There is a comment from the author in response to someone that I found fascinating, and I am quoting here to respond to:
> We found that even more of a threat than rain was one’s own sweat on a hot day. So, yes, it does need waterproofing, both inside and out. We did a number of experiments along those lines, and found that rubbing a block of beeswax over all sides of the armor provided nice waterproofing. It also makes the armor smell nice! When you wear it for a couple hours, your own body heat softens the glue a bit and makes it conform to your body shape, so it is much more comfortable to wear than rigid types of armor. Our reconstructions weighed about 10 pounds–about one third the weight of bronze armor that would provide the same degree of protection. Thanks for the questions!
It would explain to some degree why this armor may have found such military success during that time period, that it was more comfortably and more closely conformed to the body while offering similar protections. One of the things many people who've never had to wear armor for an extended period of time on a hot day don't realize is how horribly uncomfortable armor is, and how that discomfort can be a severe distraction under battlefield conditions.
One thing that also interested me about this is that we found that one of the strongest materials we have available to use in modern materials science is also laminated cloth, in this case carbon fiber laminates. By ensuring that the direction of the weaves are perpendicular to one another when doing a cloth layup, and using a sufficiently strong adhesive/sealant, these types of materials are incredibly strong. Carbon fiber and carbon kevlar both are exceptionally strong materials that would make great armor (and do), and it seems the linothorax is essentially an early application of some of the same ideas, with lesser source materials.
>One of the things many people who've never had to wear armor for an extended period of time on a hot day don't realize is how horribly uncomfortable armor is, and how that discomfort can be a severe distraction under battlefield conditions.
Maybe! A well tailored and properly weight-distributed mail hauberk (which is also conformal) is surprisingly comfortable for extended period of time in all kinds of weather. (Source: my own experience in medieval re-enactment). What gets you in hot weather are the textiles - with mail its the necessary padding under the mail that will cause issues in hot weather.
the author's point that linen was more comfortable than 'rigid' armor was probably true, but I will point out that rigid armors were also individually tailored, balanced, and created for optimal weight distribution.
As an aside mail armor was a successful and popular armor for a millennium, from the Iron Age to the middle ages (and continued to be successful as an augment to plate and in other contexts like South Asia and India until probably the 16th century).
It was probably contemporary to the linen armor of the article (In time, not geographically - it was used most heavily in iron-rich regions in central Europe at first).
Linen is also going to be cheaper than bronze (and later iron), even though linen fabric is quite an expensive material by the standards of a pre-industrial society. If you can grow flax, you get edible flaxseed, flaxseed oil, and linen fibers for thread and then weaving... and next year, hopefully, you get a new crop of flax. Save the bronze for your swords.
Iron was likely relatively cheap to produce compared to Linen. You can find various YouTube videos of people processing iron ore by hand fairly rapidly though it takes significant quantities of wood or coal. Something like 2 weeks of labor to the extract and process raw ore for enough iron to make a breastplate seems likely. Though transportation would be an issue. Linen on the other hand required extreme processing simply to get thread and takes up valuable farmland, but could be produced locally. https://ulsterlinen.com/flax-to-linen/
Linen armor would only have been relatively cheap as a means of recycling old garments. However, that’s likely to degrade it’s protective value.
Raw ore wasn't the limiting factor for iron production: it was all about the wood. Coal has the issues that, without coking, it neither burns hot enough nor clean enough (i.e. it adds lots of sulfur to the iron, and the resulting alloy is inferior for pretty much all purposes). As a result, iron and steel production wasn't as bound by locality to mines nearly as much as it was by locality to fuel sources (i.e. forests).
To give a sense for the figures involved, 1kg of iron would require around 15kg of charcoal, which itself would have to be charcoaled from >100kg of wood.
From this, you end up seeing things like Elba being entirely deforested by the time of Caesar, and its still productive iron mines would have their ores shipped to the mainland for processing.
That’s not the complete picture. If 2-5 kg of iron ore + 15kg of charcoal makes 1kg of iron then moving the iron ore to charcoal is more efficient than moving charcoal to iron ore. The same was true of coal, though coal trade was extremely common for it’s use in heating and cooking.
Anyway, Bituminous coal was used in smelting of iron ore in Roman Britain, and China had long been using coal for steel production by that time period.
Also, wood was very much an abundant but managed commodity with various levels utility. Land was reserved for effectively farming it even after forests disappeared. The issue was these managed forests weren’t producing giant long straight trunks that you would find in old growth forests. Wood that’s fine for cooking or matching charcoal, can be useless for shipbuilding.
But that means you'd need to be constantly building new smelting facilities as local wood resources were used up. Making charcoal needs relatively little infrastructure, so it'd be easier to make and transport.
I suspect the optimal answer is a combination of approaches. Build a few foundries distributed optimally near large forests, cut timber and char it and bring the charcoal to the foundries. Maybe cycle them on a 40 year basis so you can re-seed the forests and grow enough timber to make them worth it.
