Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor

Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor PDF

Author: Gregory S. Aldrete

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2013-05-01

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1421408201

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A thorough and original study of the linothorax, the linen armor worn by Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great led one of the most successful armies in history and conquered nearly the entirety of the known world while wearing armor made of cloth. How is that possible? In Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor, Gregory S. Aldrete, Scott Bartell, and Alicia Aldrete provide the answer. An extensive multiyear project in experimental archaeology, this pioneering study presents a thorough investigation of the linothorax, linen armor worn by the Greeks, Macedonians, and other ancient Mediterranean warriors. Because the linothorax was made of cloth, no examples of it have survived. As a result, even though there are dozens of references to the linothorax in ancient literature and nearly a thousand images of it in ancient art, this linen armor remains relatively ignored and misunderstood by scholars. Combining traditional textual and archaeological analysis with hands-on reconstruction and experimentation, the authors unravel the mysteries surrounding the linothorax. They have collected and examined all of the literary, visual, historical, and archaeological evidence for the armor and detail their efforts to replicate the armor using materials and techniques that are as close as possible to those employed in antiquity. 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 armor, and that it even shared qualities with modern-day Kevlar. Previously featured in documentaries on the Discovery Channel and the Canadian History Channel, as well as in U.S. News and World Report, MSNBC Online, and other international venues, this groundbreaking work will be a landmark in the study of ancient warfare.

Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor

Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor PDF

Author: Gregory S. Aldrete

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2013-05

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1421408198

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Alexander the Great led one of the most successful armies in history and conquered nearly the entirety of the known world while wearing armor made of cloth. How is that possible? This title provides the answer. It presents a thorough investigation of the linothorax, linen armor worn by Greeks, Macedonians, and other ancient Mediterranean warriors.

Armour Never Wearies

Armour Never Wearies PDF

Author: Timothy Dawson

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2013-08-05

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0752494244

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Armour Never Wearies is the first volume to bring together all the hitherto scattered evidence – archaeological, literary and artistic – for the forms and uses of scale and lamellar armours in the region west of the Ural Mountains throughout the 3,500 years during which these armours were used. The interpretation of this data is informed by the author’s long practical experience as a maker of arms and armour, martial artist and horseman. It offers systematic definitions and analysis of these often misunderstood forms of armour, along with detailed diagrams and instructions that will be of great use to any who wish to turn their hands to reconstruction. Along the way, this unique synthesis of evidence and interpretation debunks some myths that have arisen in recent years.

Textiles for Advanced Applications

Textiles for Advanced Applications PDF

Author: Bipin Kumar

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2017-09-20

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 9535135007

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This book presents a global view of the development and applications of technical textiles with the description of materials, structures, properties, characterizations, functions and relevant production technologies, case studies, challenges, and opportunities. Technical textile is a transformative research area, dealing with the creation and studies of new generations of textiles that hoist many new scientific and technological challenges that have never been encountered before. The book emphasizes more on the principles of textile science and technology to provide solutions to several engineering problems. All chapter topics are exclusive and selectively chosen and designed, and they are extensively explored by different authors having specific knowledge in each area.

Killing for the Republic

Killing for the Republic PDF

Author: Steele Brand

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1421429861

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A sweeping political and cultural history, Killing for the Republic closes with a compelling argument in favor of resurrecting the citizen-soldier ideal in modern America.

Persian Interventions

Persian Interventions PDF

Author: John O. Hyland

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1421423707

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"In this book, Hyland examines the international relations of the First Persian Empire (the Achaemenid Empire) as a case study in ancient imperialism. He focuses in particular on Persian's relations with the Greek city-states and its diplomatic influence over Athens and Sparta. Previous studies have emphasized the ways in which Persia sought to protect its borders by playing the often warring Athens and Sparta off each other, prolonging their conflicts through limited aid and shifts of alliance. Hyland proposes a new model, employing Persian ideological texts and economic documents to contextualize the Greek narrative framework, that demonstrates that Persian Kings were less interested in control of the Ionian region where Greece bordered the empire than in displays of universal power through the acquisition of Athens or Sparta as client states. On the other hand, the establishment of "Pax Persica" beyond the Aegean was delayed by Persian efforts to limit the interventions' expense, and missteps in dealing with fractious Greek allies. This reevaluation of Persia's Greek relations marks an important contribution to scholarship on the Achaemenid empire and Greek history, and has value for the broader study of imperialism in the ancient world."--Provided by publisher.

Pindar, Song, and Space

Pindar, Song, and Space PDF

Author: Richard Neer

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 1421429799

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A groundbreaking study of the interaction of poetry, performance, and the built environment in ancient Greece. Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Classics by the Association of American Publishers In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. At the heart of the book is the great poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his magnificent odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre of modern lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by choruses of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further to show that they were also site-specific: as the dancers moved through the space of a city or a sanctuary, their song would refer to local monuments and landmarks. Part of Pindar's brief, they argue, was to weave words and bodies into elaborate tapestries of myth and geography and, in so doing, to re-imagine the very fabric of the city-state. Pindar's poems, in short, were tools for making sense of space. Recent scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology. But Neer and Kurke show that these distinctions are artificial. Poems, statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and buildings worked together as a "suite" of technologies for organizing landscapes, cityscapes, and territories. Studying these technologies in tandem reveals the procedures and criteria by which the Greeks understood relations of nearness and distance, "here" and "there"—and how these ways of inhabiting space were essentially political. Rooted in close readings of individual poems, buildings, and works of art, Pindar, Song, and Space ranges from Athens to Libya, Sicily to Rhodes, to provide a revelatory new understanding of the world the Greeks built—and a new model for studying the ancient world.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind PDF

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2000-08-15

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 0547527543

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National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia

The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia PDF

Author: Shiyanthi Thavapalan

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-10-21

Total Pages: 523

ISBN-13: 9004415416

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"In The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia, Shiyanthi Thavapalan offers the first in-depth study of the words and expressions for colors in the Akkadian language (c. 2500-500 BCE). By combining philological analysis with the technical investigation of materials, she debunks the misconception that people in Mesopotamia had a limited sense of color and convincingly positions the development of Akkadian color language as a corollary of the history of materials and techniques in the ancient Near East"--