Where to Find Kopis and Machaira Swords

Over on corporate social media, I often see people looking at copies of Illyrian and Iberian swords to understand Greek cleavers. Long war knives spread from Anatolia to Iberia before the Roman empire, but each culture had its own interpretation of these knives. The Iberian swords are very charismatic with decorative fullers and inlays and deep bends, but different from the Greek version of this weapon. Modern copies always differ from the originals, and most of them are based on other modern copies not the artifacts themselves. So this month I will talk about where to find photos and drawings of the original artifacts, then about why these images take a bit of work to find. I hope that will interest different parts of my readership and that I have time for a different topic in March.

Books with Original Artifacts

People reading this post are probably looking for in the weapons with handguards and hooked pommels in the form of a bird’s head (similar swords from other cultures often have hilts shaped like a horse’s head). However, these grew out of earlier large knives and cleavers which might have been weapons or might have been more tools for butchers and priests sacrificing livestock. Archaeologists are interested in development over time so often cover both the earlier and the later forms.

• Probably the best place to start is Marek Verčík‘s book. He has scaled drawings with cross-sections of 14 weapons, a typology with eight nine groups, and a catalogue of 86 from the Balkans with full citations (although some of the works cited are not in the bibliography).1 They are not highly technical. His drawings and measurements are taken from earlier publications. Marek Verčík, Die barbarischen Einflüsse in der griechischen Bewaffnung (Rahden-im-Westf.: Verlag Marie Leidorf GmbH, 2014)
• There are all kinds of artifacts from northern Greece in the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation e-Library. The online viewer is a bit awkward and there are no downloads but anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can view these books. Ask your favourite library to request a free print copy.
• There are weights, measurements, and cross-section drawings of several from Olympia in: Holger Baitinger, Die Angriffswaffen aus Olympia (De Gruyter, 2001). This is out of print but available in academic libraries and scans of the section on swords are available on the International Hoplite Discussion facebook group under “files.”
• The sanctuary of Apollo at Kalapodi was full of edged weapons when the Persians burned it in 480 BCE. You can find scale drawings and measurements and a typology in Hans-Otto Schmitt, “Die Angriffswaffen” in Rainer C.S. Felsch, ed., Kalapodi: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen im Heiligtum der Artemis und des Apollon von Hyampolis in der antiken Phokis, Band II (Philipp von Zabern: Mainz-am-Rhein, 2007) pp. 423-551, Taf. 67-106
• Imma Kilian-Dirlmeier has excellent scale drawings of a few as well as studies of their construction and historical development. This was published in the series Prähistorische Bronzefunde but covers steel swords and long knives as well. Imma Kilian-Dirlmeier, Die Schwerter in Griechenland (ausserhalb der Peloponnes), Bulgarien und Albanien (Franz Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart, 1993)
• There is one very nice kopis from Golyamata Mogila in Daniela Agre, The Tumulus of Golyamata Mogila near the villages of Malomirovo and Zlatinitsa (Sofia: Avalon Publishing, 2011). You can download this book from academia.edu and I have blogged about it.
• There are photos and drawings of a kopis from Sardis on the Sardis Expedition website (Sardis no. M95.007).
• There are photos of another machaira from Seyitömer Höyük in Anatolia in an article by Gökhan Coşkun in the journal Adalya (2017) https://izlik.org/JA22RY85DF
• Yvone Innall has photos and measurements of three from Italy in section 5.3 of her PhD thesis: Yvonne L. Inall, A Typological Assessment of Iron Age Weapons in South Italy (PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2009) pp. 123-126 (type 5) http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5464
• Fernando Quesada Sanz covers Italian single-edged swords in his books and articles on their relatives in Iberia, above all: Fernando Quesada Sanz, El Armamento Ibérico. Estudio tipológico, geográfico, functional, social y simbólico de las armas en la Cultura ibérica (siglos VI-I a.C.) (1997). I have not seen this one yet!

There is one more from Asia Minor and many from Illyria (Albania and former Yugoslavia). I’m not going to go into those because the books and websites above will give you plenty to get started and are relatively accessible for English speakers.2 None should give your library’s Interlibrary Loan service too much trouble, but a Bulgarian article from the 1930s might.

