The Ancients - Linothorax: Kevlar of the Ancients

Episode Date: November 22, 2020

The House of the Faun in Pompeii is known for being one of the largest and most impressive private residences in the ancient city. Among its many works of art is a depiction of Alexander the Great in battle. In previous episodes we have discussed Alexander’s rule and empire, but this time, let’s focus on his armour, as shown in this mosaic on the floor of the House of Faun, the only contemporary portrayal of linothorax on a known figure. For, instead of wearing bronze or iron armour as one might expect, Alexander is going into battle wearing a breastplate of linen. Gregory Aldrete has spent 12 years studying the composition and effectiveness of this ancient armour used by many nations around the Mediterranean. To do so, he recreated the armour from scratch, using authentic materials. In this episode Gregory, Professor Emeritus from The University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, speaks with Tristan about how this armour protected one of the most powerful conquering armies of all history, despite being made of a soft fabric.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we are talking ancient body armour.

Not iron body armour, not bronze body armour. We are talking linen body armour, the linothorax, that famous body armour that you see Alexander the Great wearing on that renowned mosaic discovered on the floor of the House of the Faun in Pompeii. Now joining me to talk through the effectiveness of the linothorax and what we know about this ancient body armour, I was delighted to be joined by Professor Gregory Aldretti from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Gregory has written the book on the linothorax and he has also reconstructed it. He has

tested out its efficiency first hand. He is the man to go to, to talk about ancient linen body armour. Here is, without further ado, Gregory Aldretti. Greg, it is great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining me. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you. Now, the linothorax, the body armour that helped Alexander the Great conquer the mighty Persian Empire. That's the quick tagline, isn't it? And there's some truth to that. But it wasn't just Alexander who wore this. This is a technology that was used for 1500 years by about a dozen different cultures. So it has a very long lifespan. And this is, of course, this body armor is something that you spent a lot of time recreating and studying.

Yes. So it was not my intent to go off on a 12-year tangent studying ancient body armor. But one of my students, Scott Bartell, was an enormous fan of Alexander the Great. I was quite obsessed with him as a tattoo and Greek of him on his arm, all sorts of things. And he had seen the very famous Alexander mosaic, which is from Pompeii, which many people have seen, in which Alexander is depicted wearing this linen armor called a linothorax. And Scott wanted to recreate one of these for himself. And so one day he came to me and said, I want to try and make this armor. Can you give me some references to do it properly? And with typical sort of professorial arrogance, I said, why, of course, I'll get you some articles

to read. And when I went and looked, there weren't any. It turned out that nobody had really studied this in depth in a rigorous scholarly way. And that was the light bulb moment where I said, well, all right, why don't you and I do this? We can study it. We'll even do a reconstruction of it. And it just snowballed from there. So in the end, I spent 12 years on this thing. I worked on Scott with it for 12 years, and we ended up writing a book together. Fantastic. I mean, that's absolutely remarkable that, as you say, this body armour, which seems to cover a large period of antiquity, hadn't really been studied in depth before 12 years ago. Well, people had talked about it a lot, but because it was made of organic materials, no examples survived.

So there was a lot of speculation, especially among actually the reenactor community, who had themselves sometimes tried to make some of this. But scholars like to study what they can touch. Archaeologists like to make typologies of physical objects. And we didn't have any of these things. Or perhaps we only had a few tiny fragments surviving in some graves. So it gets mentioned a lot, but bronze armor had really gotten far more attention because we've got lots of nice examples in museums, and it's flashy. So there was always a little bit of suspicion about the line of thorax as to just how widespread was it, and how effective was it as

protection. And those are the questions that we really tried to answer with our project. Absolutely. Well, let's dive into the material itself first of all. And first of all, no question too silly. The linothorax, what does that mean in ancient Greek? Well, it's a compound made up of two roots, lino, which means linen, and thorax, which is literally chest, but is also in ancient Greek the term for any kind of body armor. So it's very clearly, nicely descriptively named, body armor made out of linen. And the word itself occurs quite early in Greek literature. It occurs twice in Homer, linothorax. It occurs about 45 other times by about 30 different authors. So it's not a rare word.

