There are objects in museums you think you are familiar with,
armour being one of them.
I've got kids,
they had knights
in plastic, playmobil and lego.
Then last week with a friend, in the British Museum, we spotted these...
Bronze foot guards.
They weren't in our playmobil set
and playmobil make the smallest of accessories.
This was perhaps, along with the real reason foot guards may have become obsolete,
they were too cumbersome.
We loved the fact that the Romans who made these,
had tried to overcome the 'cumbersome-ness' of the foot-guards with practical hinges.
We genuinely did not know that hinges existed in 520BC.
But hang on, they had doors back then.
Much of the armour looked as if it had been moulded on real people,
with knobbly knees...
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| Bronze greaves (shin guards) 520-480BC |
...and muscular chests.
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| Roman cuirass (breastplate) 4th century BC |
Though not all,
this had an 'action-man-chest' look about it.
Then there are helmets,
with questionable practicality,
but with a 'don't-mess-with-me' look about them.
Eventually, sometime after 400BC,
"the eye-holes became so small and close as to be non-functional
and they finally disappeared from the design altogether".
I think they made the right call there.
Having to be practical wasn't a consideration in the design and manufacture of this armour.
Breastplate and helmet made of crocodile skin.
Made for processional purposes,
for a Crocodile cult in Egypt,
The most modern of the armour in this blog post,
it has been radio-carbon dated to the 3rd or 4th century AD.
For me, the most intriguing information about this crocodile armour
was how it came to the British Museum, from Egypt to Britain.
It was presented by Mrs Andrews in 1846.
Who was Mrs Andrews?
Why did she have this in her possession?
Had it been in her family for all/most of the fifteen-hundred years of its life?
Where did she keep it?
How often did she get it out and look at it?
Who did she show it to?
Did she ever wear it?
Did she belong to a Crocodile cult?
We can only guess at these answers.
However (though probably not a popular thought with the British Museum curators),
I would love to think that it has served as armour over the centuries,
for children to dress up in,
for all those games of soldiers and war,
long before the days of plastic.
See armour for yourself at the British Museum.
Details on their website here.
More about Room 70 and the Roman Empire here.
UPDATE
@RockaroundCroc from the British Museum has been in touch
with an answer to my question;
Who was Mrs Andrews?
She was married to Edward James Andrews, a painter and draughtsman.
He produced drawings and plans of the pyramids for H. Vyse,
an anthropologist and Egyptologist in the 19th century.
He died aged 31, and five years after his death
Mrs Andrews donated this crocodile skin to the British Museum.
Two years after this the Andrews' Egyptian collection was sold off at auction.
And @RockaroundCroc,
well he/she's a Nile Crocodile god, an Egyptian mummy at the British Museum.
Who better to answer my question!
