Leather Cuirass

[MeinPanzer]

Good post Ruben !
There are many that survive from ptolemaic Egypt and South Italy in particular - probably too many to list, but perhaps we should try?
Is it too much to ask you to re-construct your list ?

I could for Ptolemaic Egypt (I just wrote an article on the Ptolemaic painted stelai for the first issue of Ancient Warfare), but not for the Italian examples. I only have a handful of images of Italian tomb paintings showing arms and armour, but there are dozens out there.

Yes, I had that tomb painting in mind.My recollection was brownish, but your post prompted another look - it certainly seems, in one reproduction at least, to have a purplish tinge. I note they are also shieldless ( but then so are two other un-armoured figures) . Might they be intended to be cavalrymen ?

It seems likely that the three cuirassed men were cavalrymen. It doesn't seem like any kind of continuity can be traced between the three scenes- procession, symposium, preparation for war- but three men ride horses in the procession and three men are almost identically armed with cuirasses and kausiai. The riders in the procession wear the most purple, as well (two have purple cloaks and the third a purple tunic with yellow stripes and a blue cloak with a purple edge). Wearing the kausia could also indicate wealth (it's still not clear if the kausia was just a Macedonian thing or a wealthy Macedonian thing), but another man, carrying only a spear, also wears one.

A lot of it is hard to judge- 8 men are in the procession and 8 again in the standing prepared for war, but only 6 appear in the symposium. Would they all have to be of the same class to party together? My vote, based on the Alexander mosaic and sarcophagus, is that those three are cavalrymen, while the others are infantry officers.

I'm sure painted shading and over 2000 years of discolouration might make them seem buff, but I think they're far more likely to have been white.
http://www.ypai.gr/atlas/images/photos_big/3_2.jpg
Even if they could be seen as off-white, that ties in with linen perfectly.
To put the photo I just posted into some colour reference, here's another photo of another part of the tomb shot under different conditions.
http://www.macedonian-heritage.gr/Helle ... l/d14g.jpg

I highly doubt it, because there are other, much lighter elements of the painting beside it, such as the cheek pieces of the helmet on the right of the shield. If you see a clear photograph, you can tell that these were intended to be biege-brown.

Exactly like linen.

If leather, what paint would be used to create the patterns we often see on the representations of cuirasses under discussion, bearing in mind they were quite flexible? Or, how would the patterns and decoration be made?

I totally agree- anything that is white or off-white is almost surely linen rather than leather, and dying or painting designs on leather probably wouldn't be very easy to do (in the case of the former) or would not last long at all (in the case of the latter).