[HN Gopher] Unraveling the linothorax mystery, or how linen armo...
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Unraveling the linothorax mystery, or how linen armor came to
dominate our lives (2013)
Author : pavel_lishin
Score : 153 points
Date : 2022-07-05 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jhupress.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jhupress.wordpress.com)
| jacobr1 wrote:
| I first encountered the idea in fiction a few months ago reading
| "Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City" [1]. For those interested
| in this kind of thing, it is a fictional mashup of a variety of
| technical innovations when an engineer (the army core kind) is
| the highest ranking military officer left during a siege.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37946419-sixteen-ways-
| to...
| 99_00 wrote:
| It's good to hear about this. I still remember hearing about it a
| decade ago https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34810209
|
| Our view of history is based on what has survived, metal, stone,
| clay, some papers that have been copied or existed in dry
| climate.
|
| Anything that can rot and hasn't been reproduced, and was in a
| wet climate will be lost and removed from the picture we create
| of history.
| [deleted]
| moron4hire wrote:
| According to this paper, the idea that linothorax was made from
| glued layers is probably due to a mistranslation.
|
| https://utpjournals.press/doi/10.3138/mous.17.3.003
|
| But this paper came out 7 years after OP.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| I remember Terry Jones doing some slapstick documentary on the
| First Crusade, and described how some footsoldiers wearing padded
| "armor", would be seen with multiple arrows sticking out of the
| armor in battle, and still fighting.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambeson
| debacle wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzWipvLiCjY
|
| Todd's Workshop is a great channel for exploring these
| technologies.
| trhway wrote:
| I read somewhere that such simple armor was supposedly made by
| having the sewn together linen layers placed in a basin in the
| expected shape and pouring sea water and letting it dry in the
| Sun over and over again.
| worik wrote:
| Silk has been used this way too, I believe.
|
| There may be some advantage in the relative softness too,
| relative to iron. When something bangs into it, it will not
| transmit all the shock through to the body but will absorb some
| by deforming.
| bsder wrote:
| As I understand it, one of the advantages of silk is that it
| wrapped around things such that you could remove the arrowhead
| without surgery.
|
| That's a really big deal for avoiding infection.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Plate armor and mail were typically worn over padding.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Silk used in bulletproof vests (1999, Thailand):
| http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/379338.stm
| zeristor wrote:
| A lovely little video about growing, and processing Flax to make
| linen:
|
| https://youtu.be/TFuj7sXVnIU
| [deleted]
| msrenee wrote:
| Do they discuss the draw weight of the bow or any measurements
| they made to determine that the weapons were imparting the same
| damage as would have been common historically? It takes a while
| to work up to the sort of draw weight that was common in trained
| archers. I'm not just talking about longbows. A 90 lb recurve
| isn't something you just pick up one day.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Alicia Aldrete is coauthor, with Gregory S. Aldrete and Scott
| Bartell, of Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor: Unraveling
| the Linothorax Mystery. The website of the University of
| Wisconsin-Green Bay's Linothorax Project contains more behind-
| the-scenes information on this unparalleled effort, including an
| eight-minute mini-documentary and additional images.
|
| As an aside, Gregory Aldrete has a bunch of courses on Audible
| under "Great Courses". (You can also get them from The Teaching
| Company now call Wondrium).
|
| I heartily recommend that you listen to them if you are at all
| interested in ancient history.
| jcoq wrote:
| I came here to say the same exact thing! These courses are
| excellent.
|
| As a follow-up to those courses, there are also some courses
| about the middle ages by Philip Daileader that pick-up the
| story at the decline of the Western empire.
|
| (Also, I'm deriving great value from the Wondrium app).
| toss1 wrote:
| Working in high-performance composites, this is fantastic work!
|
| It never ceases to amaze me how some of the oldest technology was
| composites, and how much we can do with even basic materials - it
| doesn't have to be carbon fiber and epoxy to get great results,
| in this case linen and rabbit glue makes really effective and
| lightweight armor.
|
| Sort of related, the Mongol's archery bows from Genghis Khan's
| time were also amazing pieces of engineering available materials
| into high-performing tools.
