Roman Leather Lamellae Scales from Karanis, Egypt

[Dan Howard]

Here is the largest piece of the cuirass found by Carter in Tut's tomb. This was made of hide. The Cairo Museum has really buggered this up. It was an entire, intact cuirass when Carter uncovered it - the oldest leather armour ever found. The Egyptians have lost a significant amount of it (they have boxes labelled with catalogue numbers from this armour that are completely empty) and let the rest degrade terribly. Thank Christ a lot of their artefacts are in other countries.