RomanArmyTalk

Rocktupac wrote:

Quote:What is striking about the absence of quilted armor references for the Archaic and Classical periods is that there appears over two dozen literary examples of soldiers wearing armor made of linen and none of them even hint at the armor being quilted or stitched or sewn, etc.

....two Dozen references in the literature? Could you list these please?........ D

Quote:This is going to sound repetitive, but the results from the testing I have done along with Prof. Greg Aldrete over the past two or more years were completely opposite to everything you claim.

<snip> How bizarre. I find it hard to believe that simply varying the quality of the cloth could produce such disparate results. FWIW I used 16 layers of fairly expensive tablecloth linen. I'll have to dig up the type of thread and weave. What glue did you use?

Quote:I realize there is no explicit evidence for laminated linen armor thus far, and you have also made it clear that there are precedents for quilted cloth armor in other cultures, but as far as I know there is no mention that the Greeks or any other ancient Mediterranean peoples wore textile armor that was quilted.

So? Cloth armour has been used for thousands of years and I can think of two passages from any culture that actually describes its method of manufacture. One is in Arabic and the other is in French. It is hardly unusual for a passage to neglect to tell the reader how a type of armour is made.

Quote:For our tests we have also found every artistic representation of type IV armor found in the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (nearly 1,000 examples so far). Many have used what looks to be a kind of quilted armor on the vases as evidence for its existence, but when the entire body of vase paintings from the CVA is examined the number of the so-called 'quilted armor' examples is a tiny fraction of the smooth-looking, 'not-quilted' types. Though this is admittedly a featherweight argument, it does add another slight bit of weight for the argument against quilting.

It is no argument at all unless you can demonstrate that all the illustrations were done by the same artist. Every artist has his own way of illustrating things. Some might choose to show the stitching, others may not.

Quote:....two Dozen references in the literature? Could you list these please?.......

Yes please.

Edit: didn't we just have a big thread about the likelihood of at least some of these type IV's being made of leather/rawhide?

Quote:<snip> How bizarre. I find it hard to believe that simply varying the quality of the cloth could produce such disparate results. FWIW I used 16 layers of fairly expensive tablecloth linen. I'll have to dig up the type of thread and weave. What glue did you use?

We used a number of different qualities and manufacture methods of linen: ranging from tight weave to loose, smaller thread to thicker, and completely machine processed linen (but none were bleached) to completely handmade linen (i.e. harvested by hand, spun into thread by hand, and woven into linen cloth by hand). All linen types were rather expensive, but the last named was by far the most expensive. The number of layers we used in each patch varied greatly as well: most were of 10, 15, and 20 layers. We made a different patch based on weave orientation or laminated vs. quilted, and in each of the layer thicknesses. The patch that was made from the ultra authentic linen wound up being 11 layers thick, but this was based on our assumption that a 1 cm thick piece of armor (however many layers it would require to reach this thickness) would be sufficient enough to stop any impact from an arrow likely to have been encountered on an ancient battlefield. Overall there were around 15 or so patches. The glues we used were rabbit glue, flaxseed glue, and modern PVA glue; each was used in a number of different ways in the various patches based on first round tests with a smaller number of test patches. (Also, the size of each test patch was 18 inches by 18 inches.)

Scott wrote:

Quote:but this was based on our assumption that a 1 cm thick piece of armor (however many layers it would require to reach this thickness) would be sufficient enough to stop any impact from an arrow likely to have been encountered on an ancient battlefield.

...whilst I have no doubt of the value of the trials you conducted, I fear you may have started with some invalid assumptions. To begin with, neither shields, helmets, nor body-armour were ever intended to "stop any impact from any arrow...etc" - rather they were designed to be a balance between protection, weight, expense etc; a compromise in fact, as ever, between offence and defence.

Secondly, what sort of energy of weapons/penetrating power etc did you assume would be "encountered on an ancient battlefield" ?

Quote:This is going to sound repetitive, but the results from the testing I have done along with Prof. Greg Aldrete over the past two or more years were completely opposite to everything you claim.

Scott, has this work been published?

