Linothorax vs Quilted linen vs spolas

[ushumgal]

Further, I'm pretty sure I'm on solid ground in saying that the underpinnings of every scale shirt--every single one--found anywhere in the med in our period (600-300BC?) are all leather. If textile armours were common, wouldn't you have expected at least one scale shirt to be textile based?

That may be the case in the Med region, but I do know of one example from Nimrud, a Neo-Assyrian site, destroyed ca. 614-612 BC. Unfortunately, I cannot locate my photocopy of the picture in question at the moment (moving does *horrid* things to one's library...), but there is one shot in Mallowan, Nimrud and Its Remains (vol. 2, I think) that shows a portion of scale armor with a very clear impression of fairly coarse fabric on one side. The fabric had been mineralized due to the corrosion of the metal scales in contact with it. Of course, it could be that the armor fell onto something made of fabric as the room it was stored in collapsed, but I think it is pretty clear evidence that in Mesopotamia, at least, fabric backings were not unknown, and may have even been the norm. The only Mesopotamian textual sources that treat armor in any detail are from Nuzi in the Late Bronze Age, and while they detail numbers of scales, they are lamentably silent on the subject of backing material, as I recall.

well Ruben maybe, I think one may be eastern Med.Phoenician quited armour the rest i think are depicting something else ,these are finds from Ibeza ,its hard to blow them up without them turning to lego men ,copy them & have a closer look on your pc ,perhaps something along the lines of the #51 Phoenician marine & this guy is it a cape or skin (spolas) ,

The diamond or lozenge pattern could very well represent quilting, but I would be very cautious about the square pattern. I did a paper on the same pattern as it appears in Assyrian art on the hypothesis that it may have been a kind of armor (bronze squares with perforated edges and embossed designs of just the right size have been found in an armoury in Nimrud, ca. 612 BC). What I found is that in the vast majority of cases, this pattern clearly represents a decorated textile, most likely the pattern was woven into the fabric with different colored threads (akin to plaid). In fact, there was only one clear example of it as armor (definitive because of the pteruges at the base of the garment...it's the guy in my avatar, in fact...). The pattern often appeared on high-status garments, such as the robes of officials, and is found in areas surrounding Assyria as well (some of the best representations are from the Neo-Hittites in Syria). In these cases, it is obvious that it is a patterned fabric, not quilting. It could be the same case in the Mediterranean region (which, after all, was not so very far from Assyria). The style of fabric decoration could have been borrowed for high-status or "fancy" garments. ...Which is not to say it's impossible that it was quilting, I just think this might favor the option that it is not.

John Conyard wrote:

Therefore I think it could be safe to assume the artist was trying to illustrate two differing armours, rather than just painting on the pteruges at a later date. The monument is early 4th century.

....I don't think it would be safe to assume this at all, because even a casual inspection of the real thing ( beautifully displayed in the British Museum) shows that, like all other major ancient monuments, a number of different sculptors were at work. It would be far safer to assume that the same type of body armour is being depicted in different ways by different artists.
BTW, it should be noted that later Tube-and-Yoke corselets, both Greek and Macedonian, show a style difference from earlier ones in that the waist tends to get higher, and the pteryges longer......

Or, it could be evidence that one sculptor messed up. Maybe they got distracted by lunch break... But seriously, this is something not infrequently seen on Assyrian reliefs, the artist would scribe something out lightly for the sculptor to carve in, but the sculptor (presumably in a huge hurry, with hundreds of meters of reliefs to finish) missed it and so it was left unfinished. This is an important point: you can never completely trust artistic representations, for this and many other reasons. Alas, for so many things, they are all we have to go on...