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What's really fascinating here is that there is no scale leather armor from that period that can be placed contextually in Assyria! We only know of it from art
by codezero 5y ago
What's really fascinating here is that there is no scale leather armor from that period that can be placed contextually in Assyria! We only know of it from art and writing. It's wild to think that the first set with archaeological context was found so far away, imagine if we didn't have the Assyrian art/context, we might think the armor was first developed in North West China!
- hannasanarion 5y agoIt's the second set. The first known set was found in the Middle East somewhere and is in the Met collection. The conclusion of the paper is that these two sets were manufactured around the same time, and one of them stayed put, while the other was carried 3000 miles to China
- codezero 5y agoMy reading of the paper left me thinking the set in the Met is of unknown provenance, this is huge in archaeology/history as folks tend not to consider things without having context of the exact source. It's pretty clear (or seems so) that the armor in the Met came from there, but the Met doesn't seem to have a definitive source for it. I could have read it wrong or misunderstood, but I've been reading a lot about ancient history and they seem to value items found in-situ with context over ones that surface after they've been discovered without context.