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Hello.
I'll start off my first post with a quick question. As in the title, what type of armour is this? Apparently, I can't post URLs on my first post, so it will be in my next post.
While I'm waiting for the ability to post agian, for those of you who are intimately familiar with the game, I'm talking about the armour that Cretan Archers wear. It's a type of quilted armour, brownish in colour, worn over a white tunic.
Here we go:
https://img257.imageshack.us/img257/...mouraj0.th.jpg
I've seen it around, but I haven't been able to get a name for it. I'm thinking it might be a spolas, but I don't know for sure.
https://www.europabarbarorum.com/i/u...an_archers.gif
This ? Looks mostly like quilted armour to me. Could have an outer layer of leather too, going by the colour.
Not necessarily, linen can assume that colour naturally. The white cuirasses you see on the greeks were often bleached to get that effect.
...or covered with a bleached layer, I know. I was just hypothesizing based on the somewhat uniform shade of brown that reminds me a lot of many shoes I've seen.
Speaking of which, is there any reason you couldn't use leather for the outermost layer anyway ?
I guess it is possible. But I've only heard of armour made like that during the middle ages in Iberia where they'd essentially have a leather bag in the form of a long shirt with padded linen inside. Good for low intensity warfare and arrows.
Then again I'm no expert in Hellenic matters, though curious on all forms of warfare.
I would be very interested to get a source for that form of armour!
It is a hot discussion wether the Greeks used leather armour. For me the result of the discussion ist clearly "yes" but some may disagree. At least some examples of the spolas were made from leather. Another question would be wether the leather spolas were the normal tube-and-yoke armours so often depicted in the pictural sources or wether this form of armour was exclusively/mostly made from layered linen.
And now we come to the armour of the EB Cretan archers. I never saw something like this in the sources but I think it would be a good and simple form for a padded leather or layered linen armour (btw: how would it be donned and closed? just get into it like a pullover?). To be honest when I first heard about the spolas I imagined something like that stuff. So a pictural evidence would be very valuable.
The colour of the armour is a bit to dark for natural linen which is mostly light grey, seldom light brown-grey. But the same for leather; normally leather would be brighter, but that depends on the animal and the process of leather-making.
Your question made me a little curious too. Don't know how accurate this is, but it was interesting. It talks about Cretan Archers in Roman Service.
Cretan Archers in Roman Service courtesy of www.romanarmy.com
Our Hellenistic boys have said several times that Linthorax (linen armour) was often covered with a layer of leather. This would also increase weather resistance.
It's not a spolas though. The spolas was weaved, not qulted...looked like this:Quote:
Originally Posted by geala
https://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y1..._in_spolas.jpg
https://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y1...__Peltasts.jpg
There's absolutely no primary evidence for this.Quote:
Originally Posted by Philipvs Vallindervs Calicvla
That, and other quilted armours like it, are not based on any primary Hellenistic evidence, and is purely conjectural.
I wonder about the decisive primary evidence against though.
Didn't this guy leave already? :inquisitive:
Problem here is he uses deductive logic only when it suits his views.
None. But then again, there's no decisive primary evidence against any other kind of armour being worn, so if you use that as criteria, you can reconstruct just about anything you like.Quote:
Originally Posted by Watchman
Its cos he loves you so much, he can't stay away, be fun to see this one develop :)
Given the dearth of primary evidence around these things in general, your vendetta against conjecture has always slightly puzzled me.Quote:
Originally Posted by MeinPanzer
MP, hello, haven't seen you for a bit.
Let me get things straight:
First, what are the objectionable items? I'd like to be sure what this discussion is actually about first.
Is it leather at all? Leather over a lino-thorax? Leather combined with padded or quilted linen? Padded or quilted linen at all? I'd like to know your position, MP, before giving a response, though I hope Urnamma will be available to reply, since he works on Hellenistic armor.
I don't have a vendetta against conjecture; for a mod like this, conjecture is necessary. However, I am against baseless conjecture.Quote:
Originally Posted by Watchman
Hi paullus, hope everything is well with the mod.Quote:
MP, hello, haven't seen you for a bit.
