
Linothorax: How to Make Your Own Greek Armor - curtis
http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/how-to-make-your-own-greek-armor
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danielvf
For those surprised that the article has no photos of the replica armor, the
project's website is here
[https://www.uwgb.edu/aldreteg/Linothorax.html](https://www.uwgb.edu/aldreteg/Linothorax.html)

There are also instructions for making your own.

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hprotagonist
This is one of those interesting areas where I'm not actually sure how much
credit to give to academics.

Amateurs (in the sense of unpaid, not poorly executed), normally reenactors,
have been on top of this for years now. "Experimental Archaeology" has a bad
rap, I think, amongst archaeologists who mostly dig things up, but it is not
without its merits. It's not too hard to find people online who have detailed
explanations of their experiments making such armor -- some of whom go as far
as making their own glues first and the like.

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HarryHirsch
Try Marcus Junkelmann. The man is a legend.

~~~
hprotagonist
I'm more familiar with the reenactors of the european early migration period
and high middle ages, but this guy looks like he'd fit right in.

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mrob
This reminds me of the use of silk in early bulletproof vests. Natural fibers
can make surprisingly effective armor. Dr. George Goodfellow, who treated the
wounded Earp brothers after the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, wrote
about the bullet resistance of silk:

[https://archive.org/stream/southcalif02losa#page/94/mode/2up](https://archive.org/stream/southcalif02losa#page/94/mode/2up)

People then went on to make silk armor, eg:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_Zeglen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_Zeglen)

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mhd
Last time I've read a discussion about this, the whole "glue" thing was still
very much up for debate. No actual historical evidence and pretty much all
other fabric armor done by sewing instead, glue having some serious
disadvantages in the Mediterranean.

Just because you can construct it in modern "experimental archeology" doesn't
necessarily entail that it actually existed. I mean, it would've made sense
that the Romans or Vikings wore some decent padding beneath their chainman
(like the crusaders did), but IIRC, nothing was actually found or implied in
writing.

~~~
Animats
Glue and cloth make a strong composite material. Strong enough for gears.[1]
Some of the gears in Teletype machines were cloth, for quieter running.
Plastics have obsoleted cloth gears, but they worked fine. For armor, that
level of rigidity may not be what you want.

[1]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=RulMAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA96](https://books.google.com/books?id=RulMAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA96)

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tomcam
I had no idea this was a thing. You've just blown my mind open in a flash.

~~~
Animats
Today we have good materials available for almost every purpose. This is quite
new. Historically, the available materials were either not very good or were
rare and expensive. Through the whole age of armor before guns, only a few
people had the good stuff.

Until about 1885, steel was about as rare as titanium is now. Cast iron and
wrought iron were used for all sorts of things for which they were unsuited,
such as boilers. Reliably good steel was hard to get in quantity until the
1920s. It's amazing how far the Industrial Revolution got with iron. Making
stuff extra-heavy was the usual workaround.

Good rubber was developed during WWII. Pre-WWII rubber couldn't tolerate oil.
Today you can get tires with a 65,000 mile warranty.

Good plastics came in in the 1950s. The early stuff like Bakelite was brittle
and became more brittle with age. Tough plastics like ABS and polycarbonate,
and cheap flexible plastics like polyethylene, were game-changers. One of the
huge headaches of the early electrical industry was that the available
insulating materials (paper, wood, slate, glass, varnish, cloth, asbestos,
tar) all had major problems.

When looking at the past, realize how materials-constrained people were.

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bootload
_" By reconstructing actual examples using authentic materials, the authors
were able to scientifically assess the true qualities of linen armor for the
first time in 1,500 years. The tests reveal that the linothorax provided
surprisingly effective protection for ancient warriors, that it had several
advantages over bronze amor, and that it even shared qualities with modern-day
Kevlar."_

Reads like a plot from a Neil Stephenson novel (thinking of Mongoliad) ~
[https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/reconstructing-
ancie...](https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/reconstructing-ancient-
linen-body-armor)

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vacri
It's worth remembering that cloth armour, while not as strong as metal armour,
is still good armour. It's much less of a mystery as to why people wore things
like linothoraxes and gambesons when you remember that tidbit. Cloth armour is
_armour_ , not _clothes_.

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eb0la
Reminds me about Damascus steel: 1\. Original formula lost. 2\. Researched in
universities. 3\. You can buy something that looks like the books told was the
original thing.

Except I don't know if there is a market for Linkthoraxes out there

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yakult
Thing is, even if the historical accounts were wrong about important details
or even totally made up, we can probably still come up with something that
fits the description.

There's the rub with experimental archaeology: you are running graduate
descent against a cost function written by storytellers. Getting a match isn't
enough to prove much.

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wtbob
> “The university has lots of rules against weapons on campus, so, because of
> all the bows, arrows, swords, axes, and so on, we couldn’t work there,”
> Aldrete said.

Sounds like the opposite of what a university should be for to me.

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jaclaz
Anyone can add to the title (2014)?

