History of Chain Mail and Ring Mail 241 



outfit of the horsemen consisted of horse mail, a shirt of mail, a breast- 

 plate, cuishes, a sword, lance, shield, a club attached to the belt, a 

 hatchet, a quiver containing two stringed bows and thirty arrows, and 

 two twisted strings in reserve fastened to the helmet. 1 The manufacture 

 of armor was at the height of perfection in the Sassanian epoch. When 

 the Arabs overran the Persian Empire and conquered Ktesiphon, they 

 found in the well-equipped arsenals the king's cuirass with brassards, 

 cuishes, and helmet, the whole wrought in pure gold. 2 



Chain mail, which doubtless existed under the Sassanians, is dis- 

 tinctly mentioned in the Avesta (Vendidad, XIV, 9) under the name 

 zradha. According to Jackson, 3 this word is presumed to designate the 

 ringed mail-coat; so called, it is thought, from its rattling. The word 

 is derived from the root zrdd (corresponding to Sanskrit hrdd), which 

 means "to rattle." The Pahlavl version of the Vendidad passage 

 renders the word zradha by zral, which answers to Firdausl's 4 Persian 

 word zirih, already explained by Vullers in his Lexicon Persico- 

 Laiinum as "vestis militaris ex anulis fereis conserta." The identifica- 

 tion of zirih or zireh with chain mail seems to be certain, for under the 



in their interpretations of armor on the bas-reliefs, are somewhat influenced by the 

 statement of Herodotus. There can be no doubt, however, that chain mail was 

 known in Persia during the Sassanian epoch, and at the much earlier age of the 

 Avesta (see above). 



1 Compare A. Christensen (I. c, p. 60); C. Inostrantsev, Sassanidian Studies. 

 p. 80 (in Russian, St. Petersburg, 1909). 



2 Christensen (/. c, p. 106). 



3 L. c, p. 117. Bartholomae (Altiranisches Worterbuch, p. 1703) renders the 

 word only by " Panzerkoller, Panzer." 



4 Compare the passage from the Shah-nameh quoted by Jackson (/. c, p. 107). 

 O. Schrader (Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, p. 103; and Reallexikon, 

 p. 611) assumes that Avestan zradha had the meaning "scale armor," and is identical 

 with the one described by Herodotus. This opinion seems to me unfounded; Persian 

 zirih, which is derived from that word, and the same transmitted to India, have the 

 significance "chain mail;" so that also zradha is most likely to have had the same 

 meaning. Schrader's point of view is merely prompted by the desire_ to make the 

 interpretation of the word conform with the passage of Herodotus. This is naturally 

 one-sided: Iran must have possessed various types of armor from ancient times, 

 and chain mail must have pre-existed there before it was propagated from this 

 centre to all parts of the world. From the Chinese account given below, it follows 

 that chain mail held its ground in Sogdiana in the beginning of the eighth century; 

 and if Jackson's identification of the Sino-Persian term ket-li-dang occurring in the 

 Annals of the Sui Dynasty (see this volume, p. 28, note 1) is correct, we should have 

 additional evidence for the employment of chain mail in Sassanian Persia. Of 

 course, I do not mean to say that scale armor was out of commission during the 

 Sassanian period; it may very well have persisted during thattime, together with a 

 variety of other kinds of armor. The fact that such were then in existence is brought 

 out by the figure of the Persian grandee hunting a boar and a lion on the famous 

 silver bowl in the Eremitage of St. Petersburg (A. Riedl, Ein orientalischer Teppich 

 vom Jahre 1202, p. 28; and reproduced in many other books). A real history of 

 Persian armor remains to be written. 