Let me get things straight:
First, what are the objectionable items? I'd like to be sure what this discussion is actually about first.
Is it leather at all? Leather over a lino-thorax? Leather combined with padded or quilted linen? Padded or quilted linen at all? I'd like to know your position, MP, before giving a response, though I hope Urnamma will be available to reply, since he works on Hellenistic armor.
The objection is to quilted textile armour like this:
https://img257.imageshack.us/my.php?...tarmouraj0.jpg
I have no idea what kind of textile that is intended to be, but I object to the fact that a quilted jerkin has been reconstructed here unlike anything which can be found in iconographic evidence from the Hellenistic period. I object, in this case, merely to the form of the armour, and not whatever material it may have been constructed from.
P.S. You mentioned before an image from Nick Sekunda's "Hellenistic Infantry Reforms" book showing a thureophoros wearing greaves. I never did get the specific image you were referring to.
I've seen such cross pattern at least on one of vases, cant post photo as you can't make them in Polish museums. Vase was displayed in Wilanów.
When did this vase date to? Did that kind of armour have pteruges?Quote:
Originally Posted by O'ETAIPOS
sent an email to ya, MP, sorry I'd forgotten about that image.
Were you referring to this one?Quote:
Originally Posted by paullus
https://img53.imageshack.us/my.php?image=trophysq8.jpg
is that not the image i emailed to you?
So...I guess this type of armour doesn't even have a name? Like...quiltothorax...:inquisitive:
well i dont know but judging by the little bit i know and from other games id have to say its linen
No, it doesn't have a name, and there's no way to tell what it was made of. The only evidence for any sort of quilted armour, almost entirely from red figure vases, stopped appearing around the middle of the 4th C. BC. This evidence consists of iconographic representations of armour with criss-cross patterns on it. These could be attempts to represent scales, quilting, or some sort of stitched-on design, or they could be something else entirely that we're just not aware of. Even these, though, are otherwise exactly like the tube-and-yoke cuirass in form, having pteruges and shoulder yokes, and nothing like the jerkin represented here on the Cretan archers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dwin
This was written by Urnamma in the internal forums. Sorry this took so long to get out to you.
Also, it appears that the quilted armor seen on the Cretans was also used by the Persian military.Quote:
Originally Posted by Urnamma
I hope this answers your question, Dwin.
its obiviosly a secret elven cloak known only to cretans duh lol =p
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dwin
1. Do you have a source that the depicted garment is a spolas and that it is quilted? Or is it an interpretation based on other pictures which show something similar worn just around the waist (so a defensive function is presumable)? It could also be just a heavy woolen chiton.
Unlike this it is said that (at least a kind of) spolas was made of leather (Pollux, Onomasticon: I learned this recently on RAT myself:beam: ).
2. My question is: could that spolas be the tube-and-yoke armour depicted on the vases? I don't feel comfortable with this. So, was it just a (leather or linen) jerkin without the shoulder flaps, like the armour of the Cretan archers? I would like to interprete a spolas as a loose jerkin, worn by some warriors on vases (i'm not at home and cannot post it - one example of a Greek archer with it is depicted in Conolly's Greece and Rome at War).
The material is not so important, may it be leather, linen or both. It is the form of the armour which is important, as meinPanzer said (some posts following his post are rather strange...:shame: ).
So again, is there a pictural source (the picture posted by meinPanzer I can not interpret) or not? If not, that is not a problem, but if a source exists, I would make a garment like that of the archers for myself.
3. Never heard of the Rhodes find of quilted linen ~ 350 BC. That would be very important! Another evidence for linen armour in the classical period is not known to me and ~350 BC is quite near classical times. Is it published? And is it "sure" that it belongs to an armour? How many layers of linen were used? How was the stitching made?
Um, I don't know, the few sources I've read say that it's just basically a thick, weaved tunic, used as body armour.Quote:
Originally Posted by geala