Fibulae and Pins
Various sizes of fibulae (aka. broaches or safety pins) were popular from the Aegean to Media. Large straight pins were also used. Most reenactment metalworkers can make you some for a price in the low tens of dollars/Euros if you give them some measurements, photos, and drawings out of books, catalogues, and articles like:
- C. Blinkenberg, Lindiaka 5: Fibules grecques et orientales, Historisk-filologiske meddelelser 13.1 (Copenhagen, 1926) {not available in Innsbruck but supposed to be the foundational study of Greek and Near Eastern fibulae}
- David M. Robinson, Excavations at Olynthus, X: Metal and Minor Miscellaneous Finds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 95-115 {site from the 4th century BCE but Macedonian material culture was conservative and types V-VII are probably before 480 BCE. Nb. Robinson was a serial plagiarist of his students’ work}
- David Stronach, “The Development of the Fibula in the Near East,” Iraq, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Autumn, 1959), pp. 180-206 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4199659
- Muscarella 1988 pp. 45-47
- Oscar White Muscarella, “Phrygian or Lydian?” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1971), pp. 49-63
- Friedhelm Pedde, Vorderasiatische Fibeln von der Levante bis Iran. Abhandlungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 24. Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag, 2000. {more illustrations than Stronach’s article, but covers a wider period and one reviewer thinks the author needed to try casting and forging some bronze}
- … Kalapodi report …
- Cecile Brons article in ‘Greek and Roman Textiles and Dress’
- What did they do with brooches? (2021)
Men and women from the Levant to Persis were often buried with ‘bow’ or ‘elbow’ fibulae but we don’t know what they fastened with them:
