![]() ![]() The structure of the shield from the Temple of the Oxus is more close to the depictions of the triskele on the Athenian coins minted in the second half of the 6th century BCE (up to 510 BCE). Depictions of shields with such emblem are known for the Greek vase-painting of the period from the middle of the 6th to the beginning of the 5th centuries BCE, as well as for Athenian coins. triskelēs τρισκελησ, “three legs‘three legs’) in scholarship. The emblem in the shape of the three running legs has received the name triskele (Gk. Around the edge, it was tightened by a bronze rim, and in the center it had a bronze umbo in the shape of a disk with an elevated part. The shield was wooden with metal components. One of such shields was found in the Temple of the Oxus. 188).Īlready in the Achaemenid epoch, and especially in the Hellenistic times, shields of Hellenistic origin had appeared and spread in Iran. There is a credible suggestion that this was a trophy or an imported Achaemenid shield, or a Saka imitation of the latter (Gorelik, p. The shield was tightly covered with leather” (Bernshtam, p. The two middle bars were positioned close to each other for the fixation of the handle, and the remaining space was filled by braided sea-buckthorn twigs. ![]() Thus, for example, one of the shields of the Pamiri Sakas represented “a rectangular frame of 1.4 by 1.5 m made of billets with six cross-bars. 128 where further bibliography is given). The Scythes from mountainous Altai had shields, which consisted of pieces of leather with wooden sticks of round cross-section braided into them (Litvinskiǐ, 1972, p. Similar twig-braided shields of round, rectangular, and other shapes, tightly covered with leather or raw ox-hides, had been widely spread in ancient times. Sometimes, shields were made by fixing three layers of leather onto a carcass made of twigs. The shields were made of wood (latticed or braid of twigs), and then this frame was tightly covered with leather. ![]() In the Saka burials of the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, which were excavated in the eastern Pamirs, remains of several shields have been found. Real findings of the shields in Bactria, as well as in the entire Central Asia, are not numerous. The basis for the appearing of such people’s etymology must have been the acquaintance of the Greeks with the weapons of the Sakan tribes (Litvinskiǐ and P’yankov, p. Maybe, this was the result of the juxtaposing the tribal name with the designation of the shield in the Greek language. In the imagination of the Greeks, the sakhos shield was invented by the Sakas, which was probably a result of theshield” (σαχος) was invented by the Saks. Thus, Arrian designates the shield of the Sakas by the term Uerron (Υέρρον (Arrian, Anabasis 4.4.4), presuming a braid shield or a light shield tightly covered with leather. The authors of the Antiquity knew about the existence of several types of shields among the Central Asian peoples (for the Middle-Persian terminology see Tafazzoli, pp. The symbolics of the shield in the Iranian world is first of all connected with the Sun and the heavens. In the opinion of the linguists, this term can probably be etymologized with the Ancient Greek sakhos ncient-Greekσαχος (“shield”), the Vedic tvand the Vedic tvàk meaning ‘leather,’ ‘fur,’ and, apparently, ‘shield’ (see Brandenstein and Mayrhofer, p. In the Ancient-Persian, the term *taka was used to designate the shield. To the same family of words also belongs the Khotanese-Sakan baṭha which means ‘protective chain-mail,’ ‘coat of mail’ (Bailey, pp. ![]() Bailey) belongs to a large group of words deriving from the ancient Indo-Iranian word var (or war) which means ‘cover,’ ‘protection.’ From it also derive one of the Avestan terms for the designation of the shield vərəδraδra, the Ancient-Iranian *vrədra (‘shield’), the Armenian (borrowed from Iranian) vahan (shield), and the Pahlavi vartīk, gartīk (protective cloths). Another Avestan designation of the shield is vərəδδra ( AirWb., col. The term spāra-dāšta (‘the one who carries a shield’) occurs in the Avesta twice ( Yt. Shield had been known to the Eastern Iranians since olden days. This shield, datable to the 10th century BCE, is one of the most ancient of the metal shields found in Iran (Melikian-Chirvani, pp. In Lurestan, a round bronze shield was found, which has a skirting along the edge, an umbo in the center, and relief depictions of fantastic creatures. ![]()
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