Linothorax: How to Make Your Own Greek Armor | Hacker News Reader

Linothorax: How to Make Your Own Greek Armor

newyorker.com

68 pointscurtis18 comments

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

There are also instructions for making your own.

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.

Try Marcus Junkelmann. The man is a legend.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

"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...

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.

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

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.

Fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel

> The reputation and history of Damascus steel has given rise to many legends, such as the ability to cut through a rifle barrel or to cut a hair falling across the blade. A research team in Germany published a report in 2006 revealing nanowires and carbon nanotubes in a blade forged from Damascus steel.

While the original formula for damascus is lost, we still have access to resulting products, ie there are original damascus swords that survive into present.

> “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.

Anyone can add to the title (2014)?

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