It's not an unusual thing. This is something that gets talked about by a lot of authors. And in addition, there's other references to armor made of linen that doesn't necessarily use the term linothorax. So when you combine those together, on the one hand, we have a very good body of literary evidence of about 70 references in ancient literature by about 40 different authors that this thing existed and was used by people all across the Mediterranean. So different cultures who are attested as having used this include Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Macedonians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, tribes in Spain, the Persians. So it's something that was very widespread

around the ancient Mediterranean. And that's one body of evidence. The other body of evidence is ancient art, where there are a type of armor, which again, historians refer to as type four armor, just refers to what it looks like, which is identified with the line of thorax. And so what we did in our project to begin with was we collected all those literary references. And then my wife and I, particularly Alicia, went through all these catalogs of Greek vases from all around the world, all the museums, and collected every example of this thing in art that we could find, both in vases, painted on vases, but also in sculpture, on bronze objects, on wall paintings. And in the end, we made a database of about a thousand images of it in ancient art. So this is what we start with, the literary

descriptions and then the visual images. And our first goal was to simply try to backwards engineer it to figure out how this thing was put together to try and make a couple examples using the same sorts of materials that would have been available in the ancient world. As you mentioned there looking at the literary evidence and the art evidence what can this tell us about how this body armour was put together? Was it just one big piece of linen or do we think it was lots of little pieces put together? It looks like most of them had two components. So there was a kind of shoulder piece with these two long arms that you would put over your shoulders and then pull the arms down and fasten them on the chest. And then there was a flat rectangular section which you

would wrap around your body and tie together, usually on the left side. And so it forms a kind of tube around your torso, and then the shoulder thing comes over the top. Sometimes this armor is called tube and yoke armor because of that arrangement. And what was really helpful to us is there were a number of vase paintings which showed Greek warriors putting the armor on. So not already on them, but in the process of putting it on. And what was interesting there is you could see them taking these flat shapes and bending it into this tubular shape around their body. And then they would have those shoulder pieces where before again they would pull that down, the two arms would stick straight up on either side of their head. And what this told us is that the material that this thing was made of had to be flexible enough

that you could readily bend it from a flat shape into a circular shape. But it was also stiff enough that if you just sort of left it on its own, those arms would point up. So that combination of rigidity and flexibility is very unusual, and it meant that it could not be something like metal, because that would be too stiff, or it could not simply be fabric on its own, because that would just flop down, and it wouldn't stick up like we see in the vase paintings. So those arming scenes were crucial to trying to figure out what the substance was that this thing was made of. It's astonishing because we might normally think of armour,

we think of metal, we think rigidity, we think they're very solid, very stiff. But as you're saying now, this linen body armour, it seems to be able to mix rigidity and flexibility together. Precisely. And that's also one of the keys to its effectiveness, because when, let's say, an arrow or a sword or something hits it, all that force doesn't just go to the point of impact as it would with bronze armor. Instead, the entire thing flexes and disseminates some of that force throughout it. So having that little bit of flex really helps to enhance its protective abilities. And there's a lot of debate, quite honestly, about what this is made of. It's clearly linen. Some people think it was laminated together with glue. And that's what we put a lot

of time into investigating. And to be honest, I think that's probably the most common way it was done. But it could also have simply been sewn together in thick layers. It could have been quilted. You could have had leather intermixed with the linen, because every piece of armor in the ancient world is handmade. These aren't stamped out in factories by machines. Quite honestly, I think there was enormous variation. So I'm not sure there was a single method that these were constructed by. I think we can have good evidence that the lamination one was an important category of this, but I think there was a lot of variety as well. Of course, because as you say, they're found all across, well, we know that they're used all across the Mediterranean,

and it therefore suggests there's, perhaps based on the local resources, there's regional variation in their design. Right. If you're a farmer somewhere and you have a bunch of spare old sheets or curtains, you'll make it out of linen. If you've just killed an ox and you have some nice leather around, you might incorporate some of that. Some of them have clearly little metal plates added to the outside. When we studied the database, about 15% had some sort of scales, probably of metal, attached to parts of the exterior of it. So there's a lot of variation here. And from this art, and maybe even from the literary references, do we know how much of the body a linothorax would be able to cover?

Well, the core part is your vulnerable internal organs. So in the ancient world, if you get hit in the arm or leg, as long as you don't bleed to death, you can survive that or it doesn't get infected. But if your abdomen or thorax gets penetrated, you have a much higher chance of infection. So that's where the protection focuses on, because that's fatal if you get a perforation to those areas. So it would cover you from a little bit below your waist up to your shoulders. The arms would be exposed. There would be these kind of flaps attached to the bottom called terugues, which would hang from about sort of the level of your groin down to your knees. And that would provide at least a little bit of protection to your upper legs.

But mainly this is the core body part that's trying to protect, which is what all body armor tends to do as well. In further regards into the material and to the wearing of these linothorax in creating them do we have any idea how the ancients would have attached various parts of the linothorax together? Well we can see again in the vase paintings that sometimes there's holes drilled through it and then leather laces. So when they bend the two sides of it together around the body, they lace that up, usually on the left side. And it would be the left side because that's where you would be holding a shield in your left arm. So that is the weakest part of the armor, but hopefully that would be

behind your shield as well. Other parts could have used fasteners, pins, or you could have glued the whole thing together. The gluing, the lamination process turned out to be pretty effective once we started to do our actual experimental archaeology and begin building these things in person. Once again, that's very interesting, particularly with the strings and the laces, that they could have been able to use laces to tie it all together. There's all kinds of ways to do it, and that seems to have been the most typical. There is a lot of variation though in exactly how you tie them. So for example the laces that tie down the two shoulder flaps on the front of your chest sometimes they go straight

