The Mysterious Armor Worn by Alexander the Great

I got really by accident involved in this project to try to reconstruct this mysterious type of armor that was used especially by the Greeks and Alexander the Great called the line of thorax which apparently was made only out of linen and glue. So this seems a little odd that you know that's not the sort of material once you want metal or something but we had clear literary references that people including Alexander and the most famous image of Alexander is this Alexander mosaic found at Pompeii that shows him wearing one of these funny types of armor. The catch is none survived. It's organic materials. So we don't have any of them and archaeologists like to study things that survive. So we have nice typologies of Greek armor made of bronze, Roman armor made of steel this thing, this line of thorax was a mystery. And one of my undergraduate students, a guy named Scott Bartel had a real, well, an Alexander obsession. He really loved Alexander. As one should. He had Alexandros tattooed on his arm in Greek and he was a smart student, he was really smart. And so he one summer made himself an imitation of this thing of Alexander's just for fun and he said, you know, can you give me some articles so I could do a better job? So I used some scholarly articles about this armor. And with typical sort of, you know, academic arrogance, I said, why, Scott, of course I will. I'll give you some references. And I went and looked and there weren't any. So at that point I was like, huh, tell you what, why don't you and I look into this and try to do a reconstruction using only the materials they would have had in the ancient world? And little did I know at the time, I thought maybe I'll get an article out of this. I mean, it ended up being a 10 year project involving, you know, 150 students, a couple dozen other faculty members, you know, ended having three documentaries made out of it. And Scott and I ended up writing a scholarly book on this. So this is how, you know, you never know where your next project's going to come from. So it started with this undergraduate turned into this huge thing. But it's what we did. We first said, all right, what are all the sources for this armor? And in the end we found 65 accounts of it in ancient literature by 40 different authors. So we have literary descriptions. And then we looked at ancient art and we were able to identify about a thousand images in ancient art in vase paintings, pottery, bronze sculpture, tomb paintings, all these different things, showing this armor. And then using those two things, we tried to backwards engineer a pattern to say, well, if this is what the end product looked like, what does it have to look like when you make it? And then we tried to reconstruct one of these things using only the glue and materials. So we had to use, you know, animal glues, rabbit glue. We had to end up sort of making our own linen, which comes from the flax plant. So we had to grow flax, harvest it using only techniques in the ancient world. So modern flax goes through chemical processes. No, we had to do this the old fashioned way, spin it into thread. So the thread into fabric, glue it all together. And then the fun part was, once we made these things, we subjected them to ballistics testing. So we shot them with arrows, which again, were wooden reconstruction arrows using bronze arrowheads that were based on arrowheads found on ancient battlefields to determine how good protection would this thing have been. And of course, the kind of fun one that everyone always likes and that the documentaries always want is at one point, they're like, well, can you put Scott in one of these and shoot him? And we're like, okay. I mean, at that point we'd done about a thousand test shots. I grew up shooting bows and arrows. I knew exactly how far that was going to go. So it's one of these, don't do this at home, kids. So there's a million questions to ask here, but you know, in general, how well in terms of ballistics does it work? Like can it withstand arrows or direct strikes from like swords and axes and stuff like that? Bottom line is a one centimeter thick line of thorax. So a laminated or even sewn, it doesn't have to be laminated, layer of linen is about as good protection as two millimeters of bronze, which was the thickest comparable body armor of bronze at the time. And we're talking fourth century, fifth century BC here. So classical and Hellenistic Greece. And that would have protected you from, let's say, random arrow strikes on the battlefield. So you could have gotten hit by arrows and they simply wouldn't have gone through. What are the benefits? So is there a major weight difference? Yes. So the benefits of this are it's much lighter than metal armor. So the line of thorax is about 11 pounds. A bronze cuirass of comparable protection would have been about 24 to 6 pounds. The chain mail shirt would be about 28, 27 pounds. It's cooler. I mean, you know, the Mediterranean is a hot place with the hot sun. Even today, you know, a linen shirt is something you wear when you want to be cool. So it's much lighter. That gives your troops greater endurance on the battlefield. They can run farther, fight longer. It's cheaper. You don't need a blacksmith who's a specialist to make it. In fact, probably, this is interesting, any woman in the ancient world could have made one of these because they were the ones who spun thread and sewed it into fabric. So I can easily see in a household a mother making this for her son, a wife making it for her husband. So it's a form of armor you could have made domestically that