A Cunning Plan for Basilike Stamatopoulou’s PhD Thesis

Basilike G. Stamatopoulou wrote a whole PhD thesis on the Argive shield (the domed shields with a rim used by Carians, Dorians, and even Etruscans). That thesis is online as photos of individual pages. Since few people outside Greece can read Modern Greek well enough to handle a 500-page PhD thesis, this is not available to most of us. Paul Bardunias and Giannis Kadoglou published a two-page English summary but it leaves many questions unanswered. I have a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel.

• Open the thesis in the online reader
• Download select pages as individual images
• Run the pages through tesseract-ocr or another Optical Character Recognition tool for Modern Greek
• Clean up the OCR errors
• Run the Greek text through a translator such as Google Translate (is there a way to automate that with shell scripts or similar? ping a URL to get the translation in response?)

If I ever have a few days free, I think this will give me a much better sense of what is in her excellent thesis than the two-page summary. People with a little bit of Modern Greek could use this to help find the few pages which are most important to their questions and read those. I tested this process on the Table of Contents and it works.

I am posting this here because I am not sure when I will have that much free time and I don’t want to forget the workflow I have tried. Paid work and things I have already promised to write for other people come first! With the growing interest in Classical Greek warfare, I hope that someone partners with Stamatopoulou to write a summary in a language which more people can read. I boiled down my PhD thesis into an article for the Journal of Ancient Civilizations so it can be done!

Edit 2023-05-31: Paul Bardunias tells me that he got some information on Argive shields from Philip Henry Blyth’s article as well as the thesis by Stamatopoulou and it just did not get into the footnotes. So pages 32-34 of Hoplites at War are not just a summary of Stamatopoulou as passed on by Giannis Kadoglou. Talk to him to hear about his plans for a translation.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD 5

ABBREVIATIONS-BIBLIOGRAPHY 12

INTRODUCTION 22

• The name and form of the hoplite shield 29

THE NEW ELEMENTS 33

• The shields of Messina 33
• The shields from the sanctuary of Athena and Zeus Sotiros of Phigalea 36
• The shields from the sanctuary of Epicurius Apollo Basson 39
• The shield from the sanctuary of Apollo Tyritas 54
• The shield from the sanctuary of Artemis Knakeatis 56 (anon on Flickr says this site is near the village of Mavriki in the Argolid – ed. )
• The shields from Palladion 57
• The shields from the Acropolis 62
• The shield from Eleutheria 80
• The shields from Delphi 88
• The shield from Kitros Piraeus 124 (Kitros in Pieria, Greece? – ed.)
• The shields from the sanctuary of Poseidon in Posedi, Chalkidiki 127 (Possidi? – ed.)
• The shield from Karaburnaki 130
• The shields from Tomb A of Derveni 133
• The shield from Tomb B at Derveni 212
• The shield from the ‘Kinch tomb’ 245
• The shields from Tomb II at Vergina 249
• The shield from the acropolis of Vergina 281
• The shields from Amphipolis 284
• Unpublished findings 290

THE INDIVIDUAL ELEMENTS OF THE ARGIVE SHIELD AND THEIR CONSTRUCTION 295

• The wooden body (wood of the hull) 295
• The leather and fabric lining 321
• The outer metal coating (bronze) 329
• The heraldic device 334
• The antyx 351
• The grips 373
• The circular ??? 444
• The small internal appendages 451
• …
• The telamon (guige) or ochanon 458
• The ?victims? 461
• The protective attachment for the lower extremities 462
• The saga, the ?ransom?, the elyma 466

SHIELD-MAKING, THE LABORATORY ORIGIN OF ARGIVE SHIELDS AND THEIR ACQUISITION 474

THE MANUFACTURING PROCESS 479

CONCLUSIONS 482

CATALOG AND PROVENANCE OF IMAGES 498

INDEX OF SOURCES 512

INDEX OF SHIELDS 515

At first glance, her PhD thesis only covers shields from the modern territory of Greece (not North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, or Italy, and possibly not Cyprus).

(scheduled 30 May 2023)