First Sneak Peek at the Dioskouri Corinthian

[caiusbeerquitius]

Alrighty....

Since the subject of weight is being brought up here I'll take a little time here to go into some lengthy and painful discussion as to why the helmet weights of artifact helmets are irrelevant.

An Archeologist weighed and cataloged every Egyptian Mummy he could find. Through careful analysis he determined that ancient Egyptians weighed on average 52 pounds.

This is a weird comparison. A human body consists mostly of water, which bronze, as far as I know, does not.

This is the line of reasoning you are taking by reading those books. Not one of them explains to you the specific gravity weight of bronze nor the effects of time on these alloys.

As nice as these helmets look, they are mostly held together by epoxy and gauze. There is very little left of the original helmet other than a fine metal skin and patina holding it all together. A 2 or 3 pound helmet in a museum is a 'helmet mummy'. There is the exterior form and little else remaining.

Apperantly you haven´t read them. Au contraire, "Die Helme des Hephaistos" shows pages 24-45 an in depth archaeometric report. X-Ray, laserablation (with element-trace analysis, and with inductive linked plasma stimulation) and ICP-MS/ICP-OES etc. p.p., atomic absorption spectral analysis, ESEM, REM and many more.
The average metallurgy of these helmets shows an alloy that is Cu 91.09%, Sn8,23%, Pb 0,18%, Zn 0,01%, Fe 0,22%, Ni0,06%, Ag 0,04%, Sb 0,03%, As 0,14%, Co0,05%
The reports also show that apart from broken off parts and normal wear and tear the helmets did not loose weight., i.e. the specific weight of the examples investigated is identical to new identical alloys. If it weren´t so, an analysis of the alloy as such would be impossible as well. Had i.e. the copper "left" the helmet to a certain amount, as you describe, then a metallurgical analysis would offer different results, naturally. What you say indeed happens sometimes, in extreme environment, such as the sea, when other metals are nearby, or in very wet/sour/alcalic/salty soil. The helmets from olympia investigated for "Die Helme des Hephaistos" as it seems were not subject to a corrosion you are describing (below). Yet their weights are around 1 kg. This is due to their form and variation in material thickness.
The "spongy" character of the metal which you mention is indeed there, but mostly due to the fact that the bronze takes up iron from its environment. This makes the bronze brittle. *

Here is the meat and potatoes! The specific gravity of Bronze ie how dense it is; is pretty high. Much higher than iron, steel, aluminum etc. in order to work backwards to find the weight of a 'live' Corinthian in the 5th century you need to make one exactly like they did.

Done

This helmet is just a touch chunky as I needed it completed in order to get started on actually being able to offer them for sale. Obviously bigger heads necessitate a bigger helmet ergo a little more weight. I would guess fully finished this helmet in my size would be 7 pounds. Very manageable unless you are completely devoid of neck muscles.

As a point of weights to sizes, the specific gravity tells us the average helmet must, MUST weigh between 7.4-8.920 pounds.

I don´t understand. How does it do that in your opinion? As you say the volume of the bronze in combination with the specific weight tells us what such a helmet weighs. How do you derive at the weight you describe despite saying it "MUST"? You suggest that a series of natural scientists and experts on metallurgy are telling us utter nonsense in their publications.
What is your argument to make their work invalid?

This is physics there is nothing we can change about this. Bronze weighs what bronze weighs. It's mass determines weight. Artifact helmets over the centuries have had a majority of their mass or density lost to precipitation of the alloying elements into the surrounding soils. While patina on bronze is very different than rust on iron the loss can be just as devastating. Rust eats iron but patina leaves the surface intact while the underlying elements of the alloy walk away leaving something like a sponge behind. It's shaped like a helmet but nothing inside remains. If the average loss over time is 3/4 of the copper converts to sulfates and the tin migrates out of the alloy (which it does) you'd have a 7-8 pound helmet reduced to about the weights measured in your book. Obviously these are generalizations. Every single helmet is particular due to varying alloy content and even more importantly, the topography and soil type it was buried in.

But, what for Olympia, where this doesn´t seem to have happened? Same e.g. for the Mahdia Bronzes. A patina can equally preserve the bronze inside and stop further corrosion process, as F. Willer shows in detail in the publications of the Mahdia shipwreck.

]Today's replica helmets are not made to be exact copies of the real helmets. They are made for 'dressing up'.

Absolutely, correct.

Weight and convenience takes precedence over the physical characteristics being equal to a helmet that was actually intended to protect you. If you want a nice lightweight helmet to walk around in than anything helmet made from .025 or .036 bronze will give you that 3 pound weight, but those thickness are very easily moved with little force. Artifact helmets even being 'hollowed' out by time display thicker construction than their current weight would suggest. This indicates clearly the real ones when 'live' could not physically have weighed so little.

A real helmet, designed and made to be impervious is going to weight 7-8 pounds. One made to play in and be easy on the head is thin enough that anyone wielding a Badminton racket would be able to kill you. It's important not lose sight of what these helmets were really made for.

In their world, in their battles your head was the most exposed part of you above that shield. A thin lightweight helmet was what these started out as. As their combat style and the hardness of their weaponry evolved the helmets ceased to protect them. The helmet I have made represents the zenith of its evolution. It's most beautiful form, it's most complex shape and skill to make it this way. It's highest weight but also the penultimate protection. No helmet in this class shows war damage that comes close to compromising the wearer.

So your argument is, basically: The helmets are not stable enough in my opinion, so they must have been heavier?

I'm not making any case for all helmets weighed 7-8 pounds. Just that ALL helmets weighed more when new than they do now. My helmet weighs 7 pounds. It is the very pinnacle of the Corinthian helmet type they ever made. It's the sturdiest and strongest. A baseball bat wouldn't dent it. Three days of Persians wouldn't dent it. If I buried it today......2,000 years later it would weigh 2 pounds.

As the metallurgical and metallographical analysis I have quoted above show, this loss of weight does not seem to have taken place in the amount you are describing. Which seems to lead to the point that your helmets are way too heavy in comparison to the originals. This may be due to the extreme thinness of the originals on their backside, as all the X-rays show. The wax (?) models on your page seem to be too thick in that regard

If you did cast of this model, also the production process would not be like that of the originals, again shown in "Die Helme des Hephaistos" in detail. It would explain the weight, though. Can you enlighten? Did you cast of this model?



*edit: of course there are heavily corroded helmets from Olympia as well. There is a group of helmets, however, which was found in very wet conditions in wells, and which were hardly corroded, and quite in an almost-as-new state.