What Those Artifacts Look Like When Excavated

Greece is short of marshes, deep muddy rivers, and peat bogs. Most ancient weapons survive because they were buried with the dead or devoted to the gods at temples which were burned down or decided to bury some old offerings to make room for new ones. (At Olympia they used them to fill in wells and reinforce the banks of the stadium).

Its hard to keep iron and steel from rusting for 2500 years. Buried iron is often covered with active red rust as soon as it is exposed to fresh oxygen. And many of these weapons were not in good shape when they entered the ground. Weapons from burials were often ritually destroyed by heating them up and folding them like an accordion or breaking off projecting parts. Many of these were extremely quick and light weapons despite being made of soft steel (no ancient Greek, Roman, or Mesopotamian weapon is known to have been successfully quenched).3 The thinner the steel, the less has to rust away before the weapon falls to pieces. Many were buried in their scabbards which have decayed and left encrustations on the blades. This is good if you study textiles and leather from the traces they left, but frustrating if you want to understand the blade (the famous Kirkburn Sword from the Arras Culture in Yorkshire rusted into its enameled bronze and iron sheath in the 2300 years it spent in a grave). So it takes long and tedious work in the conservation laboratory to preserve these weapons, and after conservation they are blackened, twisted, and misshapen. They often fall apart into several pieces.

One of the technical terms is mineralization: the remains of these weapons are no longer iron and steel, but something like very rich iron ore in the shape of the lost weapon. You can study mineralized iron but its not as easy to work with as wrought iron or bloomery steel.

Archaeologists in the early 20th century were not very interested in rusted lumps of iron, and in southern Greece burials no longer contain weapons by the time that the fighting knives with handguards appear. So early excavations of cemeteries and city centres did not turn up many. In recent times, most archaeological finds are stuck in the country where they were found. Most of the serious archaeology in Greece and Bulgaria is by Greeks, Bulgarians, and Germans. So the original objects are in museums in Greece, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria and published in continental European languages. Photographs are not very helpful, you need to spend hours sitting with the objects and drawing them, after the conservation team spent weeks carefully cleaning the iron and stopping the active rust.

Books with all those drawings and measurements are expensive because they need archival-quality paper and skilled editing and have a limited audience. Tens of thousands of people are not willing to buy books about ancient Greek weapons. Often a few edged weapons are published with hundreds of other artifacts, and the price of the book has to cover all of those. There is not yet a large market of makers and reenactors who study the artifacts like in Viking Age archaeology or Imperial Roman archaeology. Without that large market, print runs remain around 200-400 copies, and the price of each copy is high.

There is now a move towards open access in academia: share the book or article freely online and let those who want a paper copy pay for it. This has only been practical for the past twenty years or so and it raises big questions of how to pay for services like layout and proofreading and image processing. There is also a movement towards open data (making individual images or databases searchable) but that requires even more IT services. In the long run open access will be the solution, but academia moves slowly, especially fields which are being dismantled. The Sardis Expedition database and the journal Adalya above are excellent open-access projects.

Why Some Museums Don’t Publish Their Images Online

Many ancient weapons are in regional museums with very limited budgets and IT staffs. Finds in big museums in national capitals are better known. For example, Peter Connolly painted a kopis from Korfu in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and today there are several reproductions of it. The thing that distinguishes this from a dozen other weapons is that its on display in a museum that almost every visitor to Greece sees, whereas only a few people see the regional museum in Korfu. Professional photography with good lighting and a neutral background is not free either, it takes time to set up and clean up and a display area may have to be closed down during visiting hours. The Royal Ontario Museum can afford to digitalize much more than a museum in rural Macedonia, even before the chatbot swarms started to use up expensive bandwidth and drove some sites offline or behind paywalls. Many museums and regional archaeological services have large backlogs of objects that need conserving and cataloguing, so anything else they do has to be better than that. And of course they prioritize sharing things in the language that the taxpayers who fund them speak.

Why Doesn’t Someone Else Do It?