Quote:So? Cloth armour has been used for thousands of years and I can think of two passages from any culture that actually describes its method of manufacture. One is in Arabic and the other is in French. It is hardly unusual for a passage to neglect to tell the reader how a type of armour is made.

I only wanted to make it clear that there is no evidence from the ancient Greek or Roman literary sources that state that the linen armor referenced in a number of examples was either laminated (as has been often pointed out) OR quilted.

Quote:It is no argument at all unless you can demonstrate that all the illustrations were done by the same artist. Every artist has his own way of illustrating things. Some might choose to show the stitching, others may not.

Again, I simply wanted to point out that while many artists will show incredible detail on certain items, such as the interior of a shield, and then leave the surface of armor (of the type IV variety) smooth or without detail such as quilting. And this is true for many artists. If detail is shown on one piece of military equipment (i.e. a shield interior), why not show detail on something else (i.e. the quilting on type IV armor)? If any quilting had actually been visible one would imagine more artists would have drawn it as such.

Quote:

Quote:....two Dozen references in the literature? Could you list these please?.......

Yes please.

The references:
Alcaeus (2.19); Cassius Dio (78.7.1-2); 'Chronicle of Lindos' (29, lines 36-39); Cornelius Nepos 'Iphicrates' (1.3-4); Herodotus (2.182; 3.47; possibly 1.135); Homer 'Iliad' (2.529; 2.830); Livy (4.20.1-7; 9.40.3); Pausanias (1.8; 1.21.9; 6.19.7); Pliny 'Natural History' (19.2); Plutarch 'Alexander' (32); Silius Italicus 'Punica' (4.223; 9.586-598); Strabo 'Geography' (3.3.6; 13.1.10); Suetonius (19.1); Xenophon 'Anabasis' (4.7.16; 7.63); Xenophon 'Cyropaedia' (6.4.2).

OK, only 23 individual references and not "two dozen" as I stated earlier, but close enough (24 if you include the reference from Herodotus (1.135) that the linen armor originated in Egypt).

Our work has not been published yet. We hope to have this done very soon, though. In January we will be presenting once again at the annual meeting of the APA/AIA in Anaheim, CA (January 6-9).

I've said this before, but since there are new faces I'll repeat myself. To me the biggest question with glued linen is not that it protects better or worse, this is only one concern with armor and not always the major one at that, but that there be some tradition of glueing linen that the armor makers drew from. Obviously quilting linen has a long history, but I, or someone else for at this point I don't remember, came across glued linen in the construction of masks. Tracing down more about the precursors to glued linen technology would greatly help the arguement.

Nothing to do with armour,but glued linen was used to make masks for theater. It has been suggested that it was Connolly again that introduced this theory,but in greece there is a long tradition in some places for making masks used in traditional ceremonies with armoured men wearing masks made of glued linen. The tradition has its roots in paganism.
I don't think it might be very relevant to armour though.
Khaire
Giannis

Some other bits:
-A small fragment of laminated linen containing 14 layers has been found in a grave at Mycenae among a cache of arms and armor. (Studniczka, Franz (1887) “Zur Herkunft der Mykenischen Cultur,” Mittheilungen des Kaiserlich Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung 12, 8-24)

-Similarly, a fragment of laminated linen uncovered at Tarquinia was identified by the excavator as having originally been part of a linen corselet. (Helbig, W. (1874) “Oggetti Trovati nella Tomba Cornetana detta del Guerriero,” Annali dell’Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica 46, 249-266.)

Professor Amy Cohen of Randolph College has conducted research on the use of laminated linen in theater masks, presenting at the 2008 and 2009 annual meetings of the American Philological Assoc. It is taken from a line in the 'Suda' when discussing the theatrical innovations of Thespis; it states that "he introduced the use of masks made solely from linen." ('Suda', theta 282) Prof. Cohen is interpreting this as he made masks out of laminated linen formed in molds.

Quote:...whilst I have no doubt of the value of the trials you conducted, I fear you may have started with some invalid assumptions. To begin with, neither shields, helmets, nor body-armour were ever intended to "stop any impact from any arrow...etc" - rather they were designed to be a balance between protection, weight, expense etc; a compromise in fact, as ever, between offence and defence.

