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New research has found that an ancient suit of armour may have been used in battle, and not just for ceremonial purposes as was previously thought.
The 3,500-year-old Mycenaean armour is one of the best and most complete examples of its kind, but its true purpose has eluded historians for many decades.
The Mycenaeans were an Ancient Greek people whose Eastern Mediterranean civilisation perished at the end of the Bronze Age. They introduced several innovations, including in the military. The bronze armour was discovered in a tomb in the Greek village of Dendra by archaeologists in the 1960s.
An international team of researchers conducted human experiments with a metal replica of the armour, which was created in the 1980s by the former School of Art, Bournville, in Birmingham.
Researchers worked with a group of Greek military volunteers, who wore the replica during extended simulations of Late Bronze Age combat protocols.
The 11-hour simulations were conducted under typical Greek summer temperatures of 30°-36°C, with participants following a ‘Homeric diet’ derived from descriptions in Homer’s Iliad.
‘We found that the armour allowed full flexibility of movement and did not exert excessive physiological stress on the body,’ explained Professor Andreas Flouris, from the University of Thessaly, who led the research. ‘This means that despite earlier views which classified it as only a ceremonial outfit, the armour could be worn for extended periods by fit individuals in battle.’
The findings, recently published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggest that the Mycenaeans had a powerful impact in the Eastern Mediterranean in part because of their armour technology.
As Dr Ken Wardle of Birmingham University, who collaborated on the study, explained: ‘Hittite records of military interactions with the Ahhiyawa [another name for the Mycenaeans] show that they had a substantial presence in western Asia Minor in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC.’
‘Given that the Hittite kingdom dominated most of Anatolia and, at times, the northern parts of Syria and Mesopotamia, we must understand that only a significant military force could oppose them or gain such respect as recorded in the Hittite archives,’ he added.
‘Knowing that [the armour] was possibly used in battle… helps to shed light on one of history’s turning points: the collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age civilisations.’
Image: Andreas Flouris and Marija Markovic´
