Thickness of a bronze bell cuirass

[Matthew Amt]

Yet I have seen a couple in the Athens War museum that are much thicker looking.

But all you can see is the edge, and that won't tell you much. Edges thicken when a helmet is raised, for one thing. They might also be rolled or folded, or turned back at a right angle. There is one I've seen (Univ. Pennsylvania Museum, I think) on which the nasal looks like it's a quarter-inch thick, but it's just a turned-back edge because it's coming loose at points! The metal itself is quite thin.

Measuring the thickness in several places with a long pair of calipers is the only way to get useful data. Simply weighing the helmet or armor piece will help a lot, but most museums don't even do that. Several of the helmets in the Axel Guttmann collection looked like they were quite thick around the face openings, yet I never saw a weight more than 3 pounds. *If* the face area was really that thick, the rest of the helmet had to be scary thin.

Oh, yes, good point on metal hardness, too! Hammer-hardened tin bronze is amazingly strong stuff.

Khairete,

Matthew