Tutankhamun's chariot armour

Tutankhamun's chariot armour, mentioned in my last post, formed part of a scale armour tradition that dates back as far as the third millennium BCE.  Remains of scale armour have been found at a number of sites, it's discussed in the Nuzi texts, and it's often depicted in Bronze Age art, but the depictions tend to be small and not very detailed.  Tutankhamun's armour provides a fascinating opportunity to study what Bronze Age scale armour was like in real life.

Tutankhamun's chariot armour, made sometime around 1325 BCE.  Image from the Griffith Institute.

This photograph shows the armour as it was found, folded and placed in a box in Tutankhamun's tomb.  It is the only complete, intact set of Bronze Age chariot armour that has ever been found, and this is the only photograph of it in existence - at least in its intact state.  The armour appears to have disintegrated when Carter and his team tried to remove it from its box.   They tried to conserve it, but were not very successful.  Today, all that remains are a few fragments and some loose scales in a box in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Unfortunately, this means we don't know exactly what the armour looked like.  Carter's description was brief and not very detailed.  In his three volume publication on Tutankhamun's tomb and artifacts, he wrote only one short paragraph on the chariot armour.

"Another form of defensive armour was a crumpled-up leather cuirass that had been thrown into a box. This was made up of scales of thick tinted leather worked onto a linen basis, or lining, in the form of a close-fitting bodice without sleeves. It was unfortunately too far decayed for preservation." Howard Carter, 1933: The Tomb of Tut Ankh Amon Volume III p.143.

The last sentence suggests part of the reason Carter didn't offer a more detailed description of the armour may have been because there wasn't much left to examine.  As far as I'm aware the first and only really comprehensive analysis was completed in 2002.  This is a doctoral dissertation written by Thomas Hulit, entitled Late Bronze Age Scale Armour in the Near East: An Experimental Investigation of Materials, Construction, and Effectiveness, with a Consideration of Socio-economic Implications.  It is available from the British Library's e-theses online service, and you do not have to be a UK resident to use this service.

Tutankhamun's armour would have looked much like these examples from the tomb of Rameses III, which shows cuirasses stacked ready for allocation to chariot warriors.

Image from Late Bronze Age Scale Armour in the Near East, by Thomas Hulit.

The drawing is more of a schematic representation than a detailed illustration, but it does show the overall shape of Egyptian chariot armour and suggests how colourful this armour could be.  All the scales of Tutankhamun's cuirass appear to have been painted red, but these ones have alternating stripes of different colours.  The cross lacing that helps support the skirt section of Tutankhamun's armour, and is visible at the lower right corner of the photo, is missing from the Rameses III drawing, either because that detail was omitted or because not all chariot armour included this feature.  In his dissertation, Hulit describes other fragments of cross laced scales which would have been located on the shoulders of the cuirass - you can tell from the size of the scales.  This makes me question what exactly Carter meant when he described the cuirass as sleeveless.  Personally, I suspect the small scales around the shoulder area extended down over the shoulders somewhat, forming what we might call cap sleeves.  I'm not aware of any Bronze Age depictions of scale armour that are actually sleeveless, and I think it may have looked something like this:

Possible reconstruction of scale armour found at Kamid el-Loz.  This image also comes from Late Bronze Age Scale Armour in the Near East, by Thomas Hulit.

This picture also illustrates the different sizes of scales used to make Bronze Age armour, which is not evident in the drawings from Rameses III's tomb.  It's not evident in Bronze Age art in general, but we know this was a characteristic feature of scale armour at the time.  Tutankhamun's scales range from around 25mm to 60mm in length, and around 17mm to 35mm in width.  The scales' thickness varies too, from 1.8mm to 2.5mm.  As you might expect, the smaller scales are thinner than the large wide ones.  Assyrian records described armour scales as being either "large" or "small", but this doesn't entirely reflect the variety in size and shape found in Bronze Age armour scales.  It's more a reflection of the fact that you need larger scales for the body of the cuirass, and smaller ones for the neck and shoulder area where there is a greater degree of curvature.

The scales were linked together in rows and sewn onto a linen backing, apparently with a leather lining.  Where the linen backing survives it consists of six layers of fabric, which would have provided additional protection and some degree of padding.  Arrows which failed to penetrate the armour could still have caused bruising or even broken bones, but a survivable injury is better than a fatal one.

As part of his thesis Hulit constructed and tested armour samples made from rawhide, bronze, rawhide and bronze in combination, and alum tawed leather.  Early examination of the scales had suggested they were made from alum tawed leather, but this was subsequently found to be incorrect, and while Hulit was not able to conclusively determine what type of hide product the scales were made of, rawhide seems to be the most likely candidate.  He tested them using a reproduction of the bows and arrows used at the time.  These experiments showed that rawhide scales would have provided a good level of protection against arrows, and of course weighed a lot less than bronze.  Leather was cheaper than bronze too, but leather armour still requires a lot of time and material to produce, and it was still an expensive, prestigious item.  Most Egyptian soldiers at the time did not wear armour at all.