Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Jim McDougall
Estcrh, very well explained deductions and assessment!
Thank you for explaining these in detail so we can better examine other examples using these guidelines. Mail is something not particularly in the mainstream in arms and armor study, so that really helps.
|
Jim, while I am certain that this particular hauberk was not made in Africa I can not rule out entirely that some riveted mail could not have been manufactured in African countries. Currently though I do not know of any research which mentions this.
For anyone who may think that the riveted mail hauberks found in various African countries may have originated in Africa I suggest reading this PDF about the making of mail hauberks in the Sudan, it is very informative. I have posted some significant sections below.
THE MAKING OF MAIL AT OMDURMAN, by A.J. ARKELL, Reprinted from KUSH, vol. IV, pp. 83-5, 1956
http://www.erikds.com/pdf/tmrs_pdf_9.pdf
Quote:
THE MAKING OF MAIL AT OMDURMAN
When I was Commissioner for Archaeology and Anthropology in the Sudan, Sir
James Mann, the distinguished curator of the Wallace Collection, suggested to me in 1939 that I should try to find out the origin of the suits of mail used in the Sudan, of which a number had been brought to England as trophies from the battlefield of Omdurman. I soon discovered that the expert on Sudanese mail was Hamid Idris, then a venerable figure of well over seventy, but with all his wits about him. He had worked for the Mahdi and his successor Khalifa Abdullahi as silversmith and craftsman, and, unless my memory deceives me, he told me that he had first made mail as a young man under the Egyptian
Government before the Mahdia. In February 1940 I went with him to the Khalifa’s House Museum in Omdurman and examined all the suits of mail there. These are all made up of individually riveted rings, and for that reason Hamid Idris pronounced them as all having been made outside the Sudan and imported into it ‘from the north’, i.e. via Egypt before
1885—some of them possibly many years before 1885. He had no idea where they were made. He told me that in the time of the old Egyptian Government there were very many of these suits of mail in the Sudan, every important tribal chief or melik having 200 to 300 of them.
Although mail had been made in Omdurman during the Mahdia and before, no-one in the Sudan knows how to rivet rings, and Hamid thought that they never had had that knowledge. Sudanese craftsmen had usually used butted rings, which were imported and which they bought by weight from the merchants Kyriazi and Sirkis. About 10 kilograms of rings were needed to make one suit, and a good suit of that kind sold for £E25 in Omdurman, and more in the provinces. Suits of riveted mail fetched no higher price—which shows clearly that by that time mail was worn merely for show and not for serious,defence. There was also a third kind of mail called ‘Huksawi’ after the ill-fated GeneralHicks who fell at Sheikan early in the Mahdia. This was made out of imported split rings.
Subsequently, I made a number of enquiries aimed at ascertaining whether the riveted mail which had been imported into the Sudan ‘ from the north ’ had been made in Egypt,Tripoli, Tunis or elsewhere in North Africa ; but everywhere I drew a blank, and am now of opinion that it was not made anywhere in Africa (or in Europe, where it would have been too expensive for the Sudanese market). I am, therefore, inclined to think that it may
have come from India, for I am told by Sir James Mann that Lawrence of Arabia failed to trace its source anywhere in Syria or Arabia, although he sought hard for it. I hope that this article may encourage someone else to track this riveted mail down to its source. A.J. ARKELL
|