Books on ancient warfare for a general audience, from publishers such as Osprey and Pen & Sword, could print photos and drawings of these objects. I think that one reason they rarely do this is that contacting institutions in another country that speaks a minority language seems intimidating. Museum bureaucracy can be cumbersome at best, and a language barrier makes that even more difficult. People who write books like this are often in a hurry, so they start with big institutions in their own country and objects that people already recognize. Peter Connolly picked an unusually well-preserved kopis to paint, and many people have made copies of that.

Another reason is that people who buy illustrated books want to see pretty things. Bronzes and ceramics are prettier and easier to understand than lumps of rust that were once edged weapons. It takes skill and money to draw a twisted and rusted weapon, and not every book is written by an artist like Peter Connolly, Ewart Oakeshott, or Roland Warzecha who can see what the original was like.

I know two people who have spent time in small museums in northern Greece sketching and weighing and photographing ancient weapons. If you can travel there, it can be done. Some museums have friendly staff, just nobody dedicated to researching ancient weapons.

Its also possible for anyone to start a list like this on a service like WordPress or Pinterest. Fans of other periods do this all the time. Closed services that you have to log in to see are not the best choice, and ‘free’ services have risks too, but anything you share and collaborate on is better than nothing. Just give as much information as you can about where something came from (reverse image search tools like TinEye are your friend).

I previously wrote about how ancient Greek kit is hard to make. Archaeologists have published most of what you need to know to make it, but you have to track down difficult books in foreign languages. You just can’t get all that information with a quick Google search, and it won’t be as easy to interpret as a sixteenth-century sword in a vitrine. That is frustrating in some ways, but its also what makes this a stimulating hobby.

(scheduled 26 February 2026)

Edit 2026-03-05: mentioned missing bibliography entries, nine not eight types

Rationalizing Cunaxa

At the battle of Cunaxa, two claimants to the Persian throne lined up their armies. One of them had a large force of Greek infantry, and both kings had men in their armies who went on to become famous writers. One of those aristocratic camp followers, Xenophon, tells a story which has puzzled many readers (Anabasis 1.8.19 from the Loeb). When the armies were about 600 or 800 yards apart, the Greek mercenaries ran forward:

And before an arrow reached them, the barbarians broke and fled. Thereupon the Greeks pursued with all their might, but shouted meanwhile to one another not to run at a headlong pace, but to keep their ranks in the pursuit.

It was very common in the 5th century BCE for one side to run away as the enemy approached, or after a few moments of fighting hand-to-hand. Combat is terrifying, and most soldiers of the day did not have a lot of practice working as a group. The Greeks called one such fight the tearless battle because nobody on the winning side died (Plut. Vit. Ages. 33.3, cp. Xen. Hell. 7.1.28). But it is very unusual for an army to run away before the enemy was within bowshot. What happened?

Some readers have imagined that the troops who ran away were engaged in a cunning plan to draw the Greeks away from the rest of the army so it could be defeated before they returned. Supposedly, Xenophon’s enemies knew that Greek hoplites were the best troops in the world, and that the only hope was not to fight them at all. I think I encountered this theory in Ancient Warfare III.6, and from a speaker with a PhD and a teaching job at the conference in Winnipeg, but it seems to come from a book by Robin Waterfield who was retelling an article by C. T. H. R. Ehrhardt in the Ancient History Bulletin from 1994 (Edit 2020-03-19: Or maybe a 1992 article by Graham Wylie).

The problem with rationalizing this story is that it assumes that Artaxerxes (the king on the other side of the field) and Tissaphernes (one of his governors) knew that their troops were no match for the Greeks. But how could they know that? Troops from the centre of the empire had not fought Greeks for generations, and the last time they had fought they had won. The Athenian invaders had been driven from Cyprus and Egypt and forced to make peace with the king. When the rebel satrap Pisuthnes hired some Greek mercenaries under an Athenian captain, they had accepted a bribe to change sides rather than fight Tissaphernes and the King’s men. So why would Artaxerxes and Tissaphernes have assumed that this squabbling gang of hirelings was so much more formidable that they should not even try to fight them? The French in 1914 hardly marched gloomily into battle because their grandfathers had been defeated by the Prussians. Instead, many of them performed acts of shocking bravery, because they were determined to do better and erase the shame of the previous war. While Xenophon has Cyrus assure the Greeks that they are the strongest part of his army, he does not put those words in Artaxerxes’ mouth, and it was Artaxerxes who gave the orders on the other side of the battlefield.

