The Excavations at Dura-Europos conducted by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters 1928 to 1937. Final Report VII

The Arms and Armour and other Military Equipment

Simon James

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781782973553
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a paperback reprint of the first edition, which appeared in 2004, published by British Museum Press. The ancient city of Dura-Europos, destroyed by a Sasanian Persian siege in the AD 250s, was an important regional centre of commerce, government and military control under the Seleucid, Parthian and Roman empires. During excavations in the 1920s and 1930s it became famous for finds such as a painted synagogue and early Christian chapel. Not the least spectacular of the discoveries in this 'Pompeii of the Syrian Desert' were the remains of the town's garrisons and siegeworks and massive quantities of military artefacts. The latter comprise perhaps the most important single collection of arms, armour and other equipment to survive from the Roman period, a collection which is exceptional in its size, diversity and state of preservation. Its colourful painted shields and horse armour, for example, are unequalled in the vast Roman empire or in neighbouring lands. It also holds vital importance for our knowledge of the material culture of the military in the eastern frontier lands of the Roman world. This book provides a complete catalogue of the military artefacts, most of which are now housed in Yale University Art Gallery, and analyses and assesses their cultural affiliations and uses. The archaeological evidence from the site is combined with the equally rich and rare textual and representational evidence in the form of papyri, graffiti and wall-paintings, not to mention the buildings of the city themselves, to examine the ways in which material culture actively creates and expresses identity, in this case of Roman soldiers of Syrian origin.

Part 1

Discovery and context

Discovery and context

The assemblage and its potential

The excavations of Dura-Europos have provided an invaluable window on life in the Middle East from the third century BC to the third century AD, in Seleucid, Parthian, Roman and early Sasanian times. Among the most important of the surviving remains are portable artefacts belonging to the soldiers, especially the Roman soldiers, who lived, fought and, in some cases, died at Dura.

The value of studying military artefact assemblages

Many of the military finds from Dura would catch the attention of any viewer as spectacular artefacts in their own right. However, some scholars of the ancient world, not least historians, have been dismissive of the study of military equipment as of no significant potential for contributing to wider, supposedly more important issues in the study of the past. This situation still obtains, despite the development since 1960 of the small field of Roman military equipment studies, which owes its present flourishing state to the pioneering work of H. Russell Robinson (1975). This is partly the result of scholarly misunderstanding of the nature of archaeological evidence, which in turn is due to the relative youth and the theoretical underdevelopment of research into such material.

For example, the historian Adrian Goldsworthy rightly highlights the shortcomings of past archaeological work on arms, which has concentrated solely on the function of weapons to the exclusion of the key question of morale. In consequence, he is rather dismissive of the potential of archaeology, as opposed to documentary studies, for understanding Roman warfare (Goldsworthy 1996, 10, 173–4). Even David Kennedy, an archaeologist, is hardly more enthusiastic; in his survey of the evidence for the Roman army in the East, he does not mention military equipment or other artefacts at all. Clothing, fittings, horse harness, arms and armour are not listed as even potentially significant. The record consists of installations and texts (Kennedy 1996b).

There are a number of other reasons for the relegation of such studies to the periphery. Most military history has been written from the point of view of officers and commanders, and ‘grand’ themes such as military organization and structures, officers’ careers, strategy and tactics. This has been generally true of studies of the Roman army in Britain and elsewhere, and especially those of the Anglo-German tradition exemplified by the influential ‘Durham school’ founded by Prof. Eric Birley (e.g. Birley 1988a). Hardware such as weapons and the remains of military dress represent as directly as possible the soldiers in the ranks, an area with low status in Birley’s scheme of things (Birley 1988b, 3; James 2002).