This is one reason why Minnesota's large iron ore deposits were concentrated locally (if necessary, some of the Mesabi Range ore is already 65% iron) and shipped to Pittsburgh (near coal mines) for steel making, instead of shipping the coal to Duluth.
I grew up somewhat near railroad tracks in Minnesota, and it was surprisingly late that I realized most train tracks aren't littered with taconite pellets that fall off during transport.
That aligns with my understanding is that the real revolution of the iron age was not that iron was a superior material (at least initially), but that it was much more abundant than copper and (especially) tin for bronze, which democratized which people and societies were able to build iron gear.
A compelling theory to me of the late bronze age collapse is that in the bronze age, you had a very globalized society for the purpose of keeping the bronze supply chain intact. But ironworking eliminated the interdependence and the importance of the elite networks that sustained the supply chain. So then the whole "civilized" world quickly fragmented into much more micro polities. Many of the states that made the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age relatively intact already had well developed ironworking.
The Assyrians were able to build a new value proposition for international empire. They institutionalized many of the civil and engineering innovations we attribute to the post-Roman world, kicking off what would become the classical era.
I’ve read a lot about the hoplite battlefield. I would rather be in a bronze corselet if facing another hoplite phalanx (which was the common city state standoff in the archaic and early classical period).
Also, the bronze xyphos largely disappeared with Bronze Age society. Some soldiers preferred them to iron swords in the archaic period because a bronze sword could be recast by its owner if it broke, where a blacksmith was required to reforge an iron one (though the iron sword was much less like to break and held its edge much better)
I thought it’s the seed stalk. The seed for oil, the stalk for fiber. The oil could have even been used as the polymeric resin for gluing the layers (and is very water resistant when it cures)
A lot of their work is speculative (e.g. it's not clear that the layers of linen were glued, but they went with the assumption). It's interesting that they did not consider one of the most likely combinations: linen layers sewn onto leather. This would be more flexible (glue makes linen quite stiff) and more sweat resistant.
It would also be relatively easy to puncture. Gluing the linen creates a composite material which should greatly outperform either of the component materials (the primitive animal glue will be almost crumbly on it's own, and woven cloth is very weak against punctures since there is very force holding parallel fibers of material close together). As is stated elsewhere, this is why things like fiberglass and carbon fiber are ubiquitous in the modern world.
Im familiar, i think it works largely by being loose and giving. Arrows are fast, they have a lot of kinetic energy but relatively little momentum. You can decelerate them pretty effectively.
Thick layered cloth armor quite honestly also doesn't feel like something I'd bring if I was about go on a tour of conquest including such warm places as those conquered by Alexander the Great.
Having worn gambesons in the British summer during reenactment battles, I can't imagine wearing one in the Mediterranean sun let alone the Middle East. It gets extremely hot in there after even moderate physical exertion.
The glue is providing much of the structural strength. The fibers are providing tension to hold it together.
A similar approach has been used to make gears out of cloth. Stack cloth, cross-stitch, impregnate with resin, compress, cure, and then cut a gear out of the resulting block of material. It's one of those things people did before plastics.
I have some old Teletypes with a few cloth gears, and you can see the woven pattern on the sides.
Here's one you can buy, a replacement part for some old equipment.[2] Look at the large version of the picture. You can clearly see the stitching of the original cloth.
Composite materials, the early years. Composites are something long and thin with good tensile strength, combined with something strong but possibly brittle with good compressive strength. Probably the earliest composite was bricks with straw.
Search for "micarta gears". I'm not sure if that is a specific brand or a more general term but it results in lots of pictures. The gears are made of cloth and some sort of phenolic resin.
Seems the technique is also used by some for making knife handles out of cloth and epoxy resin.
Wood itself is a composite material (lignan are the fibres, other stuff is effectively resin). Adobe is a fibre-composit (mud and strawa), as is daub-and-wattle plastering.
We've come up with more interesting fibres and resins over the years, but the fundamental concept is ancient and impressively effective.
There are newer variations including polymer-reinforced concrete (using fibres within the concrete matrix), and I'd be really surprised if there weren't developments using pre-stressed nets or webbing of polymers or other flexible fibres. That said, I don't follow the topic closely.
> By ensuring that the direction of the weaves are perpendicular to one another when doing a cloth layup, and using a sufficiently strong adhesive/sealant, these types of materials are incredibly strong.
I wonder if they tested that when creating their replica linen armor? That seems like the kind of thing ancient armor makers would definitely have tested out.
The Green Bay Team reproduced a type of armour which nobody can show was made before 1970. The glue in their linen armour comes from a bad translation of a hasty summary of a medieval Roman chronicle https://www.joshobrouwers.com/articles/glued-linen-armour/
> The project received considerable media attention after Aldrete tested his construction by shooting an arrow at Bartell with cameras rolling. But Peter Connolly's reconstruction was based on a mis-remembered, twice-translated summary of a Byzantine chronicle which did not mention glue, not on an ancient text, artefact, or depiction. No culture before the 20th century is known to have made linen armour in this way.
Working in high-performance composites, this is fantastic work!
