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Todd Feinman
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Matt Corbin
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 Posted: Tue 04 Aug, 2026 7:00 pm Post subject: |
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Looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Keep us posted.
?This was the age of heroes, some legendary, some historical . . . the misty borderland of history where fact and legend mingle.?
- R. Ewart Oakeshott
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Dan D'Silva
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| Posted: Wed 05 Aug, 2026 7:21 am Post subject: |
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Sounds great. I've always wondered how these might've been built, so it'll be interesting to see how you go about it.
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Dan Howard
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| Posted: Wed 05 Aug, 2026 8:43 am Post subject: |
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We don't really know much about them. We know what they looked like from illustrations but that is about all. We only think that they were made from hide because some of the illustrations show a pattern that resembles the fur on cowhide. The Lion Hunt dagger shows the shield's back, which has a neck strap, not a central hand-grip (the shields were used with two-handed pikes). One illustration shows cross-hatching, which suggests that the construction might have involved wicker but that is on the later Dipylon shield, not the Figure-8 shield. The vertical keel on the facing tells me that a wicker backing was not needed. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with, Todd.
Author: Bronze Age Military Equipment, Pen and Sword Books
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Todd Feinman
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| Posted: Wed 05 Aug, 2026 9:49 am Post subject: |
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| Dan Howard wrote: | | We don't really know much about them. We know what they looked like from illustrations but that is about all. We only think that they were made from hide because some of the illustrations show a pattern that resembles the fur on cowhide. The Lion Hunt dagger shows the shield's back, which has a neck strap, not a central hand-grip (the shields were used with two-handed pikes). One illustration shows cross-hatching, which suggests that the construction might have involved wicker but that is on the later Dipylon shield, not the Figure-8 shield. The vertical keel on the facing tells me that a wicker backing was not needed. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with, Todd. |
Thanks Dan! It will be fun for us, and controversial for all.
Progress pics here:
http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewto...p;t=189076
Photo from my backyard. Real. https://tinyurl.com/vhp4e8hj https://tinyurl.com/4zknmw8v
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Sean Manning
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| Posted: Fri 14 Aug, 2026 1:22 pm Post subject: |
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I think there is a lot of room to use bentwood and wicker skills to understand ancient shields. Most people come to shieldmaking from woodworking, metalwork, or leatherwork. Most traditional shields are based on a form you can easily make, whether spreading a skin over a frame or splitting one whole width off a tree with wedges, but we rarely have those intuitions because are are not weavers and woodbenders and butchers and because the fancy metal copies of the cheap wicker-and-hide shields survive better.
weekly writing ~ material culture
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Todd Feinman
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| Posted: Today at 8:11 am Post subject: |
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| Sean Manning wrote: | | I think there is a lot of room to use bentwood and wicker skills to understand ancient shields. Most people come to shieldmaking from woodworking, metalwork, or leatherwork. Most traditional shields are based on a form you can easily make, whether spreading a skin over a frame or splitting one whole width off a tree with wedges, but we rarely have those intuitions because are are not weavers and woodbenders and butchers and because the fancy metal copies of the cheap wicker-and-hide shields survive better. |
One thing I noticed when cutting the hides for the shield is how much the weight adds up quickly! One thinks of rawhide as light, but in large body protecting surfaces, it adds up very quickly. I was initially going to use to two full thicknesses of hide, but that was already too heavy, even without the mast. in depictions where warriors are using two-handed spears the shield is held by a guige; anything too heavy would bruise or injure the warrior using it that way.
Iirc, Homer mentions shields skillfully made of many hides sewn together, but no mention of wicker or weaving wood together; certainly that would have been mentioned? I think either Homer was accurately describing the sewing together of many bovine hides (seven?), for a shield made from the smaller cows of times gone by, or was exaggerating things, like the tales of Paul Bunyan; is it from Peter Connolly? I'd want more hide layers instead of wicker. I think a lot of folks who haven't worked with hair-on-cowhide are unaware of how tough and strong it can be. Rolling an edge of rawhide over a strip of rawhide can create a many-layered rim that is very tough, and being bent backward and supported by the mast, would be an extremely anticlastic construction. Looking at the Pylos Agate, you can see the middle of the shield pulled back at the sides. Everything nis curved in at least two directions. ("Anticlastic" is a word I got from the great Jeffrey Hildebrandt).
Iirc, there are mentions of hide shields in military texts from Nuzi. I think the Minoan depictions are showing the shields from the back, not front, in a stylized manner; no sculptural depictions show wood on the outside. and no wicker on the inside. I know there are some depictions with crosshatchings, etc. But those are ambiguous. I think there is a depiction where you can see the texture of the back of the hide where the flesh was scraped off.
Looking at Egyptian shields, I think the curved ones were usually all-hide; you wouldn't need a metal boss if they were solid wood; Tut'[s "shields" don't have bosses.
So, what if I am wrong about the figure-8 shield? Not to worry! I can always add slats to the back of the lobe areas if I need to. If I had to, I'd add an "x" shape behind each lobe. Like the pieces mentioned by Homer for round shields; those two pieces also wouldn't provide a tremendous amount of support for a round hide shield that was quite large, i.e. "ankle tapping".
It dawned on me that I'm going to have to focus on this shield over the Egyptian one, so I can avail myself of the hot remaining days to dry the shield after it is wet.
Photo from my backyard. Real. https://tinyurl.com/vhp4e8hj https://tinyurl.com/4zknmw8v
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