down to an attachment point sometimes there's two separate attachment points sometimes there's this fancy x shape where the laces cross over one another. We see an enormous variation on a basic theme. Indeed. Let's focus therefore on Greek warfare in particular now and the use of linen thorax in that. And of course, you also mentioned metal body armour. The image might come of these archaic hoplites wearing this bronze or this iron armour. But of course, you also have this linen armour. Is there a sense that the linen was an evolution from the metal armour, or were they both used at the same time? They were clearly both used at the same time. So it's not a case of one showing up and then being supplanted by another. These were two parallel types of armour. And the line of Thorax

actually seems to have a number of advantages over bronze, at least in the archaic and classical Greek eras, even into the Hellenistic era. It's lighter for the same amount of protection. It's cooler. It's cheaper to make. And so you might ask, well, why would somebody choose to wear bronze? And a lot of that is status. Bronze is expensive. So if you buy it, you're showing off your status. And the other thing about bronze is it looks good. It's shiny and impressive. And so I think you would always have elites who would want to show off their status, who would want to look good, who would want to wear this bronze armor. On the other hand, it's clear that this really wasn't second place armor.

Even kings would wear it sometimes. So Alexander wore it, and he clearly could have worn any kind of armor he wanted, but he wore this because clearly he thought it was best. The armor that he wore was supposedly captured from the Persian king. So again, another monarch wearing this. There's a reference to some in Italy which were dedicated in the temple of a Jupiter Optimus Maximus as the spoils taken from slain Etruscan king. So again, it's not just poor people would wear this, though I think largely they would because they could afford it better than bronze, but sometimes you get even the highest people in

society wearing it as well. So even if metal is more of a status symbol, you still see some of the highest people in the society wearing leather body armor. Yes, leather or linen or various things. And one of the interesting things, too, about the manufacture is that bronze requires very specialized ingredients. So you have to get tin and stuff, which is often you have to trade for. You need to hire a blacksmith who is an expensive specialist. But to make a line of thorax, the main things you need are spinning and weaving skills and then gluing. And the people who had those talents were women. So there's an interesting gender aspect to this where I can

very much envision wives making this for their husbands, mothers making it for their sons. This is the kind of thing that could be done in almost any farm anywhere around the Mediterranean where you had women who had these weaving and spinning skills because that's really what you need to make it. And there's one very interesting Greek vase that on one side of the vase, it shows a group of women weaving and spinning, typical scene. And then on the other side of the

vase, and it's clearly in the same house because the architecture in the background is the same, you see the man of the house putting on a linothorax. And I'm very tempted to read this as the women produce it and then the man gets this armor from them. It just sounds so much more, on the one hand, cost effective, but also the ability to be able to acquire a linothorax seems so much easier than getting a metal piece of body armor. Yes, it is. And I think that's why it probably was common. And certain armies seem to have, across the board, equipped themselves with it. So Alexander, who is clearly one of the most successful military commanders of the ancient world, seems to have equipped his phalanx with a line of thorax. And one of the ways we know this is he marches, of course, from Greece or Macedon,

2,000-3,000 miles, ends up in India. And when he gets to India after 10 years and marching across all of Europe and Asia, there's a reference in ancient source where his armor was getting worn out of his troops, and he sends away to Greece to have 25,000 replacements sent out to India. And then, and this is the crucial part, it says he burned the old worn out armor and that suggests again that it was flammable. So it was probably these line of thoraxes that his men had been wearing on their great conquests. Let's focus then on the Macedonians for a moment and Alexander but I'd also like to first talk about his father Philip, because obviously Philip is the one who creates these radical military transformations that turns his kingdom into the

superpower of the central Mediterranean. And do you think one of these key transformations was the introduction of the Linothorax for his infantry. This is a huge debate about how much of the final Macedonian army was due to Alexander versus was due to Philip versus was due to some slightly earlier Greek reformers such as this guy Iphicrates who Philip seems to have been influenced by. And yes, a lot of Alexander's success rests absolutely on the reforms of Philip, who completely remade the Macedonian military, turned it into this modern machine with a mixed army, different type troops, new equipment, the sarissa, all of that. So I would suspect that, yeah, a lot of this started under Philip, who was also taking advantage of some cutting edge military developments that were going on

in other places in Greece, such as Thebes. And then Alexander just has the good fortune to step in and just run with this. So it was a whole succession of people building up to the famous moment we always hear about, which is Alexander goes off and invades Persia and conquers it. But Philip is the hidden figure who I think got the ball rolling here in terms of a lot of these military reforms. And one of those was replacing the heavier armour with lighter armour so that his men could carry the longer spear, the sarissa. And in regards to the linothorax and its use as body armour, of course, with the metal armour, we sometimes see decoration on the body armour for status and all that. Do we have any idea whether the linothoraxes were decorated? Yes, and in fact this was one of the really fun side things that came out of our

