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.
Looking at the Images, the King Tut and Nuzi Finds are much different than the Karanis find. The Scales are longer, thinner, and arranged in a curved pattern, more like segments.
The Karanis find has scales that are arranged more like a Roman Scale Cuirass, with the scales forming a circle around the shape of the neck, and then going straight down from there.
The Karanis scales look nothing like those at all. We also have no idea how large the Karanis scales are. Nobody has bothered to measure them. I wouldn't pay too much attention to how the scales are laid out. There is a possibility that they came from horse armour.
There was no excavation report but there is a conservation report. Looks like they got their grant and started a proper analysis last year. Apparently there will be some fresh reports released at the end of this year.
Quote:The Karanis scales look nothing like those at all. We also have no idea how large the Karanis scales are. Nobody has bothered to measure them. I wouldn't pay too much attention to how the scales are laid out. There is a possibility that they came from horse armour.
The scale size doesn't tell us that it is horse armour. The Karanis scales are the same size as Tut's scales. What leads me to suspect that it is horse armour is the large curvature around the top; it is consistent with a horse's neck, not a human neck. But it might just be the way that it has been laid out on display.
Fairly hard to tell WHO made it. Throughout the East, this style of armor was "generic." The only difference was the placement of the holes for sewing. Maybe it belonged to a totally lost Korean wandering across the desert. As a member of Legio III Cyrenaica, I'd like to think it might have been Roman. But the owner is long dead. :dizzy:
I always wanted a set of combo armor-- lamellar and scale. It was made for me by Lykia and shipped from Poland back on August 13th. It never made it here to Maine, lost now in the mail for three weeks. :x
Alan J. Campbell
member of Legio III Cyrenaica and the Uncouth Barbarians
Author of:
The Demon's Door Bolt (2011)
Forging the Blade (2012)
"It's good to be king. Even when you're dead!"
Old Yuezhi/Pazyrk proverb
Quote:The scale size doesn't tell us that it is horse armour
It doesnt make sense for a person to wear 7cm x 4.6cm scales. They would functionally be useless. The only clear conclusion is that they were meant for a horse IMO.
Markus Aurelius Montanvs What we do in life Echoes in Eternity
Quote:The scale size doesn't tell us that it is horse armour
It doesnt make sense for a person to wear 7cm x 4.6cm scales. They would functionally be useless. The only clear conclusion is that they were meant for a horse IMO.
Perhaps that would be true of metal, but leather scales would presumably be somewhat more flexible. Larger scales/lamellae would also need less lacing than smaller ones and therefore produce a less expensive piece of armour.
I cannot imagine that native Egyptian methods of armour production survived the many centuries of assimilation to the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. It seems more likely that, as the Roman army is the only substantial organised entity in Egypt at this date requiring armour, the armour belonged to a Roman soldier. Probability would suggest that this should be the primary hypothesis, recourse to any other explanation would need further contextual evidence.
Doesn't that one manuscript from the late 3rd century in Egypt list there being Foederati operating? Can't remember what its called, gave troop counts for a Roman Legion and two auxiliary units.
The Beatty papyrii list units of II Traiana, plus Ala I Hiberorum and a unit of equites sagittarii. No foederati mentioned, and the word itself probably wasn't in use this early.
The ND lists I Hiberorum plus a lot of other old-style auxiliary units with more recent ethnic titles - Franks included. They were possibly sent there as dedicitii or laeti in the late 3rd /early 4th centuries. Oxyrhynchus papryus 41.2591 has salarati peregrini (foreign mercenaries) serving in a unit of peregrini cataphractarii in AD267. So there were 'barbarian' groups under arms in Egypt at that point.
However, with the similarity of this armour to much earlier native styles, we'd be better off assuming that it originated in Egypt and was adopted by Roman troops, rather than being brought from elsewhere. (Although... any chance those peregrini cataphractarii might have been using leather horse armour?...)
![[Image: websitepic.jpg]](http://www.roman-artifacts.com/files/websitepic.jpg)
