
This helmet is one reason why.
Whoever wore it ruled a kingdom as sophisticated as anything in contemporary Europe.
