Linothorax vs Quilted linen vs spolas

[Dan Howard]

I agree that the Dendra panoply and the lining of the Vergina cuirass are irrelevant to the subject.

It is not relevant regarding the subject of leather and linen armour. However, it is relevant to whether Greek plate armour had integrated liners. I brought it up because people were talking about what garment might have been worn underneath. If the armour had its own liner then a regular tunic would suffice. If not then something more substantial would be needed.

The link to the linothorax find has been posted on RAT more than once. Mr Salimbeti is the one who has seen it first hand. It was found in a proto-geometric cemetery near Patras. A preliminary count suggests at least 10 layers of linen and part of the border is still intact, confirming that it is an armour fragment and not some folded cloth.
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As I said there is nothing in this thread that has not been said before. Produce a photo of one of these Macedonian leather armours. That would be worth continued discussion.

[Kineas]

The link to the linothorax find has been posted on RAT more than once. Mr Salimbeti is the one who has seen it first hand. It was found in a proto-geometric cemetery near Patras. A preliminary count suggests at least 10 layers of linen and part of the border is still intact, confirming that it is an armour fragment and not some folded cloth.
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As I said there is nothing in this thread that has not been said before. Produce a photo of one of these Macedonian leather armours. That would be worth continued discussion.

Dan, please produce a photo of one of these scraps of linen. Any one. Hearsay evidence is not evidence. It is mere assertion. I keep hearing about this linen, but there's no follow up, not article, no evidence.

Here's well known example of scales over leather from the period as you defined it.



I suspect there's hundreds. I have another up on another thread. Paul M-S in Australia has put half a dozen up on various debates. But no one has any pictures of this mysterious linen....

[Dan Howard]

Dan, please produce a photo of one of these scraps of linen. Any one. Hearsay evidence is not evidence. It is mere assertion. I keep hearing about this linen, but there's no follow up, not article, no evidence.

The dig is ongoing. There will be no report for several years. Same with the Thebes arsenal. The best we'll get until then is a first hand account from someone who examined it personally.

Here's well known example of scales over leather from the period as you defined it.

If this is all there is then we have no disagreement. I have already acknowledged that the Greeks used leather scale armour. It is by far the most common form of leather armour and has been used by many cultures since the Bronze Age. My problem is with taking this and using it to justify the existence of leather breastplates and tube-and-yoke style armours. Plenty of cultures used leather scale and did not use solid leather armour.

[Magnus]

Dan please provide primary sources and references instead of name dropping. This will allow the other people in the discussion to check and interpret the material for themselves.

[Paullus Scipio]

I have followed this subject with interest, but have refrained from posting because almost everything in the way of evidence has been discussed before, but I see a number of inaccuracies and misleading statements creeping in, which might best be corrected, so as to keep the thread on the straight and narrow…..

Dan:
and I have yet to see a convincing argument that the spolas was designed to be used as body armour.

Sean Manning:
and there are a few references to Greek armour of linen in Classical literature. There is better evidence that the "spolas" was a leather garment of some kind, but we don't know if it was armour. Some people think it was the ancient name for the "linothorax" but I'm not convinced.

