Defensive Armor of the Archaic Period 177 



buskins. l The hide was well cured, and the inner side cleaned from all 

 adhering impurities. 



My conception of the technicalities in the construction of this armor 

 is widely different from that of Biot based on the opinions of the Chinese 

 commentators. These interpret that the cuirass made from the hide of 

 the two-horned rhinoceros consisted of seven pieces sewed together; 

 that from the hide of the one-horned rhinoceros, of six; and that made 

 from a combination of both, of five pieces. There is no sense in this 

 point of view of the matter. The commentators of the Han and later 

 ages were unable to form a clear idea of the cuirass peculiar to the Chou 

 period, because it was lost in their time ; and they merely applied to the 

 latter the notions which they had gained from a consideration of contem- 

 poraneous armor. The armor terminology of the Han was read into 

 Chou armor, and a purely philological reconstruction was reached, 

 which hardly corresponds to a living reality. The armor, as interpreted 

 by the Chinese scholars, in my opinion, is technically impossible, and 

 beyond our experience: armor-suits of such requirements have been 

 made nowhere in this world, and in all likelihood never could have been 

 made. 2 



There is no raison d'etre in assuming that the first should have been 



1 Red knee-covers and buskins are mentioned in the Shi king, but they were 

 outfits belonging to the costume of ceremony, not of war (Legge, Chinese Classics, 

 Vol. IV, Prolegomena, p. 157, and p. 402). 



2 For technical reasons it is highly improbable that the hide armor of the Chou 

 was sewed together from different pieces, because such a process would considerably 

 diminish its strength and capability of resistance, and a blow struck at the seams 

 would have had dangerous consequences. On the contrary, wherever hide armor 

 was made, the principle was quite naturally developed to make it, as far as possible, 

 in one piece; and this is exactly the point where the chief purpose of defensive armor 

 comes in. If the Chou cuirass had been patched together from odd pieces, as the 

 later Chinese philologists would make us believe, it could not have been a defensive 

 armor proper, but simply a skin garment. W. Hough (Primitive American Armor, 

 Report U. S. National Museum, 1893, p. 641) informs us that "American skin armor 

 was always made in one piece folded over, sewed above the shoulders, leaving an 

 orifice for the head and with a hole cut out of the left side for the left arm, the right 

 side of the garment remaining open; the skin was often doubled, but more frequently 

 the coat was reinforced with pieces of thick hide." Indeed, our Chou armor, cum 

 grano salts, can have been no other in type and appearance than the hide armor of 

 the American Indians, as figured on our Plate XI and by Hough on Plates XVI-XIX, 

 although it may have been somewhat more elegant in its fit to the individual 

 wearer. Hough (pp. 645, 646) furnishes several examples of the fact that hide armor 

 in America was worked in several layers; thus, two, three, or more folds of the 

 strongest hides were employed by the Nass Indians of the Tsimshian stock; a great 

 many folds of dressed antelope-skins by the Shoshoni; and the Navajo singer chants 

 of suits of armor made of several layers of buckskin. Likewise A. P. Niblack (The 

 Coast Indians of Southern Alaska, Report U. S. National Museum, 1888, p. 268) 

 states that the leather jerkins formerly made in Alaska were of one, two, or three 

 thicknesses of hide, and in itself offered considerable resistance to arrows, spears, or 

 dagger thrusts. Armor of rhinoceros-hide, according to Nachtigall, is still made and 

 employed by the Arabs of the Sudan (H. Schurtz, Grundzuge einer Philosophie 

 der Tracht, p. 114). 



