Emily Chan
“There is no other scale armor from this or an earlier period in China,” said Mayke Wagner, a co-author of the study and the scientific director of the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute and head of its Beijing office.
West Asian engineers designed scale armor in about 1500 B.C. to protect chariot drivers when they became part of the military.
Afterward, the armor style spread to the Persians and Scythians and eventually to the Greeks.
The armor from the Yanghai cemetery was not made in China. It was likely manufactured in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, representing rare proof of the transfer of technology between the East and the West during the first half of the first millennium B.C.
The armor mainly shields the front torso, left side, hips, and lower back. The width and height can be adjusted to fit people of different statures.
It is unclear how the armor ended up in the man’s burial. The man could’ve been a foreign soldier in the Assyrian military, or he might’ve taken the armor from someone.