project. When we put together that database of art, we were able to then do statistical analysis of it. And again, this is something that I would have thought had been done already, but had not. People had not put together a big database of Greek armor and then said exactly what percentage of the armor is decorated, what types of decoration are on it, what's most common. And so we were able to do that number crunching, and we found out that yes, a lot of the times the armor was clearly painted and decorated. The decorations are sometimes just geometric things. The single most common decoration was a starburst logo, a multi-pointed star, and that would be on the shoulders, on the chest, on the back, all kinds of places. Occasionally, you would get animals, lions, other dangerous

looking animals. Sometimes you get things like a medusa head. What was interesting, though, is that all these different types of decoration maybe altogether were only on about 50% of the armor. So a lot of it was relatively plain. So there were forms of decoration, but they weren't universal. And again, they were very idiosyncratic. It seemed like soldiers would just put on whatever they wanted. And we don't have clearly established that, let's say, all the people from the city of Corinth would all have the same decoration or symbol on their armor. It seems to have been much more individualized. And could this decorative armor be a symbol of status? Possibly. We try to look at these, and from a modern perspective, you're always thinking, well, are there indications of things like rank, which is very important in modern militaries and

as a part of uniforms? And we don't see clear enough patterns there to say that. So yeah, I think it's more just what you think looks good on you or what whoever made the armor happened to put on it. Well, talking about decoration on a linothorax, and you mentioned it earlier, the Alexander the Great mosaic. And why does this piece of art, why is it so significant for understanding the ancient Linothorax? Well, it's the single named depiction that we have surviving of somebody who we know very well wearing it. And it's also an extremely famous bit of art too. So I mean, it's this Roman mosaic, which is itself probably a copy of an earlier Greek painting. And it's one of the most dashing,

romantic images of Alexander. I mean, it shows him charging across the battlefield, his hair is flowing in the wind, he's looking dynamic. And on the other side of the mosaic, you have Darius, the Persian king, making eye contact with Alexander, becoming frightened, and you know in the next instant he's going to turn his chariot and run from the battlefield. So it captures this key moment in a pivotal battle of the ancient world and that's an unusual thing in art. And here he is wearing this very distinctive type of armor in it so it's quite famous for that reason. And the armor itself, is it very detailed in the painting? Yes, it's clearly an elaborate version. So it's hard to make out all the details, but he does seem to have a gorgon's head painted right in the centre of his chest.

There's a lot of colour, outlining of the different parts in red, little details. So it does seem to have been a particularly elaborately decorated suit of armour, as one might expect of the type that would be worn by a monarch. Of course, of course. And you mentioned paints there. Does that also suggest that paint could be used to decorate linothoraxes? Yes. And one of the most useful things in our reconstructions was there are 27 tomb paintings, mostly in Macedon, a few in Italy, that show depictions of the line of thorax, and they're in color. So unlike the vase paintings or bronze or stone, here we have this small number of images of this armor that are actually preserved in color. And so that gives us some hint what they looked like.

And it seems like in a lot of cases, the linen may have been somewhat bleached, just like you buy it today. So natural linen, when you weave it, is a khaki brown color, but you can bleach it more towards a white color. And it seems like that was common, or they may just simply have painted some of it white. And then you also get these colorful decorations, particularly outlining bits of the armor, the shoulder pieces, in colors like purple and red. So this was colorful armor. It was not drab, probably. It's brilliant that you have that archaeological evidence surviving from the tombs. As you say, not just the statues or the pieces of pottery, you can get a real sense of the colour from this evidence that has survived.

Yep. And the really interesting part of our project was when we tried to rebuild these things ourselves. And that posed all kinds of challenges. It was a huge challenge just trying to get our hands on linen, which we felt was historically similar to linen that would have been available in the ancient world. So if you go to the fabric store today and buy linen, it's been machine woven. And more importantly, when it's being processed from flax, it comes from the flax plant, that process has used a lot of modern chemicals as well.