Rationalization is a heuristic: it assumes that a story consists of a nugget of truth around which fictional details have accreted. A heuristic does not have to be completely right all the time as long as it is close enough most of the time. There is an entire field of research trying to learn about the historical Jesus by rationalizing the Gospels (although even among secular scholars, not everyone believes that this can lead to truth). But its wise to think about when rationalization is likely to fail and not trust it in those situations.

In the case of rationalization, the problem is that sometimes the story is not a mythicized history, but a historicized myth. If the mythical parts are the original ones, then removing them will not get you closer to the original version of the story. People working on the early history of Greece are very sensitive to this problem, because most of their sources for political history are anecdotes written down centuries after the fact. While its tempting to think that stories about the age of the heroes or the Seven Sages have a basis in truth, there are no reliable ways to identify that basis. The story about George Washington and the cherry tree is great fun, but it was invented by Mason Weems after his death. The kernel of truth in the story is not a fact about George Washington but the kind of story which Americans liked to tell about him after his death.

Now, Xenophon is the only eyewitness to the battle whose work survives. But we do have another long account by Diodorus of Sicily, who had spent years in libraries reading different sources and chose to rely on some of those other writers instead of Xenophon. And he has a different take on when the Persians ran away (Diodorus 14.23.1-4):

When the troops with Cyrus approached the King’s army, such a multitude of missiles was hurled upon them as one could expect to be discharged from a host of four hundred thousand. Nevertheless, they fought but an altogether short time with javelin and then for the remainder of the battle closed hand to hand. The Lacedaemonians and the rest of the mercenaries at the very first contact struck terror into the opposing barbarians both by the splendour of their arms and by the skill they displayed. … Consequently they straightaway put their opponents to flight, pushed after them in pursuit, and slew many of the barbarians.

He also gives two reason for the outcome of this fight, whereas Xenophon does not say in so many words why Artaxerxes’ men fled. Where Xenophon implies that the Greeks won because a Greek can beat any number of barbarians, Diodorus says that this specific Greek army was so experienced and well-equipped that their particular opponents could not match them.

In the case of Xenophon’s account of Cunaxa, we know that his version differed from that in other contemporary sources (Plutarch shows us this). We know that his was written down years after the battle in response to other versions which were circulating (he cites one of them). And we know that he hated Tissaphernes, was no admirer of Artaxerxes, and had spent time after the battle in the company of Spartans who swore that if the other Greeks just obeyed them they could conquer the whole Persian empire. He is vague on how much of the battle he saw himself and how much he heard from others, and qualifies some of his most vivid descriptions with “they say that …” It is therefore very probable that as he told and retold the story of the battle, Tissaphernes and his men became more and more cowardly, and Cyrus and the Greeks became braver and nobler. Perhaps the Persians in the actual battle fought briefly then ran (that is what Diodorus says, and he had read both Xenophon and many sources which we have lost). Churchill’s history of the Second World War, or the German generals’ memoirs which were vague about that business in Poland but very specific about how they could have beaten the Russians if only Hitler had not held them back, are contemporary accounts by competent soldiers, but that does not mean we should trust them. And citing other stories of cowardly barbarians in the Anabasis to support Xenophon’s story of Cunaxa brings us back to the question of how much he ‘improved’ things in retelling. Different stories in the same book by the same author are not independent sources!

This does not mean that the troops opposite the Greek phalanx fought well. They certainly lost. But we should be open to the possibility that the best way to explain Xenophon’s story is not to imagine how it could have happened, but to ask whether it happened at all.

Its shameful to run away when you have taken the king’s salt. If you can, support this site so I don’t discover urgent business somewhere other than the Internet.