| klyrs wrote:
| As cool as this is, the historicity is questionable.
|
| > But Peter Connolly's reconstruction was based on a mis-
| remembered, twice-translated summary of a Byzantine chronicle
| which did not mention glue, not on an ancient text, artefact,
| or depiction
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linothorax
| toss1 wrote:
| Interesting - doesn't disprove it, but certainly makes it at
| best a very flimsy basis and a long conjecture. I wonder if
| there were any other things made with such composites of
| binder and fibers or fabric, or if this is really a long shot
| in the dark
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Unraveling the linothorax mystery (2013)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129519 - Aug 2020 (42
| comments)
| tristor wrote:
| There is a comment from the author in response to someone that I
| found fascinating, and I am quoting here to respond to:
|
| > We found that even more of a threat than rain was one's own
| sweat on a hot day. So, yes, it does need waterproofing, both
| inside and out. We did a number of experiments along those lines,
| and found that rubbing a block of beeswax over all sides of the
| armor provided nice waterproofing. It also makes the armor smell
| nice! When you wear it for a couple hours, your own body heat
| softens the glue a bit and makes it conform to your body shape,
| so it is much more comfortable to wear than rigid types of armor.
| Our reconstructions weighed about 10 pounds-about one third the
| weight of bronze armor that would provide the same degree of
| protection. Thanks for the questions!
|
| It would explain to some degree why this armor may have found
| such military success during that time period, that it was more
| comfortably and more closely conformed to the body while offering
| similar protections. One of the things many people who've never
| had to wear armor for an extended period of time on a hot day
| don't realize is how horribly uncomfortable armor is, and how
| that discomfort can be a severe distraction under battlefield
| conditions.
|
| One thing that also interested me about this is that we found
| that one of the strongest materials we have available to use in
| modern materials science is also laminated cloth, in this case
| carbon fiber laminates. By ensuring that the direction of the
| weaves are perpendicular to one another when doing a cloth layup,
| and using a sufficiently strong adhesive/sealant, these types of
| materials are incredibly strong. Carbon fiber and carbon kevlar
| both are exceptionally strong materials that would make great
| armor (and do), and it seems the linothorax is essentially an
| early application of some of the same ideas, with lesser source
| materials.
| eyko wrote:
| A lot of their work is speculative (e.g. it's not clear that
| the layers of linen were glued, but they went with the
| assumption). It's interesting that they did not consider one of
| the most likely combinations: linen layers sewn onto leather.
| This would be more flexible (glue makes linen quite stiff) and
| more sweat resistant.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| It would also be relatively easy to puncture. Gluing the
| linen creates a composite material which should greatly
| outperform either of the component materials (the primitive
| animal glue will be almost crumbly on it's own, and woven
| cloth is very weak against punctures since there is very
| force holding parallel fibers of material close together). As
| is stated elsewhere, this is why things like fiberglass and
| carbon fiber are ubiquitous in the modern world.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Let me introduce you to the gambeson:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambeson :)
|
| Multiple layers of quilted cloth are extremely effective.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Im familiar, i think it works largely by being loose and
| giving. Arrows are fast, they have a lot of kinetic
| energy but relatively little momentum. You can decelerate
| them pretty effectively.
| [deleted]
| dsr_ wrote:
| Linen is also going to be cheaper than bronze (and later iron),
| even though linen fabric is quite an expensive material by the
| standards of a pre-industrial society. If you can grow flax,
| you get edible flaxseed, flaxseed oil, and linen fibers for
| thread and then weaving... and next year, hopefully, you get a
| new crop of flax. Save the bronze for your swords.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If I remember correctly, if you harvest for fibers, that's
| before it goes into seed.
| Retric wrote:
| Iron was likely relatively cheap to produce compared to
| Linen. You can find various YouTube videos of people
| processing iron ore by hand fairly rapidly though it takes
| significant quantities of wood or coal. Something like 2
| weeks of labor to the extract and process raw ore for enough
| iron to make a breastplate seems likely. Though
| transportation would be an issue. Linen on the other hand
| required extreme processing simply to get thread and takes up
| valuable farmland, but could be produced locally.
