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feedmegin posted:Good news! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash:_A_Secret_History well sort of. Oh nice, any good?
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Oct 22, 2021 15:47
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It's pretty great, but it gets weird towards the end. Mary Gentle is a fantastic author and she wrote another work in the same universe called Ilario, about the travels and travails of an intersex painter.
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Oct 22, 2021 17:55
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Alan Smithee posted:was there any sense of what germanic tribes were up to during the Second Punic War, or were they just keeping to themselves? there weren't many germans interfacing with the mediterranean during that time period as far as we know. a group of tribes that some romans thought were germans - writing in hindsight, because nobody knew what a "german" was during the second punic war - hired on with philip V of macedon and fought rome during the macedonian wars, which were a sort of side-theater to the second punic war. they only really stand out during the third macedonian war 30 years later tho. the germans don't enter the scene in a big way until the cimbri and teutones migrate into gaul and italy a hundred years after the second punic war, and the romans don't realize that "gaul" and "german" aren't the same thing until caesar talks to some german kings during the gallic wars
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Oct 22, 2021 18:26
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WoodrowSkillson posted:For both Rome and migration era warriors, there is just no evidence of big, thick gambeson type garments worn in conjunction with mail. Period art/sculpture do not show it, and there is no surviving evidence of it that i know of, granted fabric would be exceeding hard to find. Part of how we know they were prevalent in the medieval period is since they were useful on their own, so they start showing up in art and get mentioned in surviving writings. Archers and less well off soldiers would just fight in gambeson if that was all they had, since it was still a relatively effective defense. There is no similar depictions or mentions of a similar garment in the classical or migration periods that i know of. Wearing something under it, the subarmalis, makes perfect sense, but it does not seems to be a heavy duty, quilted and padded thing like a gambeson, which is what gave medieval knights enough protection that Muslim accounts from the crusades describe knights with multiple arrows sticking out of them that burst mail and lodged in the gambeson, but did not harm the knight. romans wore cloth armor from the beginning of their history until the fall of constantinople at first it was linothorax then gambeson and linothorax could stop arrows too
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Oct 22, 2021 20:53
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ChubbyChecker posted:romans wore cloth armor from the beginning of their history until the fall of constantinople ...and your evidence is?
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Oct 22, 2021 21:44
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Tulip posted:Oh nice, any good? Like the other poster said good but weird
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Oct 22, 2021 21:45
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Tulip posted:Oh nice, any good? Would defer to the experts but Mary Gentle certainly seemed to put a good bit of research into depicting late medieval warfare and all the details of keeping a mercenary company functioning prior to the mentioned weirdness. There's a framing story of some modern-day researchers in the late 90s finding and 'translating' the story with their online editorial comments (which go from 'haha this is kinda weird' to full  ) that definitely made me think of the SA Milhist/Medieval/Roman threads when I read it.
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Oct 23, 2021 01:21
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ChubbyChecker posted:romans wore cloth armor from the beginning of their history until the fall of constantinople linothorax is not a gambeson. It is layered linen that is glued together and formed into shape, creating a more rigid defense. and if you are using the ERE then yes of course they used the same armor and poo poo as the rest of continental Europe, that is not the context of the discussion since that is in line with the same timeframe of it being post migration period.
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Oct 23, 2021 04:02
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For a different kind of Roman armor, this is kinda cool https://twitter.com/DrJEBall/status/1451608036963880961
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Oct 23, 2021 05:57
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Selling horse armor was the real beginning of the end for the empire.
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Oct 23, 2021 05:59
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Grand Fromage posted:Selling horse armor was the real beginning of the end for the empire. now some rich kid scalps a german blonde after returning from a fortnite and calls it a skin while no one bats an eye
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Oct 23, 2021 06:28
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Cessna posted:I know this is a podcast, not a book, but it's a good podcast: Yaargh, hold up. ST is extremely cool and good, it's a premier source on all things saga-related and I cannot recommend it enough - but sagas are almost never reliable sources! This saga brief draws primarily on Kormakssaga, and so is heavily , though not completely, based in fiction.
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Oct 23, 2021 07:25
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Alan Smithee posted:now some rich kid scalps a german blonde after returning from a fortnite and calls it a skin while no one bats an eye The Judea DLC caused no end of headaches.
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Oct 23, 2021 07:30
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Grand Fromage posted:Selling horse armor was the real beginning of the end for the empire. It's such bullshit that the second half of the story is hidden in the Byzantine DLC.
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Oct 23, 2021 08:36
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Still don't see why the Byzantine devs couldn't just licence the name
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Oct 23, 2021 10:02
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WoodrowSkillson posted:linothorax is not a gambeson. It is layered linen that is glued together and formed into shape, creating a more rigid defense. and if you are using the ERE then yes of course they used the same armor and poo poo as the rest of continental Europe, that is not the context of the discussion since that is in line with the same timeframe of it being post migration period. the glueing thing is a mistranslation and they're both cloth armors linothorax is rigid from having so many layers
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Oct 23, 2021 10:25
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I understand that in the pre-modern world fabric was expensive due to the labour involved, and having numerous layers would multiply that. What made linothorax affordable?
