From Syria to Iberia

One reason why I like Fernando Quesada Sanz’ Weapons, Warriors, and Battles of Ancient Iberia (publisher’s website) is that he looks east to the Punic world as well as the Greek and Roman worlds. Whereas specialists in archaic and classical Greece rarely pay much attention to any kind of barbarians, Quesada Sanz reminds readers that Iberia has been influenced by people who arrived by sea from the east since the 9th century BCE. A good example is what he has to say about the Iberian disc cuirasses.

Between about 600 and 100 BCE, warriors in Iberia and Italy wore bronze discs on their chests to protect them from weapons and impress anyone who saw them. Iberian sculptures such as the Warriors of Porcuna show additional discs on the shoulders and at the waist. Samnite tombs from Central Italy contain cuirasses where the breastplate and backplate are embossed into three discs and additional plates protect the shoulder straps and under the arm. This type of armour is shaped differently from the coats of scale armour from West Asia, the Greek muscle cuirasses and tube-and-yoke cuirasses, or Celtic coats of mail. Something about the disc shape was important to warriors in Italy and Iberia, even if armourers needed to add more discs or other plates to provide as much protection as their patrons wished.

In Polybius’ day or slightly before, most Roman soldiers just had a simple disc breastplate:

οἱ μὲν οὖν πολλοὶ προσλαβόντες χάλκωμα σπιθαμιαῖον πάντῃ πάντως, ὃ προστίθενται μὲν πρὸ τῶν στέρνων, καλοῦσι δὲ καρδιοφύλακα, τελείαν ἔχουσι τὴν καθόπλισιν:

The majority (hoi polloi) of Roman soldiers all have in addition a bronze plate a span wide in all directions, which they wear on the breast and call a heart-protector (kardiophylax), which completes their armament.

Polybius 6.23.14 tr. Manning

Unfortunately, there are no depictions of Italian disc breastplates or finds of Italian disc breastplates from this period, with one possible exception from the Roman siege of Numantia in Spain. A well-known translation of this passage calls the plate “a span square” but this Greek text does not.

Quesada Sanz is of the mind that because the first Iberian sculptures of disc breastplates are later than the first Italian sculptures of disc breastplates, the Iberians probably copied this armour from Italians. However, he does not stop there.

Which is the first origin of these breast-plates, guadacuori or kardiophylakes? Everything points to the Middle East. There is some isolated evidence dating back to the time of Hammurabi, in the second millennium. Much later, Assyrian reliefs from Tiglath-Pilser II (eighth century BC) onwards show fighters with this type of defence fastened to wide leather straps.

Weapons, Warriors, and Battles of Ancient Iberia p. 164

These disc breastplates were worn by the Gurrean and Ituˀean spearmen, which was what Assyrians called their auxilliary troops. The Assyrians themselves wore scale or lamellar armour if they had any armour at all. We do not know much about Syrian and Phoenician arms and armour after the fall of the Assyrian empire, but it is possible that the Phoenicians could have carried the idea of a disc breastplate to Italy and Iberia. This was a period when technologies like the safety pin (fibula), ironworking, writing, stone architecture, silver mining, and cavalry warfare spread west across Europe and North Africa.

I hope that many people read Weapons, Warriors, and Battles of Ancient Iberia (Pen & Sword, 2023) (publisher’s website) because it has many objects and ideas which other books in English do not discuss.

The Met has a book Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age (2014 or 2016) which I have not yet read. You can read it in PDF here.

(scheduled 4 April 2024)