Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor - New Book

[Sean Manning]

I have now read the book, and recommend that people interested in ancient armour read it. It is clearly written, modest, and describes a lot of laborious and thoughtful experiments. There are valuable sections on the decoration of tube-and-yoke armour, on the manufacture of linen in the ancient world, and on the likely relative price of leather and linen armour. They did make some tests with quilted linen, stuffed linen, and bronze plate, but their emphasis was on demonstrating the feasability of their favourite construction rather than on comparing it with alternatives; they could also have done more to link the tube-and-yoke typology in art with “thorakes linou” in texts.

They managed to obtain bronze sheet of the right thickness and a reasonable alloy, and I understand how difficult that was, but they said it was annealed (softened by being heated and allowed to cool). Blyth found that most helmets after 520 BCE were quite hard, although he speculated that breastplates were usually softer. The performance of their bronze plate was closer to Blyth's “low count” estimate than Williams' “high count” estimate.

I agree that they have demonstrated that glued linen armour would have been economically and technically feasible in the ancient Mediterranean. Unfortunately, they still don't seem to have any evidence that any ancient culture did make such armour, and that concerns me. Modern people often solve problems differently than preindustrial people did, or they overlook difficulties which were important to the ancients. They cite two articles as evidence for glued linen armour, but you can read them for yourselves; they repeat the theory that theatre masks were made from glued linen, but I don't see anything about glue in the text which they cite (Suda s.v. Thespis, Adler no. Theta,282). The book is still useful whether or not you find their argument for glued linen armour convincing.