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Oct 23, 2021 10:52
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The Lone Badger posted:I understand that in the pre-modern world fabric was expensive due to the labour involved, and having numerous layers would multiply that. What made linothorax affordable?
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Oct 23, 2021 11:31
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The Lone Badger posted:I understand that in the pre-modern world fabric was expensive due to the labour involved, and having numerous layers would multiply that. What made linothorax affordable? yeah, they weren't cheap, but probably still cheaper than metal armors
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Oct 23, 2021 12:18
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ChubbyChecker posted:the glueing thing is a mistranslation and they're both cloth armors The only reference I can find to this is one paper published in July of 2021 by a guy who does not seem to have published anything else, or at least nothing I can find easily. So while this may be the case, it's a big reworking of decades of research and experimental archeology by lots of people and I'll let the academics hash it out before accepting it as fact. And regardless, that is still not the same as gambeson and mail being used in conjunction, and it's also not evidence of migration era and Viking era warriors using that system, which was the origin of this discussion. One guy can always have had any idea. I'm sure individuals in history have done all kinds of poo poo that never was recorded. I'm certain some dude or even a small group of dudes might have done it, but the issue is evidence. WoodrowSkillson fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 12:50
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ChubbyChecker posted:the glueing thing is a mistranslation and they're both cloth armors Again, and per what WoodrowSkillson said, can we have some evidence and/or cites here? You keep asserting stuff as fact without anything to back it up.
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Oct 23, 2021 13:14
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The Lone Badger posted:I understand that in the pre-modern world fabric was expensive due to the labour involved, and having numerous layers would multiply that. What made linothorax affordable? In ancient Greece, one of the primary things women were expected to do was weave cloth: your archetypical Greek citizen's home had a loom. As long as your citizen hoplite warrior had a wife, which he was expected to have, he had free labor who could make his armor. We should also remember that hoplites were drawn from the middle and upper classes and were not decidedly not poor.
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Oct 23, 2021 13:21
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I read something once about how in viking age Scandinavia you tend to find a lot of spindle whorls. Both women and men would be spinning whenever their hands were free. Their sails were made of wool so you needed a lot of it.
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Oct 23, 2021 13:26
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FishFood posted:In ancient Greece, one of the primary things women were expected to do was weave cloth: your archetypical Greek citizen's home had a loom. As long as your citizen hoplite warrior had a wife, which he was expected to have, he had free labor who could make his armor. We should also remember that hoplites were drawn from the middle and upper classes and were not decidedly not poor. ACOUP did the math on premodern fabric productoin. To make just a basic year's set of clothing for a family was a full labour year mostly of spinning - getting enough fabric to make dozens of layers for a linothorax is a huge amount of labour and not something that can just be done as an extra. That said, it could probably be largely made of rags.
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Oct 23, 2021 13:36
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Zereth posted:Wouldn't that also apply to metal? ChubbyChecker posted:yeah, they weren't cheap, but probably still cheaper than metal armors lol So like most things, the major entrant in expense is labor, and just in general premodern societies are poor at converting energy from their environment into substitute labor. Like windmills weren't invented til the 9th century at all, and nowadays we're heavily reliant on methods of converting random sources of heat to substitute for a wide variety of labors, but the further back you go the more things we have humans handle like having people push mill wheels (or even worse, push quern stones) up until you go so far back that people go 'gently caress it we'll do without' which is a little outside the scope of what we're talking about. For metal, I'm assuming we mean iron, cuz we're talking about early iron age. Iron production is incredibly fuel intensive. There's not universal agreement about how efficient the process is (charcoaling introduces significant variability), but a good round estimate would be around 100 tons of wood per ton of iron. Which in turn means 26-40,000 hours of labor just for chopping wood and charcoaling. This is a lot. The mining and charcoaling all happen close to each other to reduce transportation costs (you transport the iron as bars). I don't have the numbers anywhere near to hand about stuff like blacksmithing, other than remembering that blacksmiths in the Roman era would use a lot of slaves to just smack things with a hammer over and over again. And I haven't mentioned mining because I really have no idea! I guess somebody could use cost estimates but I've already put enough effort into a post on a comedy forum. For cloth, spinning dominates. Aldrete et al., (Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor (2013) estimates that a linothorax involves 25 hours to break, scutch and hackle the flax, 575 hours to spin it into thread, 75 hours to weave the thread into fabric (including loom setup time), and 8 hours to measure and cut the fabric. The spinning wheel will cut that dramatically, but the linothorax was obviously out of use for centuries before the spinning wheel comes into use. The number I've seen for how much a legionnaire needs in terms of iron, which is admittedly total not just armor, is that you have about 50 tons of iron for 5000 guys, so each guy is using about 1/100 of a ton, so that's 260-400 hours of just chopping wood and charcoaling, plus y'know the whole "turning a bloom into anything useful." If somebody has the labor hours for those steps that could help, because currently it's relative spitting distance (again the linothorax is 683 hours). In either event, both of these things are crazy labor intensive. Even just a water mill hammer or spinning wheel would reduce this dramatically, let alone anything involving steam engines.