Further Reading

• Wylie, Graham (1992) “Cunaxa and Xenophon,” L’Antiquité Classique Volume 61 pp. 110–134 {pages 129 and 130 propose that the flight was just a ruse}
• C.T.H. Ehrhardt, “Two Notes on Xenophon, Anabasis, 1-4,” Ancient History Bulletin, Volume 8 (1994) pp. 1-4 http://ancienthistorybulletin.org/
• Robin Waterfield, Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2006) p. 18 {probably much more widely read than Ehrhardt’s article}
• John Shannahan, “Two Notes on the Battle of Cunaxa,” Ancient History Bulletin Volume 28 (2014) Numbers 1-2 pp. 61-81 http://ancienthistorybulletin.org/ {Rebuts “Two Notes on Xenophon” but does not spend long asking how Xenophon’s story about the fighting relates to the reality}

Edit 2022-06-20: fixed formatting broken when WordPress introduced the block editor

Edit 2025-12-21: mention tearless battle

Analysis of Egyptian alabaster vessel reveals widespread opium use from Xerxes to King Tut

A new analysis of an inscribed alabaster vase from the Yale Babylonian Collection has produced the strongest scientific evidence to date that opium played a wider role in ancient Egyptian life than was previously known...

More information: https://archaeologymag.com/2025/11/egyptian-vessel-analysis-reveals-opium-use/

Follow us @archaeology

#archaeology #archeology #archaeologynews #xerxes #achaemenidempire #ancientegypt

Iranian Trousers for Plataea

People representing Median, Persian, or Saka soldiers at Plataea in 2021 will need trousers. Not everyone needs them: the King rules many lands full of all kinds of men, many of whom have not adopted the Median dress. But reenactors representing men (and possibly women?) from those nations will need them.

One kind of evidence to use is artwork. Aside from the reliefs from Persepolis, the goldsmith’s work from Scythian tombs and the Oxus Treasure, and the mosaic from Pompeii which everyone knows, you will want to have a close look at some of the glazed terracottas of servants from Susa in Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia or on achemenet and of course at the tomb paintings from Tatarlı, Turkey.

By far the most important archaeological find are the trousers of saltman No. 4 from Chehrābād, Iran, radiocarbon dated to around 405-380 BCE. The saltman is still wearing trousers tucked into his shoes and covered by the skirt of his coat, and all of the textiles are so delicate and salt-encrusted that they cannot be removed, spread flat, and examined. What we know can be summarized in the following few sentences:

• The trousers are woollen, tabby weave, 8 z-spun weft threads per cm, 11 s-spun warp threads per cm.
• There are lateral seams in the trouser legs to ankle, and a vertical slit in the lateral thigh at hip level with the skin of the deceased exposed underneath. (Whether the seams are at the medial leg (inner thigh) or lateral leg (outer thigh) is not clear to me)
• A red woollen thread is sewn along the side seams hiding them except at the slit.
• Overall, they strike the excavators as loose and baggy.

There is no published information about stitches, thread, or dye of saltman 4’s trousers (the cloth looks natural white to me). Edit: Dr. Grömer describes the trousers and tunic as “made of a sturdy, plain natural white woollen cloth” (aus robustem einfarbig naturhellem Wollstoff bestehend).

*** Edit 2019-11-25: Since this was written, I got back in contact with Dr. Grömer and a future post may talk about her understanding of these trousers as described in an article from 2016, Durchdacht gemacht: Die Kleidung eines Salzmannes aus Chehrabad, Iran. Universum Magazin 3/2016, pp. 108-109. She has visited Iran and examined the mummy, I have not! ***

Out of all the trousers more than a thousand years old I have seen published, these look most similar to the Bronze Age trousers from Yanghai tombs M21 and M157 near Turfan in Xinjiang. The first, best-preserved pair have been radiocarbon dated to a 95% confidence interval of 1122-922 cal. BCE; fibres from the second tomb have been radiocarbon dated to 1261-1040 cal. BCE.