But within that balance, one would think that the intention to protect oneself from getting penetrated with an arrow was a factor in designing or for wearing body armor. I understand a piece of armor, whatever it may be, was not solely designed to resist penetration by arrow. The reason we tested the armor against arrow fire was because we could control the variables: range, pull strength of bow, angle to target, etc. We also carried out a number of slightly less-scientific tests using various weapons (slashing sword, double-edged sword, spear, axe, mace) and found that slashing objects (swords) or blunt force objects (axe, mace) hardly penetrated the armor and left only surface cuts while the thrusting objects (double-edged sword, spear) penetrated more easily from point-blank range. These thrusting or spearing motions and the penetration of type IV armor can be seen on a number of vase paintings (i.e. they depict soldiers with spears piercing areas around the abdomen of other soldiers wearing the type IV armor).

Quote:

rocktupac:3copvwii Wrote:This is going to sound repetitive, but the results from the testing I have done along with Prof. Greg Aldrete over the past two or more years were completely opposite to everything you claim.

<snip> How bizarre. I find it hard to believe that simply varying the quality of the cloth could produce such disparate results. FWIW I used 16 layers of fairly expensive tablecloth linen. I'll have to dig up the type of thread and weave.

Perhaps not so since your results were the opposite to mine too Dan...

Quote:The glues we used were rabbit glue, flaxseed glue, and modern PVA glue

Cool that you've participated in some testing too Scott I'm curious though- did you not encounter the same problem I did with the natural glues? Whether they work or not in ideal form I wouldn't have thought to be terribly significant if there is such seemingly fundamental flaw of protein glues as water solubility. Further to that, was the example you found wearing wasn't uncomfortable, etc., the PVA version or one of the natural glue pieces? And if it was one of the latter, was sweat not a problem afterall?

Quote:Nothing to do with armour,but glued linen was used to make masks for theater. It has been suggested that it was Connolly again that introduced this theory,but in greece there is a long tradition in some places for making masks used in traditional ceremonies with armoured men wearing masks made of glued linen. The tradition has its roots in paganism.
I don't think it might be very relevant to armour though.

Probably not relavent to glued linen either. A case can be made that linen was never used to make these masks at all. They are just as likely to have been a type of "papier mache"

Quote:Again, I simply wanted to point out that while many artists will show incredible detail on certain items, such as the interior of a shield, and then leave the surface of armor (of the type IV variety) smooth or without detail such as quilting. And this is true for many artists. If detail is shown on one piece of military equipment (i.e. a shield interior), why not show detail on something else (i.e. the quilting on type IV armor)? If any quilting had actually been visible one would imagine more artists would have drawn it as such.(6.4.2).

So why can't some of these Type IV's be made of leather or hide - perhaps the ones that don't show stitching?

Rocktupac/Scott wrote:

Quote:The references:
Alcaeus (2.19); Cassius Dio (78.7.1-2); 'Chronicle of Lindos' (29, lines 36-39); Cornelius Nepos 'Iphicrates' (1.3-4); Herodotus (2.182; 3.47; possibly 1.135); Homer 'Iliad' (2.529; 2.830); Livy (4.20.1-7; 9.40.3); Pausanias (1.8; 1.21.9; 6.19.7); Pliny 'Natural History' (19.2); Plutarch 'Alexander' (32); Silius Italicus 'Punica' (4.223; 9.586-598); Strabo 'Geography' (3.3.6; 13.1.10); Suetonius (19.1); Xenophon 'Anabasis' (4.7.16; 7.63); Xenophon 'Cyropaedia' (6.4.2).

OK, only 23 individual references and not "two dozen" as I stated earlier, but close enough (24 if you include the reference from Herodotus (1.135) that the linen armor originated in Egypt).

....useful to see the "usual suspects" gathered together for ease of reference, but I see that there is nothing new there that hasn't been discussed here before.
None are unequivocal, or even good, evidence for the use of linen armour by classical Greek Hoplites. One or two are in fact erroneous - Herodotus 1.135 for example makes no reference to linen whatsoever, but simply says that Persians "wear the Egyptian corselet", which is more likely a reference to the scale corselets of the Persians that Herodotus refers to elsewhere. Alcaeus and Homer are references to the mythical past of the Trojan War, Cornelius Nepos is an anachronism and obvious error, and very strikingly, the rest are all references to non-Greek linen armour....

