Arms and Armour in Antiquity and the Middle Ages; Also a Descriptive Notice of Modern Weapons (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE BRONZE PERIOD. ARMS AND ARMOUR Ol' THE ASSYRIANS: OF THE GAULS: AND OF THE GREEKS OF THE HEROIC AGES. It has already been stated that, by common consent, the title of the " Bronze Period " has been bestowed on those early ages in which men, in consequence of their still continuing in ignorance of the nature and working of iron, employed the mixed metal bronze, an alloy of copper, zinc, and tin, for the manufacture as well of their implements as of their weapons. The three successive " Periods " of " Stone," " Bronze," and " Iron," we may here repeat, in this respect penetrated or overlapped one another, so that after the introduction of works in bronze, the old flint implements still continued to be retained in use; and in like manner bronze weapons and implements and those of iron, for a prolonged period of time, were in use together. Thus, when they invaded Gaul, the Romans always wore defensive armour formed of iron, and all their offensive weapons were made of the same metal; but, at the same period, the arms of the Gauls were constructed of both bronze and iron, and both metals were evidently held in high esteem.5 In this chapter we propose to treat of the weapons, and also of the defensive equipment of the Assyrians, of the Gauls, and of the Greeks at the time of the Trojan war. Our silence concerning the arms and armour of other contemporary nations must be attributed to its true cause?the absence of historical monuments. Any attempt, therefore, to include other contemporary nations wilh the races that wehave specified, could only lead us deliberately to place before the reader unfounded conjectures in place of authenticated facts.8 Section I. Assyrian Arms and Armour. The discoveries made of late years by M. Botta and Mr. Layard among the ...