So we had to try and get our hands on some linen which had been grown in traditional methods, processed by traditional methods, and then hand woven into linen that we would then use in our reconstructions. And that turned out to be a real difficult challenge. Ultimately, we found a group of traditional weavers, all women who lived in Wisconsin, the state I live in, who were growing flax plants in their backyard, processing it by traditional methods, and then weaving and spinning the stuff into thread and then fabric. Fantastic. And did they then provide the materials needed to take the next step of creating this body armour? Well, we bought some of their linen, which was extremely expensive because there's so much labour that goes into it. And eventually what we ended up doing was growing

flax at my university. And this was another professor who took the lead on this, Professor Heidi Sherman, who is a medievalist and studies medieval textiles, especially among Vikings. And she and one of the art textile people got students to start growing flax at the university, taught them the very complicated process for processing it. So you plant it, you harvest it, you red it, which is you put it, let it sit in water till it rots, you dry it, you break it, you scutch it, you hackle it, and then you spin it into thread and then weave that into fabric. So they actually ended up growing several generations of crops and making this stuff on our own campus. And for the glue, we know in the ancient world they had all sorts of, I almost want to call them super glues,

these very complex compounds that would bond and hold even underwater. We've pulled helmets out of streams in Germany that have metal parts glued together from the Roman era that are still glued together after 2,000 years underwater. So they had really good glues, but we don't actually have the recipes for any of those to recreate them. And so we went the opposite tack where we said, well, for our glue, we'll primarily use a sort of glue that would be cheap and available to everyone. And so what we ended up using, for our glue, we'll primarily use a sort of glue that would be cheap and available to everyone. And so what we ended up using mainly was rabbit glue. You take the skins

of rabbits, they're actually hares, I guess, in the ancient world, and you would have been able to make a weak glue. And it's not the greatest glue, but we could say everybody had this. And so that became our baseline, that the armor would have been at least this good using this glue and this fabric. Ah, okay. So you use that as a baseline. And once again, it sounds like you were trying to get as close to the ancient techniques as possible. Right. And that was trial and error. I like experimental archaeology. I like hands-on projects because you learn things you don't learn just reading stuff in books. So for example, when we were trying to laminate our armor, we were eager to do this, so we'd lay down three or four layers and try and laminate them all at once. And what we discovered

was that if you don't let an individual layer dry before you put the next, your armor will grow a nasty, stinking mold. So we learned we have to do layers one at a time, let each layer dry, add another, and just build up a slab of fabric laminated together. And we also found that the maximum thickness that slab could be is about 12 millimeters. And it's not that you can't glue thicker slabs, but if you bend it over and over again hundreds of times, if it's thicker than about 12 millimeters, eventually it'll start to crack and delaminate. So there's a practical maximum thickness, I think, to this armor that you could make it just because

if you're going to retain that flexibility, which we talked about earlier and is so important, you can't make it too thick. So these are the kinds of things you really only find out by doing this in person, by trying to make this stuff. Something else we found out is initially we just built up a thick slab and then thought we would cut out the shapes we needed for the armor. And when we tried to cut it, it turned out to be so tough we couldn't cut it with anything. So we tried big scissors. I actually went to the sort of home supply store and got some bolt cutters and that wouldn't cut it. And in the end, I could only cut it out using an electric jigsaw equipped with metal cutting blades. Now, obviously, they didn't have that in the ancient world. So what we realized is what they would do in the ancient world, and this seems

obvious in retrospect, but this is the kind of thing you learn, is they would cut each piece in the shape they wanted and then laminate it together, not just laminate a big square and cut it out. So that's the sort of practical stuff you learn by doing this in a hands-on way. Absolutely. This experimental archaeology, although lots and lots of hard work, it must be extremely rewarding to be able to answer these questions. Well, it was fun. All of my research tends to focus on practical questions. I like to study how did they actually do things in the ancient world? That's kind of my angle. questions. I like to study how did they actually do things in the ancient world. That's kind of my angle. And so this was fun. I also have a bit of a science background, and this is the scientific

method, trying stuff out. And so that played into it as well. And it was also a great project for students, because once we had this thing, the second phase, which we can talk about in a minute, is the testing part. So here you get to shoot it with arrows, hit it with axes and all this. And it's a lot easier to sign up students for a project where you say you get to hit something with an axe and wear armor than, well, you get to count some pot sherds or something like that. So I was able to employ a lot of undergraduate students. These were not grad students who all basically donated hundreds of hours of their time to learning how to spin. We had all these male students learning how to use a drop spindle, which is the kind of spindle they used in the ancient world.

And we tested some of this on some of my students. One of them had a farm so we could go out there and shoot arrows and stuff. And so, yeah, it was great. And it was also nice to bring in the community. The connections we made with those traditional weavers, the women in Wisconsin who did that, was very enlightening. And one of them came and gave talks to my students and taught them how to do these things. And they were a wonderful source of information. We connected with the hunting community in Wisconsin. That's a big hunting state with bow hunters who did some

of our archery tests. Police got involved at one point. We were using their range to do something when a documentary got filmed on it. So it was a nice project that really brought together faculty, students, and community members to all do this genuine original research in experimental archaeology. Brilliant. That sounds just absolutely great fun. How much material in the end was needed to create one set of body armor yeah good question so our first one which was about 12 millimeters thick and was fairly large so ancient world ones would have been slightly smaller just because the average person was a little smaller that one had 15 layers of linen and those 15 layers ended up being like i say about 12 millimeters thick