There are not, in fact, any references to contemporary Greek armour of linen in Classical literature,( say 500 BC-300BC) unless Sean is including Homer, where as Dan has described, there are a couple…. or Alcaeus, neither of whom is strictly speaking"classical", and both of whom write well before the Tube-and-Yoke appeared and whose poetry concerns the mythical ‘Heroic Age’ .There is also a fragment of Sophocles, where the reference to linen is associated with Homeric chariots. These of course are not at all relevant to the Tube-and-Yoke in the Classical period. In actual Classical literature, Herodotus refers to “thorakes lineoi”- and clearly it seems not something familiar to Greeks. In his description of Xerxes army, (Book 7) he takes the trouble to distinguish outlandish, unfamiliar, foreign equipment. Thus it is worn by Assyrians and Phoenician marines. In contrast, other contingents wear ‘Greek armour’ or ‘their equipment was similar to the Greek’ – clearly implying that the specially described ‘thorakes lineoi’ are NOT Greek. He also refers elsewhere to linen ‘thorakes’ being a present from Pharoah Amasis to certain statues, bigger than life-size, but these do not sound like armour, being finely embroidered garments for goddesses.
Xenophon too refers to linen corselets. In the Anabasis, at 4.7 et seq, the Chalybes are described as wearing “…body armour of linen, reaching down to the groin, and instead of skirts to their armour, they wore thick twisted cords”. In the “Cyropaedia” ( a fictional? ) account of the life of the original Cyrus he speaks ( at 6.4.2 ) of a Persian called Abradatas arming “…and when he came to put on his linen corselet (linen thorakes), such as they used in his country, Panthea (his wife) brought him one of gold……”. The phrase,’ such as they used in his country’ (Persia) implies they were not worn in Greece. When describing Greek armour, Xenophon speaks of two types –‘spolades’ and ‘thorakes’. The ‘spolas’ is almost certainly the tube-and-yoke type, as described in this dictionary, with it’s references to shoulder-pieces:

Julius Pollux: Onamasticon VII.70
"Spolas de thorax ek dermatos, kata tous omous ephaptomenos, hos Xenophon ephe "kai spolas anti thorakos" is about as clear as we could hope for.
The spolas is a thorax of leather, from
the shoulders attached/which hangs from the shoulders, so that Xenophon says "and the spolas
instead of the thorax."

Xenophon when speaking of ‘thorakes’, from the context, is likely referring to the muscled cuirass.
For the sake of completeness, there are a couple of references in later Roman era writings.Cornelius Nepos, in his Life of Iphicrates, describing the changes Iphicrates is said to have made to Hoplite equipment, including “..he likewise changed the character of their curasses, and gave them linen ones instead of chain-mail and brass….”. There is clearly something wrong with this, with its anachronistic reference to mail.He is probably making an anachronistic reference to 'lightening' of equipment. I illustrated this new type of hoplite in “Warfare in the Classical World” with an Asiatic quilted linen cuirass.(of the Issus mosaic type)
Then there is Pausanias’ (1.21.7) famous reference to linen being useless for war, but alright for hunting, and linen cuirasses hanging in temples . But these temples/trophies are in Asia minor, not Greece.
.

.....So we are down to the art, which shows a smooth white surface and springy shoulders.

We can’t be sure that the shoulder-pieces are ‘springy’ since they could simply be thrown back, and be thick enough to stand vertically.

Christopher Webber:
I'm intrigued that Warry says that Plutarch says that Alexander wore the quilted type, as this might provide part of the explanation as to why he survived such terrible wounds.

Plutarch refers to Alexander wearing a quilted linen corselet on one occasion, captured from the Persians ( again implying such things were not made in Greece ), and red quilted tube-and-yoke corselets are worn by Persians in the ‘Issus’ mosaic. Alexander doubtless had more than one set of armour/equipment.

Dan:
There is nothing to suggest that glued linen was ever used by anyone ever……..There isn't a single piece of evidence to support the existence of glued linen armour in any shape or form in any culture in any time period.

Dan:
It was found in a proto-geometric cemetery near Patras. A preliminary count suggests at least 10 layers of linen and part of the border is still intact, confirming that it is an armour fragment and not some folded cloth.
Dan:
The best we'll get until then is a first hand account from someone who examined it personally.

