Despite the common perception that the "Heroic Age" was all about duelling champions and undisciplined mobs, modern history believes that military organisation and formation-based combat existed in Greece in some form already during the Mycenaean era (this was certainly the case for their neighbouring civilisations, such as the Hittites and the Egyptians). I'm not sure if it's safe to assume that the Argive shield was originally developed with a specific tactic in mind, other than being a heavy infatry shield (in other words, large). I think there is social and cultural reasons to add in this simplified schema, like the development of city-state army and the conception of "national" culture favorising the development of a kind of weapons. Large-size of infantrymen with good equipment and better training => specialisation step-by-step in the phalanx => selection of the best weapons => improvement in the selected weaponary And that is because of the development of the Greece during the 8th century: The most reasonable is to think the Aspis was developed after the Greek warriors started to rely on the phalanx for the battle. When the phalanx start to be used, the most pratical shape for the shield has become the most common.Īnd with the big conflict with the sea peoples, there was surely a lot of weaponary exchange. Personnaly I think there was a great diversity in shape for the shields of this period. You can see the shields are very similar to the Aspis and have a similar date (8th century BC) as your Urartian shields, but the one pictured above was found in Sweden. The Herzsprung shields are one example and were found in Germany and the nordic countries: Round shields are probably some of the most widespread types of shields that can be found all over the world. Compare the figure 8 shield with the Dipylon shield and the Bootian shield, and it looks like an evolution. So basically you can be sure there has been some contacts between the peoples.īut: The aspis being an important part of a specific kind of warfare the Urarti never employed, I'd think the shield evolved alongside with the warfare rather gradually, starting with the figure 8 shield employed by Mykene. I'm just not up to date with the origins of the aspis at the moment.įindings like the Nebra sky disk (using metals from various distant parts of Europe) and the Taklamakan mummys indicate, that the world has in some ways been globalized early on. Still, as many hellenic inventions or customs have been supposedly influenced by eastern cultures I would not generally discard the idea of some foreign influence.
While the "classical phalanx" is a very refined way of shield-wall-formation the general idea of a shield-wall or spear-hedge style of fighting is very basic and has been used by many cultures thoughout history to field large bodies of un-, or poorly trained troops. But even if similarities should be found it would not be safe th say those shields had inspired the hellenes. The Aspis is highly adapted to the way of fighting it was supposedly used to - that's why I would try to find some depictions ofthe urartu-shield in action.
An Aspis is formed like a flattened bowl, still deep but just not like a partial orb, also it has a massive rim that I do not see on the urartu-shield. (I'm not saying there aren't any useful depictions, I just did not find them )Īnyway, the shield you show seems to be heavily deformed, the others I saw seemed to be shaped like the part of a spere, like a cut off piece of an hollow orb (sorry, my english does not provide me with the correct words at the moment ). I just did a quick search with the terms you provided and did not find anything that depicts the usage of this type of shield.
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