Another discernible factor is academic prejudice against the practical – how people did things, made artefacts and used them. Such aspects are often implicitly devalued as ‘uncerebral’ and therefore trivial. Military equipment studies in particular have long involved the use of experiment through the construction of replicas in order to understand practical aspects of the use of weapons and armour. These are regarded by many scholars with a mixture of amusement, embarrassment or scorn, especially when produced and used, mostly for public display, by the historical re-enactment groups that are so numerous in Britain, such as the ‘Roman legionaries’ of the Ermine Street Guard, whose experiences actually provide enormously valuable feedback for understanding the artefacts in question. These activities also stir other deeply rooted suspicions. Since the First World War, Western culture has generally come to regard the study of war and violence as morally suspect and lacking in intellectual credibility. Such military history as is undertaken has long tended to avoid the realities of battle, interest in which is likely to be seen as psychologically dubious (Keegan 1988, 28–31, 48–59; Luttwak 1993, 5; James 2002).

More cogently, as was mentioned above, many of those who work with military artefacts have been open to charges of failure to move beyond crude and anachronistic functionalism in explaining and interpreting the material. Although this has started to change, much discussion of, for example, the design of dress and weapons still revolves solely around supposed enhancements of protective features in helmets and so on, as though the Roman army conducted modern-style experimental trials, and ‘must have’ improved armour during the early imperial period at least (assumptions underpinned by an expectation of progress under the ‘high’ empire, and of deterioration during Rome’s ‘decline’). The possibility that many changes occurred for other reasons, and that features may have been adopted for their symbolic meanings rather than any functional purpose, is only now beginning to be considered.

As long ago as 1970 Donald Dudley wrote that ‘in the last resort, the design of helmets counts for less than the morale of the men who wear them’ (Dudley 1970). I believe that new intellectual tools now available in archaeology for the study of such material can help us to address this valid criticism. Dura provides a striking instance of the potential of archaeology as a primary means of exploring the past, not as a mere ‘handmaiden of text based history’. It can act as a laboratory to demonstrate that archaeology, deployed on equal terms with textual sources, can make equally profound contributions to writing history in the most general sense. It will be argued that the study of Dura’s martial material culture in particular can go far beyond the merely functional, to deepening our understanding of military history, and not least of the social history of soldiers and the communities among which they lived.

The creation of a detailed narrative of the siege, and our understanding of the competing forces and their actions, methods and equipment, do not simply form an archaeologically-led project; they reveal a story almost entirely told by archaeology. Dura is about weapons and equipment in the context of a battlefield, in the absence of directly relevant texts. It challenges assumptions about the inherent potential of archaeology made by writers like Goldsworthy: for example, the material remains of the twisted bodies of the men who died in the countermine at Tower 19 bring us as close to the real experience of soldiers on the battlefield as any Latin text.

At a superficial level, Dudley was right to say that equipment design was less important than the morale of the wearer but, at a more subtle level, he was quite wrong. Dress and equipment are not just passive artefacts that are hung on soldiers; current understandings of human material culture show that the artefacts and environments that humans construct and inhabit have a much more active, indeed interactive, role in creating individuals, societies and identities (e.g. Schiffer 1999). In the case of Roman and Sasanian soldiers, clothing, armour and weapons did not simply encase the man; they did not simply enable him to live and, sometimes, to fight; nor did they just express his special status as a warrior in visual terms. Partly a matter of personal preference, partly determined by the group, they were actually a vital component in creating his identity, for himself and for others, by physically framing, enabling and obliging him to move, to behave and to appear in characteristic ways which marked him out as part of this community of soldiers, of this unit, and of no other. Then, as now, the design of helmets – and of tunics, of boots – is intimately and reflexively involved with the creation of the soldier’s self-identity, and so with those vital morale factors; they are a fundamental part of the literal embodiment of being a soldier (James 1999).

