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Nov 02, 2024

Ancient Composite Armor I Linothorax and Paper Armor Mysteries.

We’re thrilled to announce the release of a new, monthly article series written by guest writer Jake Ganor for BodyArmorNews, titled Ancient Composite Armor. Each month, we’ll dive into a different

We’re thrilled to announce the release of a new, monthly article series written by guest writer Jake Ganor for BodyArmorNews, titled Ancient Composite Armor. Each month, we’ll dive into a different chapter of this in-depth exploration into the mysteries of ancient protective gear, starting with The Linothorax and Paper Armor Mysteries.

In this first installment, Ganor investigates the famed linen armor of Ancient Greece, known as the linothorax. Did the Greeks pioneer their own version of composite materials long before the Space Age? Could this ancient armor have been a layered, glued creation, or was it constructed with other sophisticated techniques?

With each chapter, Ganor will unravel more about historical armor technologies across different cultures, sharing unique insights into ancient materials, construction methods, and their evolution over time. Follow along each month as we uncover the fascinating world of ancient armor-making!

Fiber-resin composites took off commercially with the invention of glass fibers in the late 19th century and its mass production in the early 20th. Glass fibers are very strong but highly friable, and it’s difficult to make use of their strength in raw form, so they are virtually always combined with resin, which acts as a bonding agent that holds the fibers together. In so doing, the resin provides structural integrity and allows the glass fibers to form a solid, lightweight structure that can be molded into complex shapes. The resin also toughens the fiberglass structure; if a crack spreads through the resin, the fibers arrest the crack’s propagation, which increases the composite’s ability to absorb energy from impacts without failing. The result is a material that is much tougher than either glass or resin on their own – tougher and far more useful.

The turnover of the fiberglass market crossed the $300M/year mark in the 1950s. It was a big business even in those days, and, right alongside aluminum, it was a symbol of the coming “space age” – an advanced material par excellence.

In later years, the same fiber-resin technique was applied to the industrial production of dozens or even hundreds of different types of fiber composite: From carbon fibers, aramid fibers, UHMWPE fibers, and dozens of others, including natural fibers such as jute and PALF. Some of these composites are the strongest and toughest materials on the planet.

To this day, the common conception of fiber-resin composites is that they are among the materials that define our modern era – that they are something new, something which separates us from our ancestors who forged metals for armor, lashed boats together out of wood, rope, and fabric, and built early aircraft out of balsa wood.

But is this truly the case, or would men in ancient times recognize these “modern” composite materials? Did they possess their own versions, or anything like them? The historical record is not perfectly clear, but I believe that the question can now be answered definitively, as several articles in this series will show. We will start by turning our gaze to Ancient Greece.

The Ancient Greeks used armor made of linen, and by some accounts this was a resin composite. In any case, we know that armor was made of linen as early as the 8th century BC, and that its use may have started in the Bronze Age, perhaps as early as the 11th or 12th centuries BC. The first explicit mention dates back to Homer’s Iliad – traditionally dated to the 8th century BC, but possibly even older – where it was used on both sides of the conflict. Here describing Ajax the Lesser, a Greek captain:

Ajax, the fleet son of Oileus, commanded the Locrians. He was not so great, not nearly so great, as Ajax the son of Telamon. He was a little man, and his breastplate was made of linen, but in use of the spear he excelled all the Hellenes and the Achaeans.

And Amphios, a Trojan:

. . .Adrasteia and the district [dêmos] of Apaesus, with Pityeia, and the high mountain of Tereia – these were led by Adrastos and Amphios, whose breastplate was of linen.

Ajax the Lesser survived the war in his linen breastplate but was famously slain at sea by Athena and Poseidon as a punishment for, essentially, war crimes. Amphios’ linen breastplate didn’t carry him through the battle alive; he was slain on the field by Diomedes.

In the 7th century BC, the Oracle at Delphi cuttingly responded to supplicants from Megara who had asked her “Who are the best of the Hellenes?”:

[That] of all soils Pelasgian Argos is the best, and best are the horses of Thessaly, the women of Lacedaemon, and the men who drink the waters of lovely Arethusa. But better even than these are they who dwell between Tiryns and Arcadia, rich in sheep, the linen-cuirassed Argives, first to the fight. But you, Megarians, are neither third, nor fourth, nor twelfth, nor in any reckoning or list.