It never ceases to amaze me how some of the oldest technology was composites, and how much we can do with even basic materials - it doesn't have to be carbon fiber and epoxy to get great results, in this case linen and rabbit glue makes really effective and lightweight armor.
Sort of related, the Mongol's archery bows from Genghis Khan's time were also amazing pieces of engineering available materials into high-performing tools.
As cool as this is, the historicity is questionable.
> But Peter Connolly's reconstruction was based on a mis-remembered, twice-translated summary of a Byzantine chronicle which did not mention glue, not on an ancient text, artefact, or depiction
Interesting - doesn't disprove it, but certainly makes it at best a very flimsy basis and a long conjecture. I wonder if there were any other things made with such composites of binder and fibers or fabric, or if this is really a long shot in the dark
> Alicia Aldrete is coauthor, with Gregory S. Aldrete and Scott Bartell, of Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor: Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery. The website of the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay’s Linothorax Project contains more behind-the-scenes information on this unparalleled effort, including an eight-minute mini-documentary and additional images.
As an aside, Gregory Aldrete has a bunch of courses on Audible under “Great Courses”. (You can also get them from The Teaching Company now call Wondrium).
I heartily recommend that you listen to them if you are at all interested in ancient history.
I came here to say the same exact thing! These courses are excellent.
As a follow-up to those courses, there are also some courses about the middle ages by Philip Daileader that pick-up the story at the decline of the Western empire.
(Also, I'm deriving great value from the Wondrium app).
I loved the sentence: "We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project."
I first encountered the idea in fiction a few months ago reading "Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City" [1]. For those interested in this kind of thing, it is a fictional mashup of a variety of technical innovations when an engineer (the army core kind) is the highest ranking military officer left during a siege.
In a lot of composites, the titular material isn't the main material. It's almost always glue instead. Which is fine, but one of the drawbacks is the thing is usually heavier and stiffer than you would imagine.
Here it's rabbit glue, which is probably a type of hide glue?
I remember Terry Jones doing some slapstick documentary on the First Crusade, and described how some footsoldiers wearing padded "armor", would be seen with multiple arrows sticking out of the armor in battle, and still fighting.
Do they discuss the draw weight of the bow or any measurements they made to determine that the weapons were imparting the same damage as would have been common historically? It takes a while to work up to the sort of draw weight that was common in trained archers. I'm not just talking about longbows. A 90 lb recurve isn't something you just pick up one day.
Do people really use carbon fiber in armor? I know the Army tried glass fiber and Kevlar for helmets before choosing Kevlar (and now some UHMWPE as well), but I can't remember anything about carbon fiber. I know you can buy carbon fiber helmets and part carbon fiber part Kevlar and/or UHMWPE helmets (at least in theory, there are problems with massive (multi year!) lead times and MIL/LE only items), but they always had dubious protection from ballistic projectiles, regarding back-face deformation, splintering, cracking, spalling, pass-through, etc.
That’s why the texts that do survive are so important. They give us descriptions of the transient experience that doesn’t make it into the archeological record.
Analytical instrumentation has made an incredible jump in sensitivity in the last 10 years. Molecular paleontologists can detect fossilized protein and nucleic acid fragments in remains that are millions of years old. I think we there is going to be a complete change in how archeologists do surveys of more modern historical sights. The molecular fingerprints left in the human record should be much more significant.
Maybe they’ll find evidence of parchment in burials showing writing goes back way further than we currently think
There may be some advantage in the relative softness too, relative to iron. When something bangs into it, it will not transmit all the shock through to the body but will absorb some by deforming.
I read somewhere that such simple armor was supposedly made by having the sewn together linen layers placed in a basin in the expected shape and pouring sea water and letting it dry in the Sun over and over again.
> We found that even more of a threat than rain was one’s own sweat on a hot day. So, yes, it does need waterproofing, both inside and out. We did a number of experiments along those lines, and found that rubbing a block of beeswax over all sides of the armor provided nice waterproofing. It also makes the armor smell nice! When you wear it for a couple hours, your own body heat softens the glue a bit and makes it conform to your body shape, so it is much more comfortable to wear than rigid types of armor. Our reconstructions weighed about 10 pounds–about one third the weight of bronze armor that would provide the same degree of protection. Thanks for the questions!
It would explain to some degree why this armor may have found such military success during that time period, that it was more comfortably and more closely conformed to the body while offering similar protections. One of the things many people who've never had to wear armor for an extended period of time on a hot day don't realize is how horribly uncomfortable armor is, and how that discomfort can be a severe distraction under battlefield conditions.
One thing that also interested me about this is that we found that one of the strongest materials we have available to use in modern materials science is also laminated cloth, in this case carbon fiber laminates. By ensuring that the direction of the weaves are perpendicular to one another when doing a cloth layup, and using a sufficiently strong adhesive/sealant, these types of materials are incredibly strong. Carbon fiber and carbon kevlar both are exceptionally strong materials that would make great armor (and do), and it seems the linothorax is essentially an early application of some of the same ideas, with lesser source materials.