This identity may be intensified and welded to a remarkable degree on campaign, and especially in the heat of battle, but it is not born there. It is created in camp; during training, working and living together, in peacetime, among groups of soldiers more or less embedded in the world of civilians. Study of dress, equipment and appearance, then, is also about the wider question of soldiers in society, as well as contemporary craftsmanship, and the nuts and bolts of the soldier’s profession in peace and war. Such study also brings us close to the physical reality of the soldier’s own world, especially the relatively little-known world of the ranks; our knowledge from documentary sources of ordinary Roman milites, for example, consists mostly of terse epitaphs, or prose accounts largely written by unsympathetic, contemptuous, or even fearful aristocrats. It is the very personal remains of military dress and equipment, combined with the rich contemporary record of depictions of soldiers commissioned by soldiers, which allow us to approach their creation and perception of themselves (James 1999).

The military archaeology of Dura-Europos and its significance

The story of the rediscovery of the deserted city of Sâlihîyah (‘place of Saladin’: Breasted 1924, 50) and its identification as ancient Dura-Europos was discussed in the preface. The most useful account is Hopkins 1979, which also contains an extensive bibliography (for the historical and political context of the excavations see Velud 1988; Gelin 1997; Yon 1997). After the identification of the site in 1920 (Breasted 1922; 1924) the first scientific excavations were undertaken in 1922–3 (Cumont 1926), followed by the main series of excavations, sponsored jointly by the French Academy and Yale University, over ten winter seasons between 1928 and 1937 (Table 1; Reps. I–IX, published 1929–52; the report on the tenth and final season was never published but a valuable summary of available information has been produced by Matheson 1992). Funding was heavily dependent on the making of ever more spectacular finds, a pressure which partly accounts for many of the problems encountered below; further planned seasons were abandoned when finance dried up. (Since 1986 field research has been resumed, on a more modest scale but with far more sophisticated methodology and technology, by an international team under joint French and Syrian direction: Leriche et al. 1986; Leriche and Mahmoud 1988, 1990, 1994, 1997.)

Dura’s military assemblage is of enormous value to Roman scholars, and indeed to scholars studying the Sasanian world, since it includes a number of pieces believed to belong to the attackers. So far as I am aware these are, to date, the only early Sasanian military artefacts known. Arguably, Dura’s martial material culture is also of an importance unique in the Roman empire, due to a combination of features:

•	the assemblage is very large and highly diverse
•	much of it is unusually well-preserved
•	it remains the only really major military assemblage from the Roman East
•	it was recovered from a remarkably rich archaeological and documentary context
•	that context, an urban military base, is unusually thoroughly explored
•	much of the material is very closely dated to the mid-250s AD

Dura was always a garrisoned town, and each phase of its existence has left some military traces. Overwhelmingly, however, the military testimony from Dura is the archaeology of a Roman defeat which resulted in the permanent devastation and abandonment of the site. It is to this local military catastrophe, and the consequent snuffing-out of the life of the city, that we owe unique insights into the Roman East and the imperial armies of the third century AD, and some knowledge of their foes.

The military archaeology at the site consists of military equipment and related artefacts, installations (the walls, towers and other buildings, purpose-built and converted, belonging to the garrison) and the siegeworks. The excavations also produced a number of important representations of soldiers and warfare, including ‘the sacrifice of Julius Terentius’, the only painting of an identifiable military unit from the Roman world (p. 39; Plate 1; Fig. 18). A rich and celebrated collection of documentary sources was also recovered. This includes a large number of formal inscriptions and graffiti which, although provisionally published in the Preliminary Reports, still await definitive publication. It also includes a major group of texts on papyrus (Welles et al. 1959).

At a general level, the importance of the Dura excavations for understanding the Roman military can hardly be exaggerated. This is clearly seen in the case of the papyri. For example, of the 134 documents presented in Fink’s corpus, Roman Military Records on Papyrus, some 83 – no less than 62% – are from Dura (Fink 1971). Kennedy notes that the documents from Dura, especially those relating to ‘the duty rosters for [cohors XX Palmyrenorum] provide us with hundreds of named personnel, more than for all of the other legions and auxiliary regiments in the entire Near East … These are sobering figures. It is only at Dura-Europos that one comes close to the variety and wealth of evidence readily available to the prosopographer of, for example, the British army of ...