and it consumed if we had made this from one bolt of linen, it would have been a bolt of linen about 18 meters long by one meter wide. So a lot of fabric. And the glue was about seven liters of glue. So when you laminate this thing, you have to absolutely saturate the fabric. And that's why you really have to let it dry too. So it consumes a lot of glue, a lot of linen. And one of the practical things one learns as well is here I am gluing together these large swaths of fabric with rabbit glue. And at the time I had a dog and my dog was very interested in my armor and kept trying to chew on it. So you have to keep your pets away

from your archaeology projects if you're making it out of rabbit glue. And do you think this can also tell us about how extensive the production of linen, flax production, must have been in the ancient Mediterranean world? Well, it was extremely extensive and we have lots of archaeological evidence. Flax is one of the oldest plants that was grown to use for textiles. There's finds from 7,000 years old. It was all around the Mediterranean. So today we think of flax or linen coming from places like Egypt, but they were growing flax in Germany as well. So it was something that was grown all around the Mediterranean, was one of the most common fabrics,

was used for all kinds of things. Linen has a lot of interesting properties. It gets stronger when it's wet, which is nice. It has very high tensile strength. It stays cool in hot weather. So it's a really good textile, and you can see why they would have naturally used it for this, because people would have had a lot of this. It's used for ropes, for sails, a lot of nautical applications as well. And by the way, we do know that the Greeks did laminate stuff. In tombs at Mycenae and in Tarquinia in Italy, we found tiny little fragments of laminated linen glued together that's sometimes 14, 15 layers thick. And these are found in grave sites full of weapons. So it's quite likely that that's actually a fragment of a line of thorax there. But there's not enough surviving to just definitively say, absolutely, this was a

piece of armor. And the Greeks, for example, laminate all sorts of stuff. We have a literary source that says some of the theater masks, which they wore in the famous plays of Sophocles and things like that, were made by laminating together layers of linen. So it's a technology that was prevalent in the ancient world. Ah, a technology that was prevalent not just militarily, but it became used militarily. Right, in civilian context there was a lot of this as well. Ah, absolutely. Okay, let's get on to what we've all been waiting to hear, the results. First of all, what weapons did you use to test the armor's effectiveness? All right. So phase one was to reconstruct one of these by backwards engineering from the

literate descriptions and the visual evidence. And we eventually made, I think, about seven complete suits of armor. And this was important because we wanted to wear them all day long. My students, not so much me, but my students would run around in these things in the hot sun. So we learned a lot about their wearability. So that was the one phase. But the big question remained, how good was this as protection? Was it legitimate protection on battlefield? How did it compare to bronze armor? And so to do that, we needed to do very controlled scientific testing. And so what we did here is we also made a whole series of flat one meter square panels with different variables. So we would make it different thicknesses, different thread counts of linen, different coarseness of weave. Sometimes we'd glue it

together with the grain of the fabric going the same way between layers, sometimes opposite. We used different glues. So we used, sometimes opposite. We used different glues, so we used fish glues, we used organic glues, we used some modern glues. So we made about 50 of these test panels, and we needed flat panels rather than armor because we needed to be sure we hit each one at exactly the same angle. And then we mounted these things on a test stand and then shot them with arrows, and we focused on arrows because this was something we could control all the variables. So with an arrow, we could get a bow with a certain pull strength. So modern bows, you pull it back and it has a certain pull weight. So every shot would

have the same force applied to it. We used replica wooden arrows with natural bird fletching. We also had some blacksmiths construct for us bronze and iron arrowheads that seemed to be as close as we could get to the bronze and iron arrowheads that were used in the ancient world. So we had to try and get the same metallurgy, the same shape, the same weight, sharpen them up in the same way they would have been used. So again, we're trying to replicate all this, and then we just do lots of shots. So we shoot it from 10 meters away, 20 meters away. We shoot it from a 90-degree angle, a 45-degree angle. We vary the power of the bow.

We vary the test patch. And so we ended up with thousands and thousands of data points. But number crunching all that down, the bottom line conclusion is it was actually surprisingly good protection. So if you were wearing a one centimeter thick line of thorax garnotional standard, you would have had the same degree of protection as a warrior wearing a two millimeter thick bronze queer ass, which is about the thickest bronze. So it was quite good.

