The first flush of dawn over the Lech River awakened a gentle shimmer on the wet earth. As birds stirred, an observant hand brushed away river silt and clay—and there, half buried in the sand, gleamed a small, curved disc of gold.
In that moment, time folded. The ancient world whispered again through metal and myth. The coin was a “rainbow cup,” a Celtic artifact lost to centuries, now found anew.
Rediscovering the Rainbow Cup
In spring 2023, near a bend of the Lech River in Bavaria—about 70 km west of Munich—a discoverer collaborating with heritage officials unearthed an object of exquisite rarity: a small, curved gold coin minted more than 2,000 years ago by Celtic craftsmen.
The coin’s design is extraordinary: a four-pointed star surrounded by arches on one side, and on the flip side, a stylized human head with one large eye and features reduced to dots.
Bernward Ziegaus, senior curator in the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection’s numismatic department, notes that only three known Celtic rainbow cups display that star-and-arch motif—a fact that elevates this find’s significance. Metallurgical analysis puts the alloy at 77 % gold, 18 % silver, and 5 % copper, while its diameter measures about 13 mm and weight about 1.9 g.
The coin’s curvature is characteristic of rainbow cups (German Regenbogenschüsselchen). Local legend holds that such coins are “drops of gold” that fall to earth where a rainbow touches the ground.
A striking twist of fate accompanied the discovery: the person who found the coin happened to be born on a Sunday, aligning perfectly with the old belief that only those known as “Sunday children” are destined to uncover rainbow cups.
This coincidence added a layer of wonder to the find, reinforcing the sense that the artifact was meant to be revealed at just this moment in time. After its discovery, the coin was donated to the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection, where it is slated for permanent display in 2024 alongside other Celtic treasures.
Echoes of Ancient Hoards and Wider Landscapes
This single coin is part of a larger and more complex tapestry of Celtic gold. In Brandenburg (northeast Germany), a hoard of 41 such curved coins was found and made public in 2022. The coins there are plain—without elaborate imagery—but they push the known reach of Celtic gold far beyond core Celtic territories.
Wolfgang Herkt, a volunteer archaeologist, first stumbled on ten coins in 2017; further excavation by the Brandenburg State Heritage Management expanded the total to 41. Numismatist Marjanko Pilekić dated them to between 125 BCE and 30 BCE, associating them with the late Iron Age and La Tène culture circulation.
Because Celts did not historically inhabit Brandenburg, the hoard suggests extensive trade networks or long-distance exchange systems. Archaeology Magazine describes the coins as “curved gold coins … called ‘rainbow cups’” whose deposition may reflect ritual, economic, or symbolic behaviors.
Other isolated finds also emerge in the record. TheHistoryBlog reported a rainbow cup found in a cornfield in Denklingen, Bavaria, by a metal-detectorist. That find, though less elaborately reported, indicates that multiple stray coins may yet lie hidden under fields across the region.
Together, these finds compose a map of possibility—one that extends Celtic influence not just in space, but in symbolic networks, migration corridors, and belief systems.
Myth, Symbol, And Meaning
Why call them “rainbow cups”? The name is rooted in folk belief. Because these curved coins sometimes resurface after rain, appearing gleaming in plowed fields, popular imagination linked them to rainbows and pot-of-gold lore. Some believed they had healing or protective qualities or that they conferred good fortune.
Although these artifacts served as currency, their artistry suggests a purpose that went beyond commerce. The four-pointed star etched into the coin may symbolize the cardinal directions, offering a sense of orientation, while the curved arches surrounding it seem to mirror the horizon or trace the moon’s passage across the night sky.
The combination of these motifs points toward a worldview that wove celestial cycles into daily life. Because such designs are exceptionally rare, researchers approach their interpretation carefully, seeing them as possible markers of spiritual belief, ritual significance, or cosmological understanding within the Celtic world.
Because only three rainbow cups with this exact motif are known, each new specimen becomes a critical piece in a symbolic puzzle. Their rarity imposes caution: overinterpretation is a risk. But at the same time, each find is a cipher—a fragment of a lost language of motifs, belief, and value.
The Fourth Point: Rarity And Interpretive Weight
Amid all revelations, the fourth point demands emphasis: the motif’s extreme rarity imbues this coin with extraordinary interpretive potential. Only three known rainbow cups carry the four-pointed star plus arch configuration. That slender fact raises the coin beyond a mere artifact—it is a key.
Symbolic systems in antiquity often worked in subtle repetition, variation, and resonance. When a motif appears only three times, each instance must be scrutinized, compared, contextualized. This new coin provides a fresh data point in that narrow set, enabling comparative geometry, alignment, provenance inference, and symbolic reading.
Moreover, because the motif appears on one side while the opposite side bears a human face, one senses a dual logic: cosmic and human, fixed and animate.
The motif may mark territory, orientation, or sacred direction, while the human face signals personhood, listener, agent. The coin may have functioned as more than currency—perhaps as a ritual object, boundary marker, talisman, or marker of elite identity.
Thus, this coin is not just rare in gold weight—it is rare in symbolic vocabulary. Its discovery allows scholars to probe questions otherwise unanswerable: Did these motif-type rainbow cups form a subgroup?
Did their distribution trace particular pilgrimage or route lines? Could they be tokens of elite networks, exchanged only under oath or sacred context? The interpretive stakes rest on that fourth point.
Why This Find Matters Now
First, it refines our understanding of Celtic coinage in southern Germany. Although Celtic presence in Bavaria is known, each new coin sharpens chronological, stylistic, and circulation models.
Second, the find’s proximity to what later became the Via Claudia Augusta—an ancient Alpine route connecting Italy and Raetia—suggests that this coin may have traveled with merchants, pilgrims, or political emissaries.
Third, it reinforces the meeting of myth and archaeology: the lore of rainbow cups, Sunday children, golden droplet stories lingers in folk memory and now again touches tangible artifact. This convergence invites public imagination to engage with archaeology.
Finally, it exemplifies how a single artifact can reshape narratives. As Marjanko Pilekić put it: “Even if it is only one coin, it is a wonderful find.” If more specimens emerge on either side of Bavaria, archaeologists can begin to trace pattern, direction, and meaning—not just in gold, but in belief.
A Human Moment Across Millennia
Picture the moment of discovery: river mist lingering, sunlight slanting; the finder, kneeling at the water’s edge, removes soil bit by bit until metal yields to vision. Their breath catches. They know they hold not only precious metal, but a message from ages past—a small arc of wonder.
When the coin joins its companions in a museum case in Munich, under gentle lighting and silent by design, it will invite viewers to lean in, to imagine ancient hands turning it, passing it, maybe offering it. Perhaps someone will murmur myths, perhaps a child will ask, “Why is this coin curved?” And in that question echoes the old legends of rainbows and gold.
Artifacts outlast empires, but they also carry whispers. A rainbow—ephemeral, intangible—is gone in a moment. Gold endures. This coin bridges that divide: legend and craft, myth and economics, human and cosmos, past and present.
May future rains uncover more cups, lay them bare in wheat fields and riverbanks. May more Sunday children—born perhaps under chance skies—become finders. And may each coin add a stanza to the song we sing across time: that human hearts have always reached upward, restless, searching—for symbols, for stories, for gold that falls from a rainbow’s arc.
