shield – Book and Sword

Shield Making with Theophilius

a wooden shield shaped like a soup plate sitting hollow-up on a linoleum countertop next to a pot of toffee-coloured glue

In April and May I have been making a domed round shield from start to finish. I decided to post a tidied-up version of my lab notes on my Patreon page. If scheduling goes right, my post should be visible here. Part 2 on the gessoing and painting should arrive in early June!

Coiled Shields and Helmets

a coiled grass bowl wrapped with light brown and off-white fibres on a vanished wooden tabletop lit by a candle and an electric lamp — A little bowl like this was all my budget could afford, but its still handy for holding my sewing things!

One weekend in May 2023 I did two things on a weekend which involved spending several hours away from home doing things with people I did not know in 2013 other than the day job (!). When I was passing through downtown Victoria I stopped at a stall run by Journey House Actions, a Rwandan charity. They sell bowls, baskets, and jars of coiled grass ropes laced with dyed sisal fibres. As I worked my way through them, I was struck how much they were like the Turkish shields in Schloss Ambras.

Whitening Shields and Panels

a colour photo of a painted terracotta model of a Greek shield with the head of a god crowned with rays of light — Model shield from the ‘Tomb of the Erotes’ on Eretria (c. 350-250 BCE, not from a documented excavation). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession number 97.322

Xenophon once uses the verb λευκόω “to whiten” to describe how anti-Spartan Athenians made shields to fight the pro-Spartan oligarchs:

The Thirty thereupon retired to Eleusis; and the Ten, with the aid of the cavalry commanders, took care of the men in the city, who were in a state of great disquiet and distrust of one another. In fact, even the cavalry did guard duty by night, being quartered in the Odeum and keeping with them both their horses and their shields; and such was the suspicion that prevailed, that they patrolled along the walls from evening onwards with their shields, and toward dawn with their horses, fearing continually that they might be attacked by parties of men from Piraeus. [25] The latter, who were now numerous and included all sorts of people, were engaged in making shields, some of wood, others of wicker-work, and in whitening them (ἐλευκοῦντο).
Xen. Hell. 2.4.24-25

As I was studying Aeneas Tacticus before the conference on Stadtbelagerungen zwischen Ost und West (Innsbruck, 12-13. October 2023) I found a passage which helps interpret this one!

How Heavy Was the Shield from the Fayum?

black and white photos of a dilapidated pltwood shield — Wolfgang Kimmig’s famous photos of the shield from Harit in Egypt (a name which he misremembered as Kasr el Harit, “Harit Castle”)

In May a well-known ancient historian told the Internet that the style of shield from Harit in the Fayum in Egypt weighed 10 kg. He probably got this from Mike Bishop and John Coulston’s classic handbook Roman Military Equipment (second edition p. 62) which cites reconstructions by Peter Connolly and Marcus Junkelmann. He was writing a general lecture so could not spend too much time questioning his sources. But I think this estimate is too high for four reasons.

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.

Dating Bronze Age Shields

the front of a round bronze centergrip shield with a boss and a decoration of alternate solid ribs and rings of embossed dots — A Yetholm type shield from Rhyd-y-Gorse, Wales. Currently dated 1200-900 BCE. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1873-0210-2

Most archaeologists focus on metal, stone, and ceramic objects which are common and easy to conserve, but this has problems! Back in 1962 John Coles studied European Bronze Age shields by beginning with complete bronze shields (or shield covers) from Cyprus, the Aegean, southern Germany, Czechia, Denmark, and the British Isles. Because the oldest finds in the Aegean could be dated to around 850 BCE, Coles created an elaborate theory that the surviving wooden and hide shields and shield moulds from Ireland were copies of Southwest Spanish copies of the shields from the Aegean and Cyprus. Because the shields from Ireland were found loose in bogs, there was no way to date them by the other objects they were found with. Then in 1991 specialists started to collect radiocarbon dates from the Irish shields and shield-moulds, and consistently got dates before 1000 BCE! Since most parts of Europe don’t have as many peat bogs as Ireland, and ancient wood and hide rarely survive outside of bogs, this sparked some rethinking!

Learning About La Tène

a laminate bookshelf with an assortment of books on armour, fencing, ancient Greece and Rome, and tabletop roleplaying games — My copy of “Greece and Rome at War” gets to hang out with its friends in the spare bedroom

Most people interested in ancient warfare know about the swords, spears, shields, and wheeled vehicles from La Tène in western Switzerland. Peter Connolly painted pictures of them which were printed in a number of his books. A chat with Prof. Dr. Marc-Antoine Kaeser of the Laténium in Switzerland pointed me to some articles where I learned more about these ancient wooden objects.

What Woods Were Used for Shields in East Yorkshire?

An oblong bronze shield with a rib down the long axis which swells into an elipse over the center — This all-bronze shield from around 400-250 BCE represents the shape of northern European shields in the first millennium BCE (exact shapes and sizes vary and most were of wood with a few iron or bronze parts). The Chertsey Shield, British Museum, Museum number 1986,0901.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1986-0901-1

I am writing a post with this very specific title because I have added some more archaeological sites to What Woods Were Used for Shields in Iron Age Europe? Most importantly, I added sites from the pre-Roman “Arras Culture” of the wolds of East Yorkshire (and more shields from early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Yorkshire). In this post, I will give more details than I can include in a list in the original post!

Aristotle on the Pelte Shield

excerpt from a scholarly edition of four ancient Greek texts — Fragment 498 from Valentini Rose (ed.), *Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta* (Teubner: Stuttgart, 1967)

Those of us who grew up on Peter Connolly remember that Aristotle defines the pelte shield (Greece and Rome at War p. 48 “Auxiliary Troops”). What did he actually say? A bit of research in March lead me to fragment 498 in Valentine Rose’s Teubner edition of the ‘fragments’ of Aristotle. In classical philology, fragments are places where a surviving text cites or paraphrases a text which is now lost. Only rarely is a fragment literally a damaged manuscript or a scrap of papyrus. Four different texts give some version of Aristotle’s words, but I will translate the version in a commentary on Plato’s Laws:

How Thick Were La Tène Shields?

a line drawing of a flat wooden shield with a central handgrip, a spine along the long axis, and a wooden boss shaped like a grain of barley — Diagram of a La Tène culture shield from Brunaux and Rapin’s *Gournay II*

This century, researchers such as Roland Warzecha have worked to spread awareness that most round centergrip shields from the Baltic were rather thin in the centre and even thinner at the edges. An overall thickness, including wood, skins, and any intermediate layers, of about 8 mm in the centre and 4 mm at the edge is typical from the sacrifices at Illerup Ådal around 200 CE to late Viking Era graves around 1000 CE. We do not know as much about shields in dryer, warmer parts of Europe where it was not customary to deposit arms in lakes and bogs. But we can study the surviving shields from La Tène on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. If you read the original reports, you will learn many things which Peter Connolly did not tell you.