It is only alleged that a fragment about thumb size was found and Mr Saltimberi, an artist and model figure-maker, claims it “won’t be published for at least 50 years”. Even if it exists ( which I very much doubt) it need not be ‘armour’ but could be anything. In any event, being from around 1200 BC or so it is again irrelevant to the classical tube-and-yoke.
I don’t think Mr Saltimberi claimed to have seen the Thebes fragment ( if it exists) personally, rather he relied on a description by another, a Mr D’Amato so the whole thing is only hearsay. Nor is it clear whether the fragment is supposed to be 'glued'.....in which case I'd have no hesitation in saying 'false', or if there are supposed to be traces of quilting....
Regardless of these murky rumours, Mycenaean or earlier cultures are not relevant to a type of corselet which first appears around 550 BC at the earliest.

Dan:
How many papers said that the Vergina cuirass had a leather liner? It turned out that it was lined in linen.

Giannis: Dan,do you have any articles about the lining of the Vergina cuirass and the Dendra cuirass?

I too would be interested in sources for this, and particularly any detailed description of the iron Vergina cuirass.

Dan:
A good starting point might be a photo of one of these alleged Macedonian leather armours.



Giannis: However a find of quilted linen from mycenean armour is not irrelevant at all. Now you'll say where are these finds of mycenean linen armour? Well,I don't know,but they're more specific than the "many" finds of leather body armour from Macedonian graves.

Photos are unlikely, and the leather seems to be fragments. What I think points to tube-and-yoke corselets is the associated metal fittings, often gold, possibly some scales etc - though these don't become common 'add-ons' to the Tube-and-Yoke until after the Persian Wars, implying an attempt to improve protection against Persian archery . Many of these warrior graves (dozens if not hundreds) have been excavated in Macedonia and unlike the rumoured Thebes fragment, or rumoured Mycenaean examples, have actually been published in reports by the excavators. I would be most interested to see these reports, but despite repeated requests in other threads and assurances by some of our Greek friends, they have not so far been forthcoming…….

[sitalkes]

Just found this in Wikipedia:
In January 2009, Dr. Gregory S. Aldrete (of UWGB) and Scott Bartell presented a paper discussing the protective qualities of the Linothorax at the joint American Philological Association/Archaeological Institute of America Convention held in Philadelphia, PA. The pair have been researching the linothorax over the past two years, and have built a number of replicas, all using the lamination method of construction. Their paper argued that a 1 cm thick linothorax, usually consisting of around 10 to 15 laminated layers, would have provided all the necessary protection to its wearer in order to survive an arrow or slashing attack. The research was carried out by assembling dozens of linen test patches using authentic materials, and subjecting them to arrow fire and sword cuts. The tests also concluded that quilted armor offered roughly three fourths of the protection of laminated armor, thus the quilted patches were less effective.

[url:102j3wfr]http://www.uwgb.edu/aldreteg/Linothorax.html[/url]

[Paullus Scipio]

This 'research' has been discussed before on another thread..........all it really does is test whether Connolly's 'glued layer linothorax' theory could work.The testing was done under some rather unrealistic conditions, which renders the results a little dubious......

[Kineas]

And the argument is circular. We're using a recreation of a linen corselet to support the idea of a linen corselet existing in antiquity.

Thanks, Paul, for a survey of the evidence.

Her's a couple of new iotas of data, just so that, as we beat this poor dead horse, something new may eventually emerge. One is in FAVOR fo the glued linen thorax. Hey, I';m an equal opportunity researcher.

It appears that stage masks were actually made by laying up layers of linen with glue. Now, there's no reason to believe that this was water proof or good armour, but it does, at the very least, suggest that a technology for laying up linen with glue existed and was practiced in period. If pushed, I could even provide a citation...

On the other hand, my shiny new survey of the textiles from the Kithra [sic] dig in Egypt (now at Ann Arbor, Michigan) says that in Egypt, the home of linen weaving in antiquity, for a fabric sample of 3500 items from 100BC to 450AD, that 90% are wool, 5% are wool and linen mixed, and less than 3% is pure linen.

This matches all the textile historians I've seen, who say that linen was frightfully expensive in period. We see lots of it on ARF, but remember that half the figures are goddesses... if we need ten layers of linen to absorb an impact, just what does that cost?

So--linen and glue masks for the theater, but linen is rare...

I hope that I have failed to advance either argument.

[sitalkes]

Dan:
A good starting point might be a photo of one of these alleged Macedonian leather armours.

Will this do? It may not be Macedonian, but it comes from Bulgaria (I have previously posted it on this forum)
[url:2pyrvg0n]http://au.groups.yahoo.com/group/thracians/photos/album/1638506231/pic/list[/url]

[nikolaos]

Paul,

Remind me never to get on the wrong side of a disagreement with you

Cole

[Paullus Scipio]

Kineas/Christian wrote:

It appears that stage masks were actually made by laying up layers of linen with glue. Now, there's no reason to believe that this was water proof or good armour, but it does, at the very least, suggest that a technology for laying up linen with glue existed and was practiced in period. If pushed, I could even provide a citation...

....I think I would challenge this idea......it stems from Peter Connolly again! ( p.98 " The Ancient City" Connolly and Dodge). We don't know what the masks were made from, since none survive.....I've had this discussion with someone a while back, and it seems that what evidence there is points more to a 'papier mache' type of construction rather than glued layers.....

Paul,

Remind me never to get on the wrong side of a disagreement with you

Cole

It's an illusion ! It's just that we have debated the evidence in regard to the Tube-and-Yoke corselet several times here on RAT, so it is all familiar territory, and apart from the Macedonian tomb evidence ( see separate thread on same) there isn't anything new........ :wink:

[sitalkes]

in Egypt, the home of linen weaving in antiquity, for a fabric sample of 3500 items from 100BC to 450AD, that 90% are wool, 5% are wool and linen mixed, and less than 3% is pure linen.

Wasn't a good proportion of weaving done at home? Perhpaps if you compared the price of cotton and flax in, say, Ireland, you would would find flax and wool was cheap but cotton expensive? I know that there are several flax producing areas in Greek Thrace, so flax was presumably not so expensive there. Were there places elsewhere in Greece (not a very flat or marshy country) where flax grew? Did they grow cotton there?

[Kineas]

There's no cotton in the Archaic or Classical. China only introduced an officer to watch the quality of woven cotton about 450 BC. textile historians argue about whether cotton originated in China, India, or even Bahrain, but we know that when Alexander saw Cotton at Babylon in 324, he was the first "Greek" to see it (or among the first) and he thought that it was exceptional.

Cotton use spread quickly, but it was a luxury fabric at first, although by 400 AD it was a major Egyptian export.

I learned all this yesterday from an exhibit at the ROM...

linen was, apparently, grown in Greece, but not in the quantity or quality that Egypt produced. It must have grown well in the Peloponnese, as Thucydides in the account of Sphacteria mentions that the Spartans sent flax-seed in honey over to their hoplites to keep their strength up. Still, Egypt was the major exporter of the ancient world when it came to woven linen. Textiles from Karanis, Egypt in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology: Artifacts of Everyday Life by Thelma K. Thomas is the study I just received. I recommend it. It represents all the dangers of research--it's later than my period and from Greek Egypt, which may, in fact, be a different world from the one that I study (late Archaic Greece) but the textiles LOOK like the ones in Greek art, and the 3500 samples represent about 50% of all the textile samples from the ancient world, Scythian grave finds included.

[PMBardunias]

I'm sitting this one out, but I will mention that although I am very sympathetic to the notion of quilted armor I am troubled by images that seem to be quilted armor- see attached. This is not the best image, but if these are quilted, then the majority of T-Y corselets look nothing like them. Note that the image is of the Persian's back.

[Paullus Scipio]

This 'diamond and dot' pattern, which seems to represent quilting is all but identical to that shown on the red Persian Tube-and-Yokes on the Alexander/Issus mosaic.Although the view here is from the rear, the corselet could still be a 'one-piece' Tube-and Yoke' ( of which there are many representations) and from the front would still have the characteristic shoulder-pieces....