Ancient Armor

How far back do we have to go to find evidence of ancient armor? We start getting a glimpse of armor 4-5 thousand years ago. Now 5000 years ago isn't when it necessarily started being used but when we first have some evidence of it. Most early pieces were made from organic materials. Materials such as linen, animal hides, or wood. All of these materials degrade quite quickly unless they somehow manage to win the preservation lottery. Humans have been around for a decent amount of time, some estimates reaching 6 million years, so the possibility that people protected themselves with furs or other materials in an almost 6 million year time span aren't far fetched.

Surprisingly some of the earlier armor is from a more peaceful ancient culture. What was this early culture? Situated in the northeastern part of Africa right on the Nile river it's of course Egypt! Land of fake beards, sunburns, and plenty of nice looking hieroglyphs. Luckily for us the Egyptians liked to draw pictures. Even armor only 5000 years old is still not likely to last when its made out of cowhide and linen. Ancient Egyptian armor was some of the earliest armor and set the standard for later armors.

A good majority of early civilization occurred in the fertile crescent, the area of land between the Tigris and Euphrates river. Ironic the area that was known as the cradle of civilization is now a big pile of sand. Well its no big surprise that a good amount of the information that we have about ancient armor is from this general area of the world. The Sumerians were one of the oldest civilizations in the area. They developed a number of important technologies including the wheel, cuneiform, and bronze-working. Although they eventually were conquered by the Akkadians and later the Babylonians, the Sumerian culture tended to be a hard beast to put down and prevailed even into the Babylonian empire. Before the Sumerian people was subdued they developed some interesting Sumerian armor.

Next we come to the bad boys of the middle east, the Assyrians. They burst onto the scene around 1400 BC (3400 years ago) and like the grade school bully took everyone's lunch money, lunch money being their cities. The Assyrians were some of the first to outfit the majority of their soldiers with full body armor. This must have been a good move because they controlled most of the middle east plus northern Egypt for a good 800 years. Assyrian armor included some very interesting advancements of ancient times.

Continuing our time trip we move a bit to the west where we meet the people of Mycenae. This might be better known as the area andtime period that Homer wrote about. Dangerous area this is too, Cyclops' getting their eyes poked out, people getting turned into the other white meat, and whirlpools that eat ships. Now these people needed armor, ancient or otherwise! The armor of Mycenae is some of the earliest evidence of plate armor, armor made from solid pieces of metal.

We already talked about the early Greeks so now we'll move onto the later ones. We're talking about Sparta, Athens, Corinth, and Thebes. Thanks to a wellspring of Hollywood movies about the Greeks, most people nowadays have a basic idea of what the basic Greek soldier adorned in Greek armor would look like. Crested helmet, metal greaves and a metal breastplate. The Greeks were less of an empire and more of a culture with differences similar to the United States. When the Greek "states" were endangered they would band together to fight off the threat. Once the threat was neutralized they would again revert to governing themselves.

We've mostly touched on empires and nations that were nearer Europe than Asia but it wouldn't be fair to leave out one of the more pivotal empires in history, China. The Chinese were on the forefront of many ancient technological advancements. They were the first to invent gunpowder, porcelain, silk, seismic detectors and many others. Its not surprising that they developed a lot of advancements in the art of defense. They were one of the first civilizations to master smelting iron armor. They also created Chinese armor made from paper that was unusually strong.