Similar short trousers (“breeches” in Middle English) are known from graves in the Caucasus region in the 7th to 10th centuries CE. Two are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 1999.153.40 and 1999.153.43). There are photos of them while they were more intact in an article by Nobuko Kajitani. These consist of two rectangular legs and a square or diamond-shaped gusset for the crotch. Bishop Timotheos of Ibrim (d. after 1372) in Nubia wore similar trousers of undyed cotton cloth with two rectangular pieces for the legs and a gusset of two right triangles, a slightly larger one in back and a slightly smaller one in front sewed bias to bias. His trousers had drawstrings tied at the centre front not the hips. Today, this style of trousers are known as shalwar and worn in Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Information in English or German about the breeches from Tuekta kurgan 1 and the woollen trousers from Alakha-1 site and the Verkh-Kal’djin-2, also in the Altai, is harder to find, but photos and diagrams in the Russian publication show that the short trousers from Verkh-Kal’djin-2 have a piece for each leg and a rectangular or diamond-shaped gusset in the crotch. The Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age trousers from Chärchän in the Tarim Basin are also said to have been made this way.

Trousers from Late Roman Denmark and Egypt are also known. These have seams up the back of the legs (unlike saltman 4’s trousers) and a wide gusset in the back with a narrow tail between the legs. Because this style of trouser is not documented in the Near East until Roman times, I would avoid it unless you are already good at making Thorsberg trousers.

The Yanghai trousers have a stepped gusset, whereas the Caucasus and Nubian trousers have square or diamond-shaped gussets. A diamond shape is easy to cut but hard to weave, so it probably came into fashion as cut clothing replaced woven-to-shape clothing. Unless your trousers are woven to shape, you should probably try a diamond-shaped gusset.

The upper part of the Chehrābād 4 trousers cannot be examined, and I don’t know of any art which shows this part of trousers in this period. (If you know of a sculpture of topless Scythians wrestling, do share!) Any length from just long enough to cover the hips (like modern “low rider” jeans) to elbow-high (like the trousers in a mid-20th-century suit) could work. The Yanghai M21 trousers are only 104 cm long but have gussets 29 cm long, so a higher waist is probably more plausible than lower. The trousers from the Altai also seem to have high waists.

Early trousers sometimes end straight at the bottom, sometime have integral booties, and sometimes have a ‘stirrup’ under the heel to pull them tight. Saltman 4’s trousers are mostly hidden and my notes from Dr. Karina Grömer’s lecture in 2016 are a little unclear. The two pairs of trousers from Yanghai seem to end straight, but the hems are are worn and the trousers may have been shortened during their working life. The only artwork I know which could help is this carving of tribute-bearers from the Apadana at Persepolis. In some photos it looks like hose with integral feet, but in other photos there seems to be a right angle between the hanging part and the bottom of the legs. It could show stirrups, but the hanging part is a bit long. Do my gentle readers have any ideas or a better photo?

In indigenous artwork, Scythian and Median trousers disappear inside the shoes or boots rather than draping on top of them like modern trousers (Greek vase painters sometimes show curly-haired Africans or generic easterners whose trousers have cuffs hanging over the shoes, but neither they nor their customers were trouser-wearers). The bottoms of salt man 4’s trousers are still hidden inside his boots. So whether you chose straight cuffs, strirrups, or booties, any trousers you should make should disappear inside low boots without forming bags around the ankles. Eastern nations like the Arachosians and Sogdians sometimes wear loose trousers but they still disappear inside the shoes.

In a different month, I will make some mockups in cheap linen or cotton, then a good pair or two in wool. But that takes time and money, and as an underemployed researcher in fall application season I do not have much of either.

Help me pay my draper’s bill with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay

Select Bibliography: The most useful books and articles are:

• Aali, Abolfazl / Stöllner, Thomas (eds). (2015) The Archaeology of the Salt Miners: Interdisciplinary Research 2010-2014. Metalla: Forschungsberichte des Deutschen Bergbau-Museums 21.1–2/2014 (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum) {for sale for about 25 Euros new}
• Beck, Ulrike, et al., “The invention of trousers and its likely affiliation with horseback riding and mobility: A case study of late 2nd millennium BC finds from Turfan in eastern Central Asia,” Quaternary International (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2014.04.056
• Elizabeth Crowfoot, “The Clothing of a Fourteenth-Century Nubian Bishop.” In Veronika Gervers ed., Studies in Textile History in Memory of Harold B. Burnham (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1977) pp. 43-51
• Nobuko Kajitani, “A Man’s Caftan and Leggings from the North Caucasus of the Eighth to Tenth Centuries: A Conservator’s Report,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 36 pp. 85-124 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Mans_Caftan_Leggings_from_Caucasus_8_to_10_C_Conservation_The_Metropolitan_Museum_Journal_v_36_2001
• Krug-Ochmann, Julia Barbara (2014) “Achaemenid and Sassanian Trousers. A short technical description from Douzlakh Salt Mine at Chehr Abad, Iran.” Archaeological Textiles Review 56 pp. 60-64 {free to download}
• Polos’mak, N.V., Barkova, L.L., Костюм и текстиль пазырыкцев Алтая (IV-III вв. до н.З.) / Kostium i tekstil’ pazyryktsev Altaya (IV-III vv. do n. e.) / Pazyryk Altai Costume and Textiles (4th-3rd centuries BCE). Infolio: Novosibirsk 2005 (in Russian) pages 80-85 ISBN 5-89590-051-8 {colour photographs and diagrams of all the clothing and shoes from the Altai including trousers from Alakha-1 and the Verkh-Kal’djin-2}

*** Edit 2019-11-25: And see also Karina Grömer, Durchdacht gemacht: Die Kleidung eines Salzmannes aus Chehrabad, Iran. Universum Magazin 3/2016, pp. 108-109 which I discovered after writing this post! ***

(And honourable mention to Peter Calmeyer’s article “Hose” in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie which covers almost all the artwork available today but was written before archaeological finds were available).

Edit 2019-11-20: Added a photograph of a Red Figure plate showing leggings which end at the ankles.

Edit 2020-06: If you read German and are interested in the cut-and-sewed clothing from the Caucasus, check out Ierusalimskaja, Anna A. Die Gräber der Moscevaja Balka: Frühmittelalterliche Funde an der nordkaukasischen Seidenstrasse (Munich: Editio Maris, 1996)

Edit 2022-04-16: Added an apparent depiction of stirrup hose in the Louvre

Edit 2024-02-17: Tip-o-the-tiara to Carolyn Priest-Dorman of https://stringgeek.blogspot.com/: Aleksei Moskvin published some details on Saltman 4’s textiles for weavers as “Ancient textiles from Chehrabad salt mine,” https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/ancient-textiles-from-chehrabad-salt-mine-10a5f66e3286443c9826d14c80d0e41a (2022). Karina Grömer measured the textiles. I don’t know if these observations have been published in print.

Trousers of saltman 4:

• warp yarn, s twist, 50° twist, yarn thickness 0.5-0.6 mm, 7-8 threads per cm
• weft yarn, z twist, 20-30° twist, yarn thickness 0.5 mm, 22 threads per cm (so it is weft-faced, NB. that sources cited above say 11 weft threads per cm)

Tunic of saltman 4:

• warp yarn is s twist, 50° twist, yarn thickness 0.7-0.8 mm, 8 threads per cm,
• weft yarn is z twist, 20° twist, yarn thickness 0.5-0.6 mm, 30 threads per cm (so it is weft-faced)

This kind of information is very important for spinners and weavers.

#AchaemenidEmpire #ancient #DariusMosaic #historicalClothing #Plataia2021 #trousers

🌍 Persian Pragmatism Meets Biblical Theology

The Achaemenid Empire's religious tolerance extended to Palestine, where Persian rulers supported the Jerusalem Temple's restoration. Biblical texts like Ezra and Nehemiah frame this as divine will, but archaeological evidence hints at broader religious pluralism during the Persian period.
This contrast—pragmatic imperial policy vs. theological narrative—offers rich insights into Persian Palestine's complex legacy.

#AchaemenidEmpire #PersianHistory

Contact Zones in the Eastern Mediterranean

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.biblioiranica.info/contact-zones-in-the-eastern-mediterranean/

New post: Greek soldiers in the Achaemenid empire. "The Neo-Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians deported all kinds of people to the cores of their empires, gave them land to work, and extracted civil or military service from them. By the Achaemenid period Babylonians often provided a substitute or paid a fee rather than serve themselves. Hiring Greeks for coins was just another way of obtaining foreign soldiers."

https://www.bookandsword.com/2024/09/07/greek-soldiers-in-the-achaemenid-empire/ #histodons #antiquidons #achaemenidEmpire