Rawhide Shield Edging

[Flavius Promotus]

Are the reasons for edging the entire edge of a scutum to do with the Dura Europas scuta? Because the only place rawhide edging was used on scuta was on the corners, not the entire rim. Leather was stitched on to the rim to keep the plywood planks together, and rawhide used to reinforce the corners. At least according to Simon James' catalogue.

Cancel 'leather' and replace with 'rawhide'. There is no use in using leather for the rim, since rawhide serves the same purpose in a much better way. Dried leather and rawhide are sometimes difficult to keep apart, so archaeological reports mentioning leather rims should be handled with extreme care.

Furthermore, the well-known "Dura-Europos corner rawhide patches for rectangular scuta" have been, at least in my opinion, a misunderstanding. If you turn the wet and soft rawhide strip 90° around at the corners, unsightly folds appear. If you press these folds down (e.g. with a small piece of plywood on both sides and a clamp) and let the rawhide shrink, the compressed folds look vaguely like a small rectangle (personal experience). If you then try to stitch over the rim of these compressed folds with saddler stitch, in order to keep them down where they belong(as the old drawing from Herbert J. Gute suggests), you get a structure which looks somehow like a patch, but it isn't one!


By the way, for those who are interested, i've listes up the measurements for the Dura-Europos shields' saddler stitch holes:

Oval 617: distance between holes = 1 – 1,2 cm.
Distance holes - rim = 0,6 – 0,8 cm.

Oval 619: distance between holes = 0,6 – 0,9 cm. Distance holes - rim = 0,8 – 1 cm.

Oval 625: distance between holes = 1,8 – 2 cm. Distance holes - rim = 1,5 cm.

Fragment Oval 626: distance between holes = 1,8 – 2 cm. Distance holes -rim = 1 cm.

Fragment Oval 628: distance between holes = 1,2 cm. Distance holes - rim = 0,4 cm (sic !).

All measurements from James (and all are average figures)

No such measurements are known for the rectangular shields, but for shield 629 (= THE shield), the width of the rawhide strip is known = 3,5 - 5 cm.

Hope that helps