Front of Armour. Back of Armour.

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A Central Asian Armour of Bands
Armours of Bands, as most Central Asian torso defenses, commonly vary between those with closures at front and center -- commonly made of two side sections which are permanently fastened at the back, and those consisting of a front and back, fastened at the sides (see the full Armour of Bands article). This reconstruction is of the second type. The front and back are here fastened by lacing a leather thong through brass loops riveted at each plate.
As one will note, this reproduction, was made for a Woman.
While women in Central Asian society were quite well accepted in battle (see the Women Warriors article), I nevertheless have not yet found any images of women wearing this particular armour. At the early stages of patterning, I found that some redesign would be necessary to accomodate the abrupt expansion at the chest - an issue that is not present for a man.

Side of Armour. I found that the best way to achieve this while retaining a smoothness of surface was to reverse the overlap of some of the plates of the front torso defense.

Skirting, from back sitting. Normally, all of the bands of a Central Asian torso defense overlap upwards (in contrast to the Roman form, where the plates overlap downwards).
Here, I kept the upwards overlap of the first two plates (counting from the bottom). I then overlapped the third plate, which also had a substantial curve and some embossing, over the second plate -- reversing the overlap so that the third overlaps downwards with the second. The third and fourth plate are again returned to the normal upwards overlap.
Armour of Bands is commonly made either as a coat -- with the torso defense, skirting, and shoulder defense permanently attached, or in separate sections of torso, skirting, and shoulder defenses. This reconstruction is made in separate sections.
The skirting is of four sections -- two front and two back. The front sections extend down to cover the knees. The back sections are substantially shorter. The four sections each have two loops riveted at the top plate, by which they are independantly attached to a belt.
The shoulder defenses consist of a dished shoulder disk attached to bands which act as an upper arm defense. These are tied with thongs to a metal loop on the shoulder strap of the torso defense.

Skirting, from back squating. The individual plates which form the armour are laced together with leather thongs.
Skirting, from side squating. There are two common ways of doing the lacing - Verticaly or Horizontaly.
I have used the first, a more East Asian method. Here a thong runs vertically through a single set of holes of all of the plates of the armour section. The next thong runs through the set of holes next to the first, and so forth.
The second lacing method has a single thong run through all of the holes of two adjacent plates -- connecting the upper to the lower plate. The next thong connects the lower plate of this set to the next plate below, and so forth.
A third common method of attaching plates, which was used in the East, is to rivet the plates to leather straps which connect the plates vertically -- similar to the method used by the Romans.
The torso is held up at the shoulders by a shoulder strapping structure which is conjectural and developed by me. Few armours of this type found retain the shoulder strapping, art images must therefore be heavily utilised in the reconstruction.
Commonly, European travelers have noted metal bands used at the shoulder -- likely of a format similar to the Japanese armour developed from this one. However, the client wanted leather for her comfort and there is sufficient pictorial evidence to justify this.

Detail of shoulder attachments. Because I did the majority of measurement by written communication, I attempted to design a system with maximum adjustibility.
To this end, I laced leather plates at the upper back. These have a number of lacing holes so that their spacing can be adjusted as needed. Separate leather bands which run from front to back are attached to these (again with a number of holes to allow adjustibility of length and spacing). At the front, these are laced to brass loops which are riveted to the upper front plate.
The leather plates are decorated with tooling. A brass loop is used as the fastening for the shoulder defense and a brass rivet, with a large decorative washer secures a hidden leather loop for lacing to the front of the torso.


More Detail Pictures currently await scanning.

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Articles and Illustrations by Norman J. Finkelshteyn.
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