All we can be sure of is that classical Greeks knew of linen armour, and therefore it is possible, although there is no direct evidence for it, that some mainland Greek Hoplite Tube-and-Yoke corselets may have been made of linen ( if so, possibly imported from Anatolia/modern Turkey, where linen armour is known to have existed at the time).

As to glued corselets ( ancient fibreglass :wink: ), this is pure speculation........

Quote:But within that balance, one would think that the intention to protect oneself from getting penetrated with an arrow was a factor in designing or for wearing body armor. I understand a piece of armor, whatever it may be, was not solely designed to resist penetration by arrow. The reason we tested the armor against arrow fire was because we could control the variables: range, pull strength of bow, angle to target, etc. We also carried out a number of slightly less-scientific tests using various weapons (slashing sword, double-edged sword, spear, axe, mace) and found that slashing objects (swords) or blunt force objects (axe, mace) hardly penetrated the armor and left only surface cuts while the thrusting objects (double-edged sword, spear) penetrated more easily from point-blank range.

...my point here is that you chose a 1 cm thick number of layers on the basis that this was 'arrow/weapon proof', but that the Greek armourers, like most, constantly strove for lightness etc and that if a piece stopped 75-90% of strikes, that was considered good, and if a new technique or material allowed increased protection at the old thickness, the armourers promptly thinned it, going for lightness rather than increased protection. This is most evident in the evolution of helmets, and possibly, shields.
I understand very well the reasons you chose arrows as your 'yardstick', and have no quibble with that. Can I ask again what energy levels of weapon you were testing your armour against? Obviously, how closely you can replicate ancient contemporary weapons is a key factor in tests of this kind. Were ancient arrow forms ( reed with foreshaft) and heads ( tanged, and trilobate) used, for example, not to mention bows of the appropriate power, or were you limited by availability to modern-type weapons, whose characteristics are of course very different.....

Matt Lukes wrote:

Quote:I'm curious though- did you not encounter the same problem I did with the natural glues? Whether they work or not in ideal form I wouldn't have thought to be terribly significant if there is such seemingly fundamental flaw of protein glues as water solubility. Further to that, was the example you found wearing wasn't uncomfortable, etc., the PVA version or one of the natural glue pieces? And if it was one of the latter, was sweat not a problem afterall?

...I too would be most interested in this aspect, for as Matt has identified, this would seem to be a fairly fundamental objection to the idea of 'glued layers of linen'. Having said that, it may be significant that where 'glue' was required to hold, say, a helmet lining in place in a sweaty environment such as a helmet, pitch rather than glue seems to have been more commonly used , re-inforcing the idea that protein based animal glues were unsuitable for such a purpose......

Quote:Cool that you've participated in some testing too Scott I'm curious though- did you not encounter the same problem I did with the natural glues? Whether they work or not in ideal form I wouldn't have thought to be terribly significant if there is such seemingly fundamental flaw of protein glues as water solubility. Further to that, was the example you found wearing wasn't uncomfortable, etc., the PVA version or one of the natural glue pieces? And if it was one of the latter, was sweat not a problem afterall?

The glues themselves may be water soluble, and we were worried about this when our initial arrow tests, but when we tested separate patches for their ability to hold together during a simulated rain we were quite surprised with the results. It seems that when a patch of laminated linen, whether glued with rabbit glue, flaxseed glue, or PVA glue (and yes, I realize PVA isn't relevant and there is nothing about it that compares to the ancient world--it was only used in any of the testing for curiosity alone), was completely drenched in an artificial rain and allowed to dry it would retain its bond between the layers. We even experimented around with natural waterproofing agents, although none of the sources name any (again we did this out of curiosity). We used beeswax rubbed on and melted on, lanolin spread on, pitch melted on, a mix of vinegar and salt, and olive oil spread on. They all compared very well and safeguarded the laminated linen patches against degradation from water.

The armor that we wore was made from PVA glue. Sweat was not a problem, including the time under the hot sun (which I experienced firsthand). I was running, bending down repeatedly, and jumping at times and found the armor to be completely comfortable and maneuverable.