Historical Greek Armor Will get Examined in an 11-Hour Battle Simulation Impressed by the Iliad



By Greek legislation, each male cit­i­zen over the age of eigh­teen should spend from 9 months to a yr within the Hel­lenic Armed Forces. As in each coun­attempt with such a pol­i­cy of manda­to­ry con­scrip­tion, that is positive­ly not a prospect rel­ished by most con­scripts-to-be. However then, it could’t be all dangerous, not less than for these enthu­si­asts of Mediter­ranean mil­i­tary his­to­ry who hap­pened to be serv­ing when researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Thes­saly got here by provide­ing the prospect to don a swimsuit of armor from the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry BC and have a really — and religion­ful­ly — old-fash­ioned bat­tle.

The repli­ca was mod­eled on an examination­ple from the late-Bronze-age Myce­naean civ­i­liza­tion “dis­cov­ered within the south­ern Greek vil­lage of Den­dra in 1960,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Son­ja Ander­son, describ­ing it as “one of many previous­est com­plete fits of Euro­pean armor in exis­tence.”

Com­posed of fif­teen “cop­per-alloy sheets held togeth­er with leather-based, which cov­ered the damage­er from neck to knees,” the swimsuit is “com­plete with arm and leg guards and a hel­met dec­o­rat­ed with items of boar tusk.” Clunky although it could look, it stands as evi­dence that, because the researchers put it of their paper, the “Myce­naeans had such a pow­er­ful affect in East­ern Mediter­ranean not less than half­ly because of their armor tech­nol­o­gy.”

However first, they needed to put the armor itself to the check. “They gath­ered vol­un­teers from the thirty second Marines Brigade of the Hel­lenic Military,” Ander­son writes, “fed them the pre-bat­tle meal of a Myce­naean sol­dier: bread, beef, goat cheese, inexperienced olives, onions and pink wine. The marines have been out­match­ted in repli­cas of the Myce­naean swimsuit, giv­en repli­cas of Myce­naean cru­ci­type swords, and positioned in a tem­per­a­ture-con­trolled room set to a geo­graph­i­cal­ly accu­fee 64 to 68 levels Fahren­heit.” There com­menced eleven hours of sim­u­lat­ed bat­tle, all “chore­o­graphed primarily based on descrip­tions of the Tro­jan Warfare from Homer’s Ili­advert, which was fought a number of cen­turies after the Den­dra armor was made.”

“We now underneath­stand, regardless of its cum­ber­some seem­ance at first sight, that it’s not solely flex­i­ble sufficient to per­mit nearly each transfer­ment of a warfare­rior on foot but additionally resilient sufficient to professional­tect the damage­er from most blows,” the researchers write of their con­clu­sion. And although their analysis sub­jects “confirmed a excessive lev­el of fatigue, sore higher physique as a result of weight of the armor, and foot ache attributable to stroll­ing, run­ning, rid­ing a char­i­ot, and battle­ing naked­foot,” it will need to have been a extra stim­u­lat­ing expe­ri­ence than the aver­age day within the Hel­lenic Armed Forces — espe­cial­ly if there was any post-bat­tle goat cheese and wine avail­in a position.

by way of Smith­son­ian Magazine­a­zine

Relat­ed con­tent:

What It’s Prefer to Actu­al­ly Battle in Medieval Armor

Easy methods to Make and Put on Medieval Armor: An In-Depth Primer

How Nicely Can You Transfer in Medieval Armor?: Medieval­ist Daniel Jaquet Offers It a Attempt in Actual Life

Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Lifeless Rel­a­tives into Musi­cal Instru­ments & Orna­ments

Why Civ­i­liza­tion Col­lapsed in 1177 BC: Watch Clas­si­cist Eric Cline’s Lec­ture That Has Already Gar­nered 5.5 Mil­lion Views

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the ebook The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­ebook.



Recent Articles

Related Stories

Leave A Reply

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here