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Oct 23, 2021 14:43
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The Lone Badger posted:I understand that in the pre-modern world fabric was expensive due to the labour involved, and having numerous layers would multiply that. What made linothorax affordable? From what I've read (which is admittedly not much because ew, Greeks) there's a lot of debate about how widespread linothorax was. Since none survives it's all based on guesswork from art and scattered written references, and there are opinions ranging from it really was not used at all in non-ceremonial contexts to it was the main form of armor almost entirely replacing metal. I have no idea.
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Oct 23, 2021 17:19
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Rome homes had looms too At least in Pompeii
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Oct 23, 2021 17:24
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what makes the linothorax potentially compelling is the scarcity of bronze. in a greek context it is replacing a bronze cuirass, which is not at all trivial to produce - it may involve fewer labor-hours than a linothorax, but requires rarer materials with higher transportation costs. the romans do not seem to have used them. maybe in the murky pre-samnite days where they fielded hoplites, but there's no evidence either way for such a thing
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Oct 23, 2021 17:31
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feedmegin posted:Again, and per what WoodrowSkillson said, can we have some evidence and/or cites here? You keep asserting stuff as fact without anything to back it up. These guys absolutely used rabbit glue in their replicas and wrote a book about the whole thing: https://jhupress.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/unraveling-the-linothorax-mystery-or-how-linen-armor-came-to-dominate-our-lives/
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Oct 23, 2021 17:45
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ulmont posted:These guys absolutely used rabbit glue in their replicas and wrote a book about the whole thing: https://jhupress.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/unraveling-the-linothorax-mystery-or-how-linen-armor-came-to-dominate-our-lives/ okay i'm loving this piece quote:We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project.
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Oct 23, 2021 17:56
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Jazerus posted:what makes the linothorax potentially compelling is the scarcity of bronze. in a greek context it is replacing a bronze cuirass, which is not at all trivial to produce - it may involve fewer labor-hours than a linothorax, but requires rarer materials with higher transportation costs. Chest armour is actually the least important piece for people who use big-rear end shields. Most hoplites in the early classical period just didn't wear any.
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Oct 23, 2021 18:26
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Never forget bronze is far more of a pain to actually get supply wise due to requiring long trade networks for either tin or copper compared to iron that just exists on it's own and can be processed and shaped into bars on the place before being shipped out.
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Oct 23, 2021 18:37
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FishFood posted:In ancient Greece, one of the primary things women were expected to do was weave cloth: your archetypical Greek citizen's home had a loom. This is true of like, practically every preindustrial society, isn’t it? Women spent a lot of time creating textiles and clothing, and since machine looms have trivialized what used to be an incredibly laborious process we in the modern world tend to have very little appreciation for how much went into it.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:40
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The cheap option would be hardened/treated leather, right?
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Oct 23, 2021 21:53
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Koramei posted:This is true of like, practically every preindustrial society, isn’t it? Women spent a lot of time creating textiles and clothing, and since machine looms have trivialized what used to be an incredibly laborious process we in the modern world tend to have very little appreciation for how much went into it. Yeah, in ancient Egypt it was the #2 industry after farming. The thing is, I don't think ancient men had very much appreciation of it either, it was thought if as a given. Because it was unpaid labor and expected, it was taken for granted. To use the Egyptians as an example again, their art has a lot of scenes of men farming or making things in workshop but comparatively few depictions of women working on textiles, and their gender norms were a lot more egalitarian than the Greeks. FishFood fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 22:08
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That’s actually kind of surprising, huh. Maybe only since it was explicitly one of the main units of taxation, but in Joseon Korea the labor that went into textile production was pretty carefully quantified and taxed in a way that was at least on paper (big qualifier there) meant to not be overly burdensome.
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Oct 24, 2021 03:25
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The Lone Badger posted:The cheap option would be hardened/treated leather, right? not really, raising animals is expensive, tanning hides is a specialized and incredibly gross task, and there a dozens of preparatory stages between skinning and tanning.
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Oct 24, 2021 06:30
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Grand Fromage posted:From what I've read (which is admittedly not much because ew, Greeks) there's a lot of debate about how widespread linothorax was. Since none survives it's all based on guesswork from art and scattered written references, and there are opinions ranging from it really was not used at all in non-ceremonial contexts to it was the main form of armor almost entirely replacing metal. I have no idea. That's a bit rich for a guy who loves to defend the ERE.
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Oct 24, 2021 06:45
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thatbastardken posted:incredibly gross task, This cannot be stressed enough, the methods range from very gross to literally the grossest smelling thing in the planet. Think like “fat liquoring” and rubbing brain on things like you were applying suntan lotion gross. I encounter wet salted hides shipped in bulk in containers from time to time. They are fantastically gross.
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Oct 24, 2021 07:02
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Weka posted:That's a bit rich for a guy who loves to defend the ERE. Get a load of this Frank over here
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Oct 24, 2021 07:24
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.