| https://ulsterlinen.com/flax-to-linen/
|
| Linen armor would only have been relatively cheap as a means
| of recycling old garments. However, that's likely to degrade
| it's protective value.
| scarmig wrote:
| Raw ore wasn't the limiting factor for iron production: it
| was all about the wood. Coal has the issues that, without
| coking, it neither burns hot enough nor clean enough (i.e.
| it adds lots of sulfur to the iron, and the resulting alloy
| is inferior for pretty much all purposes). As a result,
| iron and steel production wasn't as bound by locality to
| mines nearly as much as it was to locality to fuel sources
| (i.e. forests).
|
| To give a sense for the figures involved, 1kg of iron would
| require around 15kg of charcoal, which itself would have to
| be charcoaled from >100kg of wood.
|
| From this, you end up seeing things like Elba being
| entirely deforested by the time of Caesar, and its still
| productive iron mines would have their ores shipped to the
| mainland for processing.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| That aligns with my understanding is that the real
| revolution of the iron age was not that iron was a superior
| material (at least initially), but that it was much more
| abundant than copper and (especially) tin for bronze, which
| democratized which people and societies were able to build
| iron gear.
|
| A compelling theory to me of the late bronze age collapse
| is that in the bronze age, you had a very globalized
| society for the purpose of keeping the bronze supply chain
| intact. But ironworking eliminated the interdependence and
| the importance of the elite networks that sustained the
| supply chain. So then the whole "civilized" world quickly
| fragmented into much more micro polities. Many of the
| states that made the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age
| relatively intact already had well developed ironworking.
|
| The Assyrians were able to build a new value proposition
| for international empire. They institutionalized many of
| the civil and engineering innovations we attribute to the
| post-Roman world, kicking off what would become the
| classical era.
| kbenson wrote:
| > By ensuring that the direction of the weaves are
| perpendicular to one another when doing a cloth layup, and
| using a sufficiently strong adhesive/sealant, these types of
| materials are incredibly strong.
|
| I wonder if they tested that when creating their replica linen
| armor? That seems like the kind of thing ancient armor makers
| would definitely have tested out.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| >One of the things many people who've never had to wear armor
| for an extended period of time on a hot day don't realize is
| how horribly uncomfortable armor is, and how that discomfort
| can be a severe distraction under battlefield conditions.
|
| Maybe! A well tailored and properly weight-distributed mail
| hauberk (which is also conformal) is surprisingly comfortable
| for extended period of time in all kinds of weather. (Source:
| my own experience in medieval re-enactment). What gets you in
| hot weather are the textiles - with mail its the necessary
| padding under the mail that will cause issues in hot weather.
|
| the author's point that linen was _more_ comfortable than
| 'rigid' armor was _probably_ true, but I will point out that
| rigid armors were also individually tailored, balanced, and
| created for optimal weight distribution.
|
| As an aside mail armor was a successful and popular armor for a
| millennium, from the Iron Age to the middle ages (and continued
| to be successful as an augment to plate and in other contexts
| like South Asia and India until probably the 16th century). It
| was _probably_ contemporary to the linen armor of the article
| (In time, not geographically - it was used most heavily in
| iron-rich regions in central Europe at first).
| BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 wrote:
| Composite layups in aircraft often rotate layers 45deg from the
| previous layer.
| pixodaros wrote:
| The Green Bay Team reproduced a type of armour which nobody can
| show was made before 1970. The glue in their linen armour comes
| from a bad translation of a hasty summary of a medieval Roman
| chronicle https://www.joshobrouwers.com/articles/glued-linen-
| armour/
| Geonode wrote:
| In a lot of composites, the titular material isn't the main
| material. It's almost always glue instead. Which is fine, but one
| of the drawbacks is the thing is usually heavier and stiffer than
| you would imagine.
|
| Here it's rabbit glue, which is probably a type of hide glue?
| soperj wrote:
| They go into that. Apparently your body heat would reduce the
| stiffness.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| The manufacturing process seems very like an ancient version of
| how modern carbon fiber armor is built.
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