то приведу ещё одну цитату из Британники же. Если коротко -- наиболее ранния свидетельства о кольчуге -- эллинистические 3 века до РХ, есть некоторые основания говорить о её кельтском происхождении.
Mail
The first practical body armour of iron was mail, which made its appearance in Hellenistic times but became common only during the Roman Imperial period. (Bronze mail was impractical because of the insufficient strength of the alloy.) Mail, or chain mail, was made of small rings of iron, typically of one-half-inch diameter or less, linked into a protective fabric. The rings were fastened together in patterns of varying complexity depending on the degree of protection desired; in general, smaller, lighter rings fastened in dense, overlapping patterns meant lighter, better protection. The fabrication of mail was extremely labour-intensive. The earliest mail was made of hand-forged links, each individual link riveted together. Later, armourers used punches of hardened iron to cut rings from sheets: this reduced the labour involved and, hence, the cost.
The earliest evidence of mail is depicted on Greek sculpture and friezes dating from the 3rd century BC, though this kind of protection might be considerably older (there was some evidence that it might be of Celtic origin). Little else is known about the use of mail by the Greeks, but the Roman legionnaire was equipped with a lorica hamata, a mail shirt, from a very early date. Mail was extremely flexible and provided good protection against cutting and piercing weapons. Its main disadvantage was its weight, which tended to hang from the shoulders and waist. In addition, strips of mail tended to curl at the edges; the Romans solved this problem by lacing mail shoulder defenses to leather plates. In the 1st century AD the legionnaire's mail shirt gave way to a segmented iron torso defense, the lorica segmentata.
In hoc signo vinces
Подведём итоги - Chestnut26.02.2006 21:37:26 (32, 910 b)
