Depictions of Underarm Phalanxes

[Sean Manning]

I do agree that a lot of these debates would be easier if people had done more experiments and measurements. For example, a few years ago people were still claiming that hoplites carried 70 pounds of kit into battle; and the biggest corpus of helmet weights I know of comes from an auction of Axel Guttman's collection! The old arguments based purely on texts and art will always go around in circles.

I agree that overhand thrusts are more powerful than underhand, but the difference between twice the energy and four times the energy is important.

For what its worth, the 15th and 16th century European sources on fighting in armour have no real preference for rising or falling thrusts, except with the dagger where an overhand 'ice pick' grip was preferred. The emphasis with most weapons was hitting areas with no armour or just mail such as the face or armpits. Armour in that period was thicker and more complete than in the Iron Age Mediterranean (ancient plate armour seems to have been around 1 mm of bronze or steely iron), but its one parallel.