The martial poet Alcaeus later wrote lyrically of the contents of an armory:

And the great hall gleams with bronze: the whole ceiling is dressed for the war-god with bright helmets, down from which nod white horse-hair plumes, adornments for men’s heads. Bright bronze greaves hide the pegs they hang on, defence against a strong arrow; there are corslets of new linen and hollow shields thrown on the floor. Beside them are swords from Chalcis and many belts and tunics.

Thus there’s ample textual evidence to support the notion that the Greeks used linen armor in the 6th-8th centuries BC, and possibly even earlier, in Mycenaean Bronze Age times. As the decades and centuries rolled on, the later use of linen armor in Greece, Egypt, Persia, Assyria, and among the Etruscans is very well established. Mighty kings were known to wear it, from Alexander the Great, to Lars Tolumnius of the Etruscan Veii, to more than a few Pharaohs.

What nobody knows is how exactly it was made, for linen, sadly, is biodegradable and no examples of linen armor have survived the passage of time in reasonable condition. Was it a glued, multi-layered composite? Or was it quilted, felted, or twined? On this point there is considerable controversy.

Some have said that the linen armor of Ancient Greece consisted of multiple layers of woven fabric bonded to each other with glue. Peter Connoly, in the popular 1970 book “Greece and Rome at War,” wrote:

“In the second half of the 6th century, the bell cuirass declined in popularity and was superseded by the linen corselet as the basic hoplite body armour.

Linen cuirasses had probably been in use since late Mycenaean times, but it was not until late in the 6th century that they became the standard armour of the hoplite. A linen cuirass was made of many layers of linen glued together to form a stiff, thin sheet about 0.5 cm thick. The corselet extended down to the hips, the lower part, below the waist, having slits to make it able to bend forward. A second layer cut into small strips (pteryges) was stuck on the inside to cover the gaps in the outer layer. The shirt, which had no shaping to the waist, was wrapped around the torso and tied together on the left side. A V-shaped piece, fixed to the back, was pulled forward to cover the shoulders. Vase paintings often show these shoulder flaps springing back when untied, illustrating the resilience of the material.

A few years ago, I made a copy of one of these cuirasses. It was difficult to put on because of its stiffness, but once one had got used to it, it was quite comfortable and easy to move about in. These cuirasses were often made in several pieces, and the pteryges were sometimes detachable.”

This account, though written in an authoritative tone, appears to have been based on a “third-hand [16th century] summary of a medieval chronicle.” There’s no hard evidence to support Connoly’s seemingly-authoritative assertions.

Yet a few decades later, to a surprising amount of fanfare in the pop-sci media, University of Wisconsin professor Gregory Aldrete released a book-length study on his recreations of Ancient Greek linen armor. His book Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor, Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery picked up where Conolly left off, in attempting to build replicas of Ancient linen armor and test them against arrows and other weapons.

Aldrete came to the conclusion that linothorax was likely a glued multi-ply composite, based on reconstructions that utilized laminated layers of linen held together with an adhesive. His experiments involved creating replicas of this armor by layering 17 sheets of linen and bonding them together using glue, then testing them against arrows and other weapons to assess their protective qualities, in comparison with other potential designs and with bronze armor.

Aldrete’s tests provided detailed data showing that the glued linen armor could stop arrows from traditional bows at various distances. This, he claimed, offered a plausible explanation for how ancient Greek warriors could have been protected without the use of heavier bronze armor.

However, Aldrete’s conclusions have sparked substantial criticism within the academic and historical reenactment communities. Critics argue that the evidence for the use of glue in ancient linen armor is scant, indeed nonexistent. The key issue lies in the fact that there are no surviving archaeological examples of glued linen armor, nor are there direct references to the use of glue in ancient texts. While Aldrete’s work builds on the earlier hypothesis of Peter Connolly, who suggested that glue might explain the stiffness of shoulder flaps seen in ancient depictions of armor, many scholars believe this interpretation to be speculative at best – and they often note that the shoulder flaps were much more likely to be made of leather or rawhide in any case, rather than linen.

Critics further point out that ancient sources, such as Pliny the Elder, mention linen armor being made from twined threads rather than glued layers. Twining, a technique still used today, involves twisting threads together to form thicker, more durable cords that could provide protection without the need for glue or multiple layers of linen fabric. This process, which was well known and quite common in antiquity, could explain the stiffness and resilience of the armor while aligning more closely with the available evidence. Another thing to keep in mind is that woven fabric was expensive in those days, and linen – from soil-depleting flax – was especially expensive! A twined vest would be considerably less costly than one made of a dozen layers of fabric.

