Posted on 12/10/2021 10:48:30 AM PST by BenLurkin
An international team of archaeologists and historians has completed an extensive analysis of a rare leather armor waistcoat recovered from the grave of an ancient horse-riding soldier in Northwest China.
Notably, the climate in that region of China is desert-like and bone-dry. This is significant, because the arid conditions and lack of moisture in the soil allowed the leather armor to survive intact despite being buried for nearly 3,000 years.
Under the supervision of archaeologist Patrick Wertmann from the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at University of Zurich, the research team members used radiocarbon dating procedures to establish the age of the Chinese leather armor. These tests showed the armor had been created sometime between 786 and 543 BC.
This fact alone was not enough to prove the armor had been manufactured in Mesopotamia, however. To reach that eye-opening conclusion, the archaeologists and historians compared the characteristics of the newly excavated Chinese leather armor to those of a similar artifact currently on display at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (the MET).
Scaled armor is designed to protect a warrior’s body from injury without weighing them down or limiting their mobility.
This type of armor features multiple overlapping rows of small- or medium-sized plates, which are sewn into a cloth or leather backing. The plates could be made of bronze or iron (metals available during the Neo-Assyrian period), but they could also be made from leather, as was the case with the armor recovered in China.
Despite its obvious durability, the leather armor found at Turfan was a lightweight piece of equipment. It was covered by more than 5,000 small leather scales and 140 larger ones and was bound together tightly by leather laces sewn through leather lining. In total the armor weighed around ten pounds (five kilograms).
(Excerpt) Read more at ancient-origins.net ...
Closeup images of the Yanghai leather scale armor fragment: A: inside; B: outside. (P. Wertmann / Quaternary International )
ping
Cheap Chinese copy, of course........................
Does that mean they stole this technology too? They’re like the borg.
two examples in the world huh? wow, maybe “rare” can still mean rare sometimes.
“Chinese leather armor”
I don’t think they are using this term correctly.... the whole basis of the article is that the armor was made in Mesopotamia and not China...they should instead be calling it either middle-easter, Mesopotamian, or neo-assyrian armor.
The only reason to call it Chinese is because of where it was geographically unearthed.
The best protection for a Chinese warrior was a steaming serving of General Tso’s chicken.
The guy on the left is wearing a dress and the guy on the right has some kind of wrench.
So this ancient Chinese army was made up of transvestite plumbers.
They need to see if they can do some genetic analysis of the bones.
Harbor Freight the early centuries.
They both bought the armor from some rich Corinthian guy.
Thanks BenLurkin. Riders on the swarm ping.
LOL!...................
It gets so confusing.
Seems some are bearded...and other clean shaven; wonder if that is the way to tell them apart?
“The only reason to call it Chinese is because of where it was geographically unearthed.”
I think today that is considered racist.
Neo-Assyrians were Semitic, pre-Aramaeans/Babylonians.
Sumerians were, well, Sumerian with no proven contemporary or earlier/later relatives.
Excellent.
if you look closely at the lower right hand corner it says “Made in China”.
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