And most arrows would not penetrate. A lot of them would just bounce off. And a lot of them would just sort of stick in the armor quite dramatically. So you could have a hoplite looking like a pin cushion with all these arrows sticking out of them, but they don't go through, so they were completely untouched. If you like the scientific side of this, it required about 70 joules of energy to penetrate a one centimeter thick line of thorax, and that's the way that penetration stats are measured for things like knives and swords is usually in joules of energy required to penetrate it. So after all

this testing, it turned out, yeah, this was quite effective. And we did also have our blacksmith make us some one millimeter and two millimeter thick bronze plates and did direct comparisons using the same bows, the same arrowheads. And so that's how we know that it was equivalent protection. You're saying that many of these ancient arrowheads, well, either they bounce off or they get lodged between layers of the linen? Yes. And actually, when we studied this a little more depth, when the arrow hits it, like I say, the point of the arrow will slice through the first couple layers of fabric, but then the whole surface flexes. And so it absorbs and disseminates the impact of that arrow. Whereas if you have bronze

armor, because it's rigid and the arrow point hits a certain point, there's the resistance that that specific point offers. But if the arrow can penetrate that, it goes through it. So it's again that combination of stiffness and flexibility that gives it its through it. So it's again that combination of stiffness and flexibility that gives it its magic properties. In these ways, it's a lot like modern Kevlar armor, which again is made to resist penetration particularly and has some of that flex to it as well. And something we found is when arrows would hit it at an angle, which is probably what would happen on the battlefield, it would be rare that it would hit exact 90 degree perpendicular to the surface, the arrow tip would burrow through a couple layers and then almost get caught between two layers and would be deflected away from your body and the

arrowhead would just sort of burrow between the layers and lose all its force that way rather than continuing straight on to penetrate. So because of this layered effect, it would almost divert arrows away from your body if the tip would catch between two of those layers once it loses a little of that initial momentum. So it really was, I think, very good protection from things especially like arrows. Now what it's most vulnerable to is really, really sharp points. So ancient bronze and iron, just because of the softness of the metal, you can't get that kind of razor sharp point. But we tried things like modern hunting arrowheads, which really have razor-tipped steel points, and those ripped

right through it. So I think that's partially why it falls out of use around the Roman period, is there were some advances in metallurgy which simply made arrowheads and sword points and things sharper. And because it's fabric, sharpness really matters because it'll cut through it. So it ceases becoming frontline military gear when metallurgy gets a little bit better. So as with many things in history and military history, technological improvements is probably key to why it falls out of use around the time of the Romans. Yep, it's always technology. And also around the time of the Romans, there were people coming into the Mediterranean with some more powerful bows. You have horse archers from Eurasia, Huns and

people like that. And again, if you have a bit more force behind it, that'll enable it to be penetrated. But the sorts of bows that were used in the Greco-Persian Wars, the famous Battle of Marathon, all that sort of thing, Thermopylae, there you probably would have been pretty safe from arrows if you were wearing this kind of armor.

Now, if you take something with a sharp point and just ram it into it, it will penetrate. So when I took a spear with a sharp point and just ram it into it, it will penetrate. So when I took a spear with a very narrow tip and just ran right at it, I was able to get through it. So it's not invulnerable, but for just random arrow shots in that period from 600 BC to 250 BC, it would have worked quite well. Indeed. And what do we know about its effectiveness against melee weapons? Well, I actually have quite a large collection of replica weapons, given my interests, and we hit it with everything we could find. So we smacked it with swords, axes, spears, pila, javelins, maces, all kinds of things. And these weren't as scientific because

each hit is different depending on the strength of the person who's wielding the weapon, whereas the bows were the scientific one because we could control that. But my impressions from this is it's pretty good. It's pretty good protection and especially against blunt force weapons. So things like axes or maces, where a lot of it is a force of the blow. Again, that flex, the first time one of my students hit with an axe, we almost had an accident because it bounced the axe right back at his leg because it had that flex in it. So it's almost he hit it and then it pushed the axe back at him because it flexed in and then flexed back out. So I think it would have been quite good protection

against those sorts of things. It would have been excellent against slashing weapons, because those don't penetrate. But it's the narrow points that just go straight in with a lot of force, the tip of a spear or a stabbing sword that might have had a chance of getting through it. Once again, it's extraordinary, especially when we consider the ancient Mediterranean, from what you're mentioning there. It has the flex, but it also has the strength combined with it. And the other thing is it's much more comfortable to wear. So I've worn a lot of body armor. I've worn Roman Lorica segmentata, I've worn chain mail, and this is by far the most comfortable

armor I've worn. And the reason is, well, it's lighter for one thing. It would weigh about five kilograms, a line of Thorax versus let's say about 10 for bronze corslet or about 13 kilograms for chain mail. So that means you have greater endurance on the battlefield. You can run faster, go further. It's also cooler. And if you're in a hot Mediterranean 100 degree sun, armor bakes you, metal armor cooks you quite literally, whereas this would let you stay a lot cooler. And also we found that once you wear it for an hour or two, your own body heat softens the glue a bit, and so it starts to conform to your body shape. So it was much more comfortable to wear for five, six hours at a time than, let's

say, my Roman armor, where sometimes I'll wear this for, let's say, five hours, and by the end of that, my lower back is killing me because it's very rigid and it doesn't adapt to my body in the way that this adapts to my body. Indeed, indeed. And that climate point you made just there, especially when you said how it's popular in the eastern Mediterranean and Greece, and also when we're considering Alexander and his conquest of the Persian Empire, that climate point, the temperature, where they're fighting, the heat of these places. Do you think that's also a factor as to why the Linothorax becomes so popular? Definitely. And we do see it at places, there's some fragments that might have come from the Linothorax. It's a place like Masada in Israel. So that's a desert. Places where it's really hot, I think it's especially useful.

