Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2022 - 32

Yanghai Cemetery
tion of this type of scale armor took place
somewhere in western Asia and that it was
somehow connected to the origin of horsedrawn
chariots during the first half of the
second millennium b.c., " says Wertmann.
Nineveh
Babylon
Memphis
T
500
1,000 miles
7th c. b.c. Neo-Assyrian Empire
he Yanghai cemeterY was first discovered by
villagers in the 1970s, and archaeologists have since
excavated more than 500 burials at the site. In 2013,
they unearthed a grave belonging to a man who had died
around the age of 30. Among his burial goods was a set of
armor that has been radiocarbon dated to between 786 and
543 b.c. The armor was made from more than 5,000 individual
pieces of rawhide as well as leather laces. The majority of the
pieces, known as scales, each measure just under an inch long
and slightly more than half an inch wide. They are very light,
weighing less than two hundredths of an ounce apiece. Each of
the scales has a rounded lower right corner and a row of three
vertical slits pierced just below its top edge. Because the scales
are all nearly identical, they were most likely cut from a large
piece of sheep or goatskin using a stencil or template, says
archaeologist Patrick Wertmann of the University of Zurich,
who has been analyzing artifacts discovered at the Yanghai
cemetery for more than five years.
The scales were sewn onto a leather lining, and the resulting
armor fit the wearer like an apron or a waistcoat, protecting the
torso, hips, left side, and lower back. " This is the kind of garment
that could be put on quickly without any help from another
person, " says Wertmann. " It would also have potentially been
adaptable for people of different shapes and sizes, as it had a fastening
device that the wearer could adjust. " Such a lightweight,
portable defensive covering for the body designed to be worn
on horseback was well suited to the Cheshi's nomadic lifestyle.
Because the Cheshi left behind no records, what researchers
know about this long-lived but poorly understood culture they
have learned through archaeological research and through reports
written by court scholars of China's Han Dynasty (206 b.c.-a.d.
220). The Han Dynasty seized military and political control of
the Turfan Basin around 60 b.c. Han historians characterized the
Cheshi as skilled horse riders who lived in tents and followed seasonal
grasses that fed their horses, cattle, sheep, and goats. They
had a reputation for lethal proficiency with the bow and arrow.
Alongside the leather armor in the man's grave, archaeologists
discovered cheek pieces from a bridle, suggesting he was a
horse rider. Researchers have also recovered numerous artifacts
from other graves at the site that attest to the integral role
that horses played in Cheshi society. Wertmann says, however,
that the scale armor is not just the only object of its kind to
have ever been found at the site, it is one of only three sets of
ancient leather scale armor to have been excavated anywhere
in the world. " At the moment, scholars assume that the inven32
B
eginning
around 4,000 years ago,
the Neo-Assyrians' predecessors, the
Assyrians, established a city-state at
Assur on the banks of the Tigris River in
what is now northern Iraq. By the tenth
century b.c., they had transformed their kingdom into
the Neo-Assyrian Empire and expanded across much of
Mesopotamia. While the Yanghai scale armor dates to around
the seventh century b.c., Wertmann explains that it comes
from a technological tradition that is much older and was born
out of ancient Assyrian conquests.
The Assyrians introduced chariots to the battlefield as
mobile archery platforms. The charioteers and chariot archers
who stood on the platforms were raised above the fray and
were thus rendered vulnerable and in clear need of some form
of protection. Assyrian armorers invented a type of leather scale
armor-some of the earliest armor in the world-that offered
wearers protection from projectiles and glancing blows, while
still allowing them enough freedom of movement to throw a
spear or draw a bow. According to Wertmann, the Assyrians may
have looked to nature for inspiration. " This armor is really an
example of bionics, in that it is a transfer of biological methods
of defense found in nature to human technology, " he says. " The
artisans who made the armor looked at the skins and scales of
animals and realized that the best protection is not created by
just a hard outer shell, but also by the effect of many flexible
small scales working together-and they engineered that. "
Depictions of soldiers across the Neo-Assyrian Empire,
including reliefs from the palace of Ashurbanipal (r. 668-627
b.c.) at Nineveh on the outskirts of what is now Mosul in
northern Iraq, show cavalry and archers wearing armor of the
type found in the man's burial at the Yanghai cemetery. " The
armor had to be light, hard, and flexible, " says Wertmann. " Sets
of scale armor could be made from iron, bronze, or leather
Conservators prepare the armor, which was made from more
than 5,000 scales of rawhide, for analysis in a laboratory.
ARCHAEOLOGY * May/June 2022
Turfan Basin
Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2022

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