would have been, you know, maybe not the greatest armor, but pretty good, pretty comparable to bronze armor. And it's amazing that you used all the materials they had at the time and none of the modern techniques. But I should probably say, maybe you can speak to that, they were probably much better at doing that than you are, right? Because like, you know, again, generational, it's a skill. It's a skill that probably is practiced across decades, across centuries. In terms of producing the fabric, I'm sure they could do it 10 times faster than we could. Just that's a speed thing, but it's still incredibly labor intensive. Where I think there's a big difference between our reconstruction and ancient ones is in the glue. So we ended up using a kind of least common denominator glue. We used rabbit glue because it would have been available anywhere and it's cheap. But in the ancient world, they did have basically the equivalent of super glues. I mean, we found, for example, helmets that were fished out of a river in Germany that had metal parts glued together that after 2000 years of immersion in water were still glued together. So they had some great glues, we just don't know what the recipes for them were. So we went the opposite tack and said, well, we're just going to make something that we know they could have made. So it was at least this good, you know what I'm saying? But actually, this is a materials thing, but I think glue, aside from helping glue things together, it can also be a thing that serves as armor. So if you glue things correctly, the way it permeates the material that it's gluing can strengthen the material, the integrity of the material. That's an art and a science probably that they understood deeply. The process of lamination did add something. So there's actually a huge debate among scholars and actually a sort of amateur archaeologist that was this line of thorax thing glued together or was it simply sewn together? Was it composite, partially linen, partially leather or other materials? And my honest answer is, I think it's all of the above. Because again, every piece of armor in the ancient world was an individual creation. So I think if you had some spare leather, you put that in. If you wanted to make one that was just sewn together or even quilted, stuffed with stuff, you'd do that. Maybe you were good at gluing stuff, you use that. So I think there's no one answer. We investigated one possibility because we just had limited time and money and resources, but I think all these other things existed at the same time and were variants of it. Just as a small aside, I just think this is a fascinating journey you went on. I love it. Answering really important questions about, in this case, armor, about military equipment and technology that archaeologists can't answer by using all the sources you can to understand what it looked like, what were the materials, using the materials at the time, and actually doing ballistic testing. It's really cool. It's really cool that you see that there's a hole in the literature. Nobody studied it. And going hard and doing it the right way to sort of uncover this, I don't know, I think it's an amazing mystery about the ancient world. I mean, shifting from just sort of Roman history in general to my research that I've done as a scholar, the theme that runs throughout my scholarship is practical stuff. I'm interested, how did this actually work in the ancient world? So there's people who are much more theoretical, who look at the symbolic meaning of something. I'm simpler. I just want to know, how did this work? So almost all of my books that I've written have started with some just, how did something work? And I'm trying to just figure out that aspect of it. And that's just, maybe it's a personality thing. I also have kind of a science-y background. So I think I've used a lot of that, even though I'm a humanist and a historian, I use a lot of kind of hard science in my work. I did a book on floods where I had to get really heavy into vectors of disease and hydraulics and engineering and all that stuff. And I think, again, having that sort of hard science combined with a humanist background helps with those sorts of projects. Well, like you said, I think the details help you understand deeply the big picture of history. And I mean, Alexander the Great wore this thing. And I should say, by the way, it does drop out of use around Roman times. And I think what's going on there is technology. That with bronze, it's hard to keep a sharp edge on things. But once you get into metals, which approximate steel, you can get sharper. And a key factor to penetrating fabric is the edge on the arrowhead, right? So as soon as you start to get something more like a razor edge, it's going to go through it more easily. Also, there's changes in the bows that are being used. You start to get sort of Eastern horse archers showing up with composite bows, which are much more powerful. And so it just becomes outdated as frontline military equipment. What's interesting is by the Roman period, people are still wearing it. But it's now things like when I go hunting, if I'm hunting lions, I wear this. There's an actual source that says it's really good for hunting dangerous big cats because it catches their teeth and stops them from penetrating. One emperor wears one of these under his toga. It's kind of like a bulletproof vest, but stab-proof vest. So again, it's not to fight in the frontline of the legions, but it'll protect him from somebody trying to assassinate him. So it still has those uses where you're not up against top-line military equipment.