Glued Linen Armour- a simple test

[Giannis K. Hoplite]

WoW! What is the word used? "????????????" perhaps?
Khaire
Giannis

[Kineas]

I'm trying to find it in Greek. Loeb published an edition in 1913 and I have it on order. Let's hold our speculation until then!

And as usual, there is a caveat--it's the Oracle at Delphi--and some of these oracular prophecies may have been produced in the 2nd C. BC. Or so I'm told. We can and will argue the validity of every piece of evidence...but so far, I rather like this one...

[MeinPanzer]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this fall under basically the same category as Alcaeus' mention of linen cuirasses in that it still precedes the emergence of the T&Y in Greek art?

[Paullus Scipio]

Yup !....and that assumes it is not a 2nd C BC forgery !

However, accepting it for the moment as genuine, we have referred to it before on a previous thread...

An anonymous verse from 'Anthologia Palatina' (Snodgrass thought it could be dated to Archilocus' time - who wrote around 650 BC)
-Book XIV, poem 73: "argeioi linothorekes" "Argives linen-cuirassed"
The poem contains archaisms (or deliberate archaisms) like the genitive in "-oio", and the phrase "linen cuirassed Argives" seems to be a deliberate 'Homeric' phrase and formulaic........

A very dubious piece of evidence it would appear.......

[Dan Howard]

Plenty of authors attempted to write "homeric-stye" Just because he attempted to adhere to a literary convention doesn't discount its validity.

[Paullus Scipio]

Ruben's point is still insurmountable.... this example is even worse than Alcaeus, datewise........

[Astiryu1]

I have dabbled with linothorax. I have made bracers that I am actually wearing at the moment out of Duck-Cloth from Wal-Mart and Carpet Glue from Home Depot. The bracers are just 3 layers thick but are fairly resilient to slashing from a sharp knife. These bracers were a test project ; I want to make the Cuirass 10 layers thick and it would cost me around 100 dollars
U.S. for all of the materials.

[Dan Howard]

Pretty much anything will stop a knife cut. A decent test would involve an arrow or spear thrust since these were the most common threats on the battlefield.

[Astiryu1]

Six layers didn't stop an arrow shot from a 60 lb draw bow but not much does excepting good metal armor and decent luck but I'm not done yet! He He!

[Paullus Scipio]

In conducting your tests, Craig, you might like to bear in mind that powerful bows such as those with a 60 lb pull were simply not available to the enemies of the Classical Greeks.
A modern bow like that imparts something like 45 Joules of kinetic energy. The Persian 'large' bows had an initial energy in the order of 30-35 J at release, 26 J at 100 m and 20 J at 200 m. The smaller Scythian bow, drawn to the chest only had an initial energy of around 25 J, falling to 15 J at 100m and 9 J at 200 m.

( source: P.H. Blyth "The effectiveness of Greek armour against arrows in the Persian War" )

[Doc]

Well those Persina large bows were quite effective considering that without our modern technology they could produce something that is not radically different in energy. Nonethelss, I have to agree that a test should be done with bows of very similar strenght. The extra 10-15 Joules although not staggering might be just enough to render an armor test piece defeated when in reality it may not been.

I also agree with Dan that any material with some thickness will stop a slash to a certain degree.

[Astiryu1]

Yes I believe in my readings the Persians used bows made from date palms. I make self bows but I am not too advanced yet, it seems those would be fairly weak. On the other hand Odysseus had a fairly strong bow according to Homer. I would prefer overkill to being killed personally.

[Sean Manning]

Careful there Paullus! Any given style of bow can be made in a wide range of draw weights, and fire a range of types of ammunition. In medieval Europe you could find a bow drawing anything from 50 to 180 lbs depending on what it was meant to kill and how good the user was. All would be built in basically the same way although a strong bow would be somewhat longer and thicker.

I haven't read Blyth's thesis, but I'm suspicious of anyone who gives performance stats for a type of bow as if they were standardized. Just for example, two replica Egyptian angular composite bows had draw weights of 18 and 23 kg at 90 cm. Obviously the one with a 30% higher draw weight would shoot farther and give its arrows more energy. The yew warbows on the Mary Rose probably had draw weights ranging from 50 to 81 kg at 30" when new, a 60% difference between the weakest and the strongest.

I agree that most ancient bows fired relatively light ammunition which would reduce energy and therefore penetration.

Also, what evidence is there of any Old World bow which was drawn to the chest? Sources like the Munich wood show Scythian double-curved and Elamite single-curved bows drawn to or past the ear.

[Dan Howard]

A good paper was in Barry Molloy's book The Cuting Edge. The paper, called "The reconstruction of Scythian bows", goes into a great deal of detail as to what sources they used for their reconstructions of ancient bows including Scythian and Bashkir. They ended up testing three bows all with a draw length of around 60 cm. Results are all recorded in scatttergrams rather than tables so it is difficult to extract data, and they use meric units such as kiloponds or Newtons to measure draw-weight so it is difficult to compare with earlier tests. Unfortunately they only measure arrow velocity at a distance of 1m from the bow so it doesn't tell us much about the amount of energy that can be delivered to a target.

Here is one set of data extracted from one of their graphs.
Bow 1 Scythian 60cm draw length 205N draw weight
34g arrow averaged 38m/s (1m from bow)
36g arrow averaged 36m/s (1m from bow)
38g arrow averaged 35m/s (1m from bow)

[MeinPanzer]

A good paper was in Barry Molloy's book The Cuting Edge. The paper, called "The reconstruction of Scythian bows", goes into a great deal of detail as to what sources they used for their reconstructions of ancient bows including Scythian and Bashkir. They ended up testing three bows all with a draw length of around 60 cm. Results are all recorded in scatttergrams rather than tables so it is difficult to extract data, and they use meric units such as kiloponds or Newtons to measure draw-weight so it is difficult to compare with earlier tests. Unfortunately they only measure arrow velocity at a distance of 1m from the bow so it doesn't tell us much about the amount of energy that can be delivered to a target.

Here is one set of data extracted from one of their graphs.
Bow 1 Scythian 60cm draw length 205N draw weight
34g arrow averaged 38m/s (1m from bow)
36g arrow averaged 36m/s (1m from bow)
38g arrow averaged 35m/s (1m from bow)

Do you know which archaeological evidence they drew on in reconstructing these bows? And what sort of Scythian bows were they - those of the western Scythians or Saka? Or did they just use "Scythian" as a generic steppe term?

A few very well (and, in some cases, near-perfectly) preserved Scythian-era bows have been found within the last few decades in Central Asia, but they are not easy to find information on. There are, of course, the bows from Subeixi in Xinjiang, dated 5th-3rd c. BC, but then there are also the extremely well-preserved bows from Saryg-Bulun burial 5 in Tuva, dating to between the 6th and 5th c. BC, along with a few other more fragmentary finds from later burials also from Tuva, and Olon-Kurin-Gol 10 in the Mongolian Altai, dating to the 4th or 3rd c. BC. The latter especially is a very important find, since it is the first actual bow found in a Pazyryk-culture burial; I was very disappointed to see, however, that in its most recent publication (Molodin et al., "Das skythenzeitliche Kriegergrab aus Olon-Kurin-Gol: Neue Entdeckungen in der Permafrostzone des mongolischen Altaj," in Eurasia Antiqua 14 (2008): 235-259) almost no attention and no new photographs were devoted to the bow. Closer study in the lab will hopefully allow this find to shed some light on the bows in use at the time.