Blog

Last Year, our member Ariston wrote an article for the history magazine Desperata Ferro. The article covered our reconstruction of the equipment of a Phalangite and explained about the Phalangite warfare and how it dominated the ancient world for over a century.

It was previously published on our website as scans of the Spanish magazine, but now we have translated it in German and English and published it in full. Here's the link:

After Athineos took apart his Aspis (as described here and here), it was of course necessary to reassemble it again.

The first step was to cover the naked wooden core with a soft brown leather. It is important to start with the back side of the shield to be able to attach the metal fittings before covering the front. The leather is simply glued to the wood, which is prepared by sanding it a bit. If you want to try it yourself, make sure to have a large enough piece of leather as the curvature of the bowl takes up more fabric than you initially think.

For the exhibition Gods in Colour, where the Hetairoi will be present in December, we started to research historic paint. Together with Agnes Zankl from the society "Wienische Hantwërcliute 1350", I will conduct multiple experiments with earth pigments over the next weeks.

As you surely noticed, we were busy over the last few weeks enhancing the website. Among many small things we also translated (almost) all articles, that were only available in German, to English. The links for the newly translated articles are here.

A while ago, Athineos started to completely remodel his Apsis. I had written about it in this blog at the time. Today he has gotten far enough to write down some more information. Athineos completely removed all linen covers and metal fittings from the wooden core. Out of interest we weighted all components separately, with a surprising result.

The 14.2kg original weight were distributed as follows: