Real Deal Spolas

[Crispianus]

"Athens had a booming export industry making white shoes from alum-tawed leather."

I already provided a link to a white shoe which may or may not be Ptolemaic and could be cured leather or anything else pretty much, however I made no suggestion it was Alum tawed, if its true that aluta can refer to any white leather then theres a number of ways it can be achieved without ever using Alum, the problem is that there is no unambiguous evidence and little in the way of surviving material or contemporary descriptions of any significance, any list of materials can be open to interpretation, colouring leather is quite often done as part of the tanning process.

Remember White leather doesn't necesarily mean Alum Tawed but can also be cured, the problem here is with wording of the translations when does "Dressing" become a process of "Curing" or "Tawing" or "Tanning", when Pliny talks about dressing skins with Alum does he mean curing/tawing or as preperation for dying and are they one and the same thing, hes not being very specific about a good many things almost as though he has no real knowledge of the subject which is likely not suprising.

You'll find many mentions of tanners/ dressers of skins/hides in greek litrature but this is usually as far as it goes, as far as I can tell there are no actual descriptions of the process and although the egyptians for example have left some pictorial evidence for oil dressing hide its a shorthand version, if that is indeed what they are doing since there is no manual for it.

There is as far as I know no surviving leather footware from classical Greece (everday items are going to be way more common then armour in the rubbish), equally though you could say the same thing of Roman Italy with a few notable exceptions, these regions compare very badly with the thousands of leather items including some horse protection from northern Europe (veg tanned mostly or it is now) and Egypt (early non veg tanned mostly)

And then there is the complete lack of unambiguous tannery's in other words the places where skins/hides were turned into usable material...... everywhere, with the possible exception of Pompeii.

I think its true to say that none of the real questions have yet been answered its possible they may never be......

My suggestion is experiment away.... it seems like the best course to me.


Just my thoughts not written in stone