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 ...
an ancient horse-riding soldier in Northwest China .... These tests showed the armor had been created sometime between 786 and 543 BC.Horses date back into the Shang era, but weren't used with riders in Chinese warfare until the BC 4th century, so these soldiers came from somewhere else.
Sumerians were centuries, actually millennia earlier. The Sumerian civilization arose around 5000 BC. Around 2500 BC various Semitic people ie nomads came to live between the Sumerian cities. The two assimilated. By 1000 BC, ie after the bronze age collapse of 1440 BC, Sumerian language was relegated yo a liturgical language, like hebrew in 1 AD or Latin today.
The people were mixed.
The old Assyrian kingdom was before the collapse.
The new ie neo Assyrian kingdom arose in 900 BC
Neo-Sumerians? There were no Neo-Sumerians.
Perhaps you meant Neo-Babylonians, which marked the post-Assyrian revival of Babylon as a major capital. During the (so-called) Neo-Assyrian era, Babylon served as a secondary capital. Both groups used a Semitic language.
The term Neo-Assyrian has itself enjoyed a resurgence, but it is a meaningless term, really. Older survey works refer to Sargon the Great (founder of the Akkadian Empire), Sargon I (eventually dropped, as he turned out to be a modern invention) and Sargon II (now called Sargon, or sometimes Sargon II, now done to differentiate him from Sargon the Great). In the 1960s correspondence was found on a cuneiform tablet showing Hammurabi of Babylonia and King Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria to be contemporaries, and Sargon I just ceased to exist along with about three and a half centuries of phantom history.
As Cronos noted, the earlier Assyrian Empire is and has been referred to as the Akkadian Empire (after the capital city of that period) and overlapped the end of the Sumerian city-states. The Akkadians adopted Sumer’s cuneiform writing system and preserved some of its literature.
Digest ping. The other GGG topics added since last digest ping:
Needs a little oil...should bring it right back...
Of course Hammurabi ruled before muzzies took over and prohibited pork...
[snip] The Third Dynasty of Ur is commonly abbreviated as Ur III by historians studying the period. It is numbered in reference to previous dynasties, such as the First Dynasty of Ur (26-25th century BCE), but it seems the once supposed Second Dynasty of Ur was never recorded. The Third Dynasty... began after several centuries of control by Akkadian and Gutian kings. It controlled the cities of Isin, Larsa, and Eshnunna and extended as far north as Upper Mesopotamia... some time after the fall of the Akkad Dynasty. The period between the last powerful king of the Akkad Dynasty, Shar-Kali-Sharri, and the first king of Ur III, Ur-Nammu, is not well documented, but most Assyriologists posit that there was a brief "dark age" ...On the king-lists, Shar-Kali-Sharri is followed by two more kings of Akkad and six in Uruk; however, there are no year names surviving for any of these, nor even any artifacts confirming that any of these reigns was historical — save one artifact for Dudu of Akkad (Shar-Kali-Sharri's immediate successor on the list). [/snip]
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