2,700-year-old leather armor proves technology transfer happened in antiquity | Hacker News Reader

2,700-year-old leather armor proves technology transfer happened in antiquity

sciencedaily.com

81 pointsbenbreen17 comments

I think there was a bunch of evidence already that also strongly indicated technology transfer throughout Eurasia in the last few millennia BCE, especially military technology.

For example, two-wheeled light military chariots probably originated in Central Asia with the Sintashta culture around 2000 BCE, and spread from there to everywhere from Egypt to East Asia.

In addition, though I dunno if you want to consider it a technology transfer, their particular horse breeds, bred to drive those chariots, also spread to the extent those breeds are the ancestors of every living domestic horse (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04018-9)

The remarkable thing here is that the technology transfer was not by contact and osmosis over the centuries, but literal and intentional transit.

We now know that there were two people, a shock troop and a horseman, who served in the same Assyrian imperial army at or around the same time. Then after they retired from the army, one stayed in the region, and the other moved to China.

Well the horses at least were quite intentionally traded, and I would be very surprised if chariots were not either, although admittedly, they spread mostly by some poor saps being pounded to dust by the folks in chariots and then those poor saps adopting chariots themselves (e.g., the Egyptians and the Hyksos)

What's really fascinating here is that there is no scale leather armor from that period that can be placed contextually in Assyria! We only know of it from art and writing. It's wild to think that the first set with archaeological context was found so far away, imagine if we didn't have the Assyrian art/context, we might think the armor was first developed in North West China!

It's the second set. The first known set was found in the Middle East somewhere and is in the Met collection. The conclusion of the paper is that these two sets were manufactured around the same time, and one of them stayed put, while the other was carried 3000 miles to China

My reading of the paper left me thinking the set in the Met is of unknown provenance, this is huge in archaeology/history as folks tend not to consider things without having context of the exact source.

It's pretty clear (or seems so) that the armor in the Met came from there, but the Met doesn't seem to have a definitive source for it.

I could have read it wrong or misunderstood, but I've been reading a lot about ancient history and they seem to value items found in-situ with context over ones that surface after they've been discovered without context.

full paper w/images here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061822...

Can we change the link to this article - it's fulsome with more details and great images.

It's cool to find this evidence.

But now we have the opposite problem... there is so much good information and technology out there, yet we're often not able to effectively use it. (What, another failed infrastructure / IT / software project? Don't we know how to make those?)

Our collective ego has gotten so big, we often lack the humility to say, "Wait, I need to see who has the best technology / method in this area", and then learn it and apply it.

Well, now like then, I suppose, technology is wielded, not shared freely.

Sure it spreads, but it spreads by the nature of warfare and/or commerce more than anything else.

In fact, that this person was buried with a piece of technology that predates defensive technology available in the area shows how selfish or superstitious they were.

Right between China and Assyria there lies Central Asia which was mostly inhabited by extremely mobile nomads who crossed thousands of kilometres each season; had abundance of leather; used to wear leather closes head to toe; had nearly everything around them made of leather. Nearly all males (and many females) spent their entire lives on wars.

I find it unsurprising that military technology was transferred so easily in this medium.

Isn't that cultural appropriation? Does that mean even 2700 years ago it was a problem? Disgusting.

How was this in doubt? I invent fire, you see it and copy my idea. Technology transfer. The idea is useful enough that it propagates out to the rest of the world over time. This is intuitive.

It's not just people copying each other, we have direct evidence of an Assyrian soldier who moved to China after retirement.

And who then started a DirtTube channel on how to make Assyrian armor. (Sadly the records and backups of DirtTube have been lost).

The article makes it clear they are not sure that this person served in the military or whether they bought/acquired the armor from someone who did after the fact, nonetheless it's a possibility and it's pretty cool.

I don't think there was any doubt, but archaeologists like to show solid physical evidence, of which they had not had any yet, probably mostly because leather decays so quickly. Similar to how it's hard to know exactly how material culture evolved before the stone age because much of the technology and tools have decayed. We have a good idea, and a few examples, but the more we can collect and understand the better we can paint the picture of history.

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