This is why Alexander's army could march so far so fast, is because they weren't as heavily burdened. There's also a reference to it being used by some marines on a ship, and if I were on a ship, I would very much want a lighter armor that if I fall overboard, isn't going to drag me straight to the bottom immediately. So yeah, there's a lot of context in which I think this would have made sense. It's interesting, too, that even when it falls out of use as frontline military gear, in the Roman era, we still have references to it. So, for example, one of the emperors, Galba, puts on one of these things under his toga as a kind of vest to protect him from assassins' daggers. So clearly, there's still this notion it could provide protection, just not maybe on the front line of the battlefield.

Another Roman author tells us that Roman hunters who were hunting things like leopards and lions with claws and big teeth would wear a line of thorax because it was good protection against those kinds of dangers. So it's interesting how you still find it popping up in these slightly different contexts that aren't the frontline military, but still being used as protection for all sorts of reasons. Brilliant. Well, there you go. And we might not have the evidence for this, but then could it very much be possible, you mentioned lines that this might have been used as a type of body armor

in the arenas? We don't know. I mean, there's no visual depictions of this and gladiators were extremely stylized. The Romans had this thing where 20 different types of gladiators who all had very specialized weapons, and none of them seemed to have been linen armor. Now, they may have been, and we just don't know or don't have surviving examples. Something that I suspect it was used for a lot that doesn't show up in the evidence so much is you could have made things like greaves, sort of shin protectors out of this that would have been very useful, arm bracers on your arms to protect you, even helmets,

I think, because it conforms itself so nicely to your body. So I suspect people used it for various things that maybe we just don't have evidence of, but we have to stick to what we have concrete evidence of. Of course, of course, of course. Greg, what's next? Is there anything next for the Linothorax project? Well, we finished that first phase, so that was our goals. It was an interesting project because it did get some media attention. So I think one of the things that happened was we had a couple documentaries filmed on us, and for those, they asked, well, can you put this on one of your students and shoot them? Which at first I was a little but I thought why not I know it won't go through I've been doing archery since I was a kid so we did this and you can actually find some videos of me shooting some of my students

with arrows which is what I seem to become famous for but we would like at some point to go back and look a little more depth at things like leather armor, because I think this was another alternate material that some type four armor could have been made of. So armor that looks exactly the same as the line of thorax, let's say in a vase painting, could have been linen, could have been leather, could have been a composite of the two. I'd like to experiment a little more with bronze, just to go a little bit more in depth and to see how that works. So there's always room to go further to investigate things additionally. I don there's always room to go further, to investigate things additionally. I don't have immediate plans to do this. I'm working on some

other projects at the moment, but sometime in the future I might do this or other people. And I've seen actually a lot of other professors have started doing this reconstruction thing since our book came out. So I know in Romania, there's some guy who is just making a bunch of these and doing the same sorts of experiments with his students. I know a lot of reenactors who do this. A lot of my students, you can make this very cheaply with stuff from fabric stores and Elmer's glue,

common modern glues, and make yourself a fun little suit of armor to wear around home or whatever. So it's a type of thing that clearly caught people's imagination. There's some avenues for further exploration, which either I or other people could do. But it's a nice model is what I think it's in the end most important for doing this kind of experimental archaeology,

for saying, let's build something from the ancient world. Let's test it. Let's see what we can learn by doing that. Absolutely. And I love that you got that student shooting reference in there. Absolutely fantastic. Sounds great fun. As you say, it also highlights how important, how useful experimental archaeology can be for learning more about parts of history like the Linothorax, like this body armour, that we may not have that much information about from the archaeological record surviving. Yes. There's a lot of things in the ancient world that we know something occurred, but we don't have the evidence to firsthand analyze it. Or where there's just gaps, where we don't know things. And sometimes you can fill that in by this sort of approach. So it's a nice supplementary one to just the traditional study of texts, is to try and build this stuff. And when you do something with your hands,

when you wear something, you get insights you wouldn't otherwise have. And that's happened a number of times in this project and other projects. So I like that approach. Brilliant. All the insights you need. Fantastic. And Greg, you mentioned your book just now, and the book is called? Reconstructing Ancient Linden Body Armor, Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery. And the authors are myself, my wife Alicia, and my student Scott Bartell, which I'm very proud to have actually authored a scholarly monograph with an undergraduate student. So that was a fun thing to do. Brilliant. Well, from what you've been saying, it sounds like it's been an absolutely

incredible journey during those 12 years. Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.