Quote:There are a few 3rd c. BC helmet molds for Boeotian helmets from Memphis which show that intricate floral designs were embossed into the helmets as decoration:

http://www.antiquemilitaryhistory.com/i ... eotian.JPG

Quote:....hold on a sec, Ruben....... presumably if a sheet of bronze was beaten over this mould, the outside of the helmet might be perfectly smooth, and probably polished.....in fact, it would have to be beaten rather hard for the sculpted pattern to appear on the inside of the helmet ( I think that possibly a helmet could be produced, and the pattern might not be "embossed" on the inside at at all ). That would appear to leave three possibilities, viz:
1. The mould pattern was decoration for the mould only, it being an object intended to last and hence worthy of decoration.
2. The mould "pattern" was embossed on the inside of the helmet - perhaps as a means of identifying the products of this mould/armoury
2. The helmet was beaten down sufficiently hard that the pattern appeared on the outside of the helmet.

The latter seems a little unlikely to me, and I would be interested in the opinions of those on the Forum with some experience of working metals over stakes/moulds as to how this could be done. Simple beating seems to me unlikely to "take" such an intricate pattern to produce such a detailed 'grooved' and 'dotted' outside ( unlike, say, a raised mould which could be beaten down to leave a raised pattern )....it seems to me that to produce such grooves would require a 'scribe' of some sort hammered into the metal over the 'groove' in the mould, if a crisp groove were to appear on the finished product, even if rather thin metal was used (as seems to be the case) which would of course not be possible when the pattern beneath the metal is invisible..........if this 'pattern' on the mould really was meant to appear on the outside of the finished product, how was it done? :?

Quote: The shield mould also found from the same armoury shows that this is how the bronze facings for Macedonian shields with embossed detail and lettering were made (it features details in negative, like on these moulds, but the facing was obviously beaten so that the decoration was in relief on the outside).

Quote:....yes, I had these in mind when raising the question.
Firstly, the bronze pelta/shield-facing seems to have been made by beating the shield-face from the BACK onto/into the mould, so that the letters/pattern appear on the finished product on the face/front of the shield in raised relief - feasible when it is borne in mind that the facing was extremely thin - a mere 0.3-0.4 mm on surviving examples. A helmet mould would have to be hollow and bucket shaped to use this technique for helmet making, not solid ( i.e. the opposite method).
Secondly, Greek/Macedonian helmets were of varying thickness in different parts, but typically from 0.75-1.5 mm at a minimum to 2-3 mm or so maximum. They were thus two to ten times as thick, and, I suspect, could not 'take' that sort of detail at that thickness
The difficulty here is that although the shield-face mould and helmet mould are superficially the same they are used in 'opposite' ways ( one as a 'male', one as a 'female' mould) to produce objects radically different in thickness........hence my queries.