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Old 7th July 2016, 07:09 AM   #14
estcrh
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Now on to the typical Indo-Persian riveted mail which in the vast majority of examples will be made with alternating rows of solid links and round riveted links. The use of round rivets mades identifying most mail from India, Persian and the Ottoman Empire rather easy.

Since most European riveted mail was not made with round riveted links since around the 13th century to 14th centuries, if you encounter a riveted mail hauberk with round rivets you can be fairly sure that it is Indo-Persian. There are some examples that were not made using solid links but if they have round rivets then for the most part you can assume that it is Indo-Persian.

Until very recently it was assumed that if a hauberk was made with wedge rivets that it was automatically European but recent examples of some Indo-Persian riveted mail have been shown to be made with wedge rivets, some of these examples are in the Met museum collection. These examples have been attributed to Ottoman Circassian mail makers. The links of these are very uniform in size and shape and the overlap, which is the flattened area were the rivet goes through is very neat with no overhang. So no longer can one assume that any wedge riveted hauberk is European.

Below is an example of Ottoman 16th century round riveted mail, it is used to connect the steel plates of a cuirass together, these are typical Ottoman alternating solid and round riveted links. Both sides of the links are shown and you can clearly see the round rivet head on both sides of the riveted links. You can also see that the solid links are not perfectly round, they almost look faceted, this seems to be fairly common on Ottoman solid links from that time period unlike the Ottoman Circassian solid links which are round.

What you are seeing here is both sides of the steel plates and the attached mail. The red arrows show the round rivet heads, there are clearly visable on boths sides of the links, these links are over 500 years old and you can still see the details, you can also see the overlap on the links were the rivet goes through is quite flat and long. The solid links are shown with yellow arrows, they not round at all but have flat edges on the outside, I have no idea how they were formed.
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