Further complicating the argument for glued linen is the well-established tradition of quilted textile armor, which has been used across many cultures over millennia. Quilted armor, made by layering and stitching together fabric, offers significant protection without the need for any adhesive. This method is well-documented in examples of armor from regions such as Asia, Europe, and the Americas, where multiple layers of fabric or padding were sewn together to form highly effective, flexible, and lightweight armor. These historical precedents strongly suggest that ancient Greek linen armor could have been quilted rather than glued. In fact, many frescoes, vase paintings, and other artworks from Greece depict warriors wearing armor with grid-like patterns that resemble quilting stitches, further supporting the idea that layered fabric armor could have been stitched rather than bonded with glue.

Quilted armor can be of varied stiffness, depending on the density of the cross-stitches, so it could also be that well-made quilted armor would provide greater flexibility and mobility for soldiers in combat, an aspect that would have been diminished in the stiff glued constructions Aldrete experimented with.

Another major critique of Aldrete’s research concerns the overbuilt nature of his reconstructions. By creating a linothorax composed of 17 layers of linen, he produced an armor that was nearly arrowproof. This result, while assuredly impressive in terms of modern reconstructions, does not align well with ancient accounts of linen armor’s performance in battle. Historical sources, such as Pausanias, describe linen armor as being less protective than leather armor overlaid with scales made from split horse hooves, and susceptible to penetration by powerful weapon strikes. In his own words, which I’ll quote at length as this is quite interesting:

“The Sauromatae have no iron, neither mined by themselves nor yet imported. They have, in fact, no dealings at all with the foreigners around them. To meet this deficiency they have contrived inventions. In place of iron they use bone for their spear-blades, and cornel-wood for their bows and arrows, with bone points for the arrows. They throw a lasso round any enemy they meet, and then turning round their horses upset the enemy caught in the lasso. Their breastplates they make in the following fashion. Each man keeps many mares, since the land is not divided into private allotments, nor does it bear anything except wild trees, as the people are nomads. These mares they not only use for war, but also sacrifice them to the local gods and eat them for food. Their hoofs they collect, clean, split, and make from them as it were python scales. Whoever has never seen a python must at least have seen a pine-cone still green. He will not be mistaken if he liken the product from the hoof to the segments that are seen on the pine-cone. These pieces they bore and stitch together with the sinews of horses and oxen, and then use them as breastplates that are as handsome and strong as those of the Greeks. For they can withstand blows of missiles and those struck in close combat. Linen breastplates are not so useful to fighters, for they let the iron pass through, if the blow be a violent one. They aid hunters, however, for the teeth of lions or leopards break off in them. You may see linen breastplates dedicated in other sanctuaries, notably in that at Gryneum, where there is a most beautiful grove of Apollo, with cultivated trees, and all those which, although they bear no fruit, are pleasing to smell or look upon.”

Additionally, there was the famous incident involving Alexander the Great, who was nearly killed when an arrow pierced his linen armor, which suggests that historical versions of linen armor were far lighter and less impenetrable than Aldrete’s model, which was so robust that it far outperformed bronze in some scenarios.

Moreover, critics have highlighted issues with the materials used in Aldrete’s experiments. The modern glues and linen fabrics employed in the reconstruction do not perfectly replicate what would have been available to the Ancient Greeks. This is not entirely his fault – it’s simply not known what adhesives would have been available to the Ancient Greeks, which is, in fact, another problem – and while Aldrete sought to create a historically accurate reconstruction, the properties of modern adhesives likely differ significantly from the natural resins and other binding agents that may have been used in antiquity. This introduces an element of modern bias into the results, potentially skewing the effectiveness of the armor beyond what the ancient Greeks could have achieved. Aldrete’s metal testing also raised concerns. His team used annealed bronze, which is considerably softer and weaker than the work-hardened bronze that was typically used in ancient armor. This softer metal would have been more easily penetrated by weapons, further exaggerating the apparent superiority of the glued linen armor in the tests. Lastly, though he tested quilted linen, it was rather deficient – very lightly quilted, not at all in keeping with historical or even contemporary examples of quilted armor.

Until more concrete evidence is found, such as archaeological examples of glued linen armor, the notion that the ancient Greeks used glue in the construction of their armor remains an interesting but unproven hypothesis. And, as I’ll explain later in the series, I believe that it can be dismissed.

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