Linothorax vs Quilted linen vs spolas

[MeinPanzer]

What the.....? Where did this come from? I have never said that, or disagreed. The information isn't something 'new'. We already knew that leather 'spolades' and linen 'thorakes lineoi' were in use concurrently in Asia minor ( the Aeneas quote refers to a city in Asia minor).....Xenophon told us so !! That fact was never part of the so-called 'debate' at any time !

How do we know that the Aeneas quote refers to a city in Asia Minor? I think I must have missed something.

Thought they would be Temple/Treasury lists ( temple and treasury were synonymous).

Somewhat, but in the case of the Delian inventories, it's worth differentiating between the "major treasures," which are found in temples, and the "minor treasures," which are found in the smaller treasury buildings.

I don't agree that because an item appears alongside another, they are necessarily contemporaneous - consider the actual find of what these lists refer to - at Olympia - where helmets for example spanned a period of several hundred years.

True, but in this case these arms don't appear in earlier records.

Nor does lack of an 'ethnic' term imply very much, considering that the lists must have been compiled by a number of individuals over several hundred years, and whereas in the 4C BC, a 'celtic sword' would be a sufficient novelty to be described as such, it might not be the case in the 2 C BC, when celtic mercenaries were common in the Greek/Hellenistic world, and a similar item might be described as 'long sword' or even just 'sword' by a later compiler. Or, to put it another way, what might be considered 'Greek' arms in one century would not be in another - consider as another example the 'Thyreos' with no ethnic tag, while in the 4 C BC it might well have been described as 'celtic thyreos'.

Thankfully, the perpetuation of lists makes it quite clear that once an object was included in the list with an ethnic title, it stuck. To give but one example, an "Illyrian" helmet dedicated on the acropolis at Athens can be tracked through almost a century of storage, and it kept its ethnic designation despite the fact that the added information that it came from Lesbos was lost. The compilers of these inventories were careful to take stock of prior inventories, as ensuring that all dedications in the collections were accounted for was the primary purpose of these inventories.

Also, I don't think the idea of 'linous.......spoladion' links in the way Ruben suggests - the lacuna could be anything,

Hardly. These lists follow a strict and well-understood formula, considering that we have hundreds of them and the more complete examples are hundreds of lines long. It's either a number in Greek numerals, in which case "linous" is a separate entry but the continuity of the list is broken, or a written number or some other qualifier that is only two or three letters long, which would then link the two words together.

and if that hypothesis were to be correct, why does Xenophon never call linen armour 'spolades lineoi', but only ever 'thorakes lineoi' ? It would have to be a first ( the list), because, as far as I can recall, there is no other reference anywhere to a 'linen spolas'. Recall also that Pollux's 'Onomastikon' entry doesn't refer to spolades of 'leather or linen' ( though obviously, 'spolas/stole' could refer to a felt horse trapper (probably) and so wasn't exclusively leather ( though could be just 'animal skin products' - felt would fit this definition.

Perhaps because this was a later invention? Or because the spolas was most commonly made of leather, and so Xenophon never encountered one of these rare examples? There could be any number of reasons why.