African knights - African armour collection thread

[Ian]

I was fascinated by the armor shown by LinusLinothorax and reproduced in this thread below. It struck a chord about a race of people in the Sudan who were described in antiquity by the Romans as "headless." This race was said to occupy the area during the Post-Meroitic Period (350–543 CE).

Here is some material from a Polish Museum web site (http://www.muzarp.poznan.pl/en/exhib...d-and-x-group/):

The Post-Meroitic Period and X-Group (350 – 543 AD)

The fall of the Empire
Although the last Meroitic monarch known by name was Yesbokheamani (283 – 300 AD), 30 years later the dead rulers were still buried in the Northern cemetery of Meroe. On the other hand, an inscription of an Ethiopian king Aezana, discovered in the city of Axum and dated to c. 350 AD, reports a war with the Noba people and the conquest of Al-Butana. Probably at that time the kingdom of Meroe no longer existed. Whether the hegemony of Meroe collapsed due to an internal crisis, or whether its fall was partly brought about y raiding nomads from the desert, is a question that cannot be decisively answered…

The nomads build tumuli…
The next two centuries, the so-called Post-Meroitic period, is one of the most mysterious and least recognized periods in the history of the Sudan. Monumental architecture and knowledge of writing disappeared altogether, and in the belt between Sennar and the Fourth Cataract there appear earth burial tumuli of the Tanqasi culture, today the only legible remains of the Noba nomad tribes who arrived at this region from the territories of modern Kordofan. An especially large and richly equipped burial ground was discovered in el-Hobagi.

The Blemmyes – a wild headless race
The Meroitic inhabitants of Lower Nubia encountered arrivals using the Nubian language. These included the Nobatae who in 296 were apparently entrusted by Emperor Diocletian with the defense of the southern Egyptian frontier, and the Blemmyes from Eastern Desert, scornfully described by Pliny as "a wild headless race with eyes and ears rising directly from their shoulders." The latter were particularly devoