The Problem of Plate Armor 263 



Su-shen, I shall comment later. Hide armor and bone armor formed 

 the national harness of the Su-shein, as we may infer from another 

 memorable passage in the Annals of the Tsin Dynasty 1 relating to the 

 period 265-419 a.d., where the characteristic arms of the tribe are 

 enumerated as wooden bows, stone crossbows, hide and bone armor. 2 

 It is remarkable that the Chinese do not ascribe bone armor to any 

 other of the numerous tribes, with whom they became familiar during 

 their long history, and whose culture they have described to us. In all 

 likelihood, the term "bone armor" occurs in their records only in those 

 two passages; and it is not at all ambiguous. There is but one thing 

 that can be understood by it, — the well-known type of bone armor, as it 

 still occurs among the tribes occupying the northern shores of the Pacific 

 on the Asiatic and American sides, particularly among the Chukchi and 

 Eskimo, and in that region exclusively. 3 The Eskimo ivory plate armor 

 represented on Plate XXIX will give some idea of what the Su-shen 



Journal of the College of Science, Vol. 36, Toky5, March 29, 1914, p. 73), which has 

 just reached me, that the two Japanese authors understand this passage in exactly 

 the same sense. 



1 Tsin shu (compiled under the T'ang dynasty by Fang K'iao and others), 

 Ch. 97, p. 2 b. 



2 The question in this passage, accordingly, is of the armor, offensive and de- 

 fensive, possessed and made by the Su-shen in the beginning of the middle ages. Hide 

 and bone armor are attributed to them, while iron armor is not mentioned. The 

 text might be construed to mean that the Su-sh&n possessed but a single type of 

 armor, composed of both bone and leather; that is, plates of bone lashed together by 

 means of hide thongs; bone armor is unthinkable without such a ligament, but this 

 consideration need not preclude the assumption that the Su-shen fabricated also pure 

 hide armor. The ethnographical fact that in the culture-area to which this tribe 

 belonged hide and bone armor still occur side by side, must be equally considered in 

 this question; and for this reason we may well understand the passage of the Tsin 

 Annals in the sense that the Su-shen had hide or leather armor, and bone armor. But 

 this point of view is of minor importance. The same passage in the Tsin shu indicates 

 a tribute sent by the Su-shen toward the end of the period King-yuan (260-264) an d 

 consisting of arrows, stone crossbows, armor, and sable-skins. What kind of armor 

 it was on this occasion is not specified ; but the general word kia refers to a hide armor 

 or cuirass. J. Klaproth (Tableaux historiques de l'Asie, p. 85) attributes "cuirasses 

 made from skin and covered with bone" to the Yi-lou; the latter are identical with 

 the Su-shen, and the text from which Klaproth translated must be the same as that 

 of the Tsin shu referred to above. The text relative to the Yi-lou inserted in 

 Hou Han shu (Ch. 115, p. 2 b) makes no allusion whatever to armor, but I am not 

 inclined to infer from this silence that the Yi-lou or Su-shen lacked armor in the Han 

 period. 



3 As stated by me in T'oung Pao (1913, p. 349), the plates of this bone armor 

 were presumably carved from walrus ivory, in the same manner as in the present 

 Eskimo and Chukchi plate armor. Dr. W. Hough of the U. S. National Museum in 

 Washington, to whom I addressed the question as to whether ivory or ordinary bone 

 was utilized to a larger extent in these pieces has been good enough to write me as 

 follows: "The Eskimo armor in the Museum and such suits as I have seen are 

 mostly made of walrus ivory, and so far as I can remember, there are no combinations 

 of ivory and bone in the same piece. On the other hand, there are fragmentary parts 

 of armor from St. Lawrence Island and from the Alaskan mainland which are made 

 of bone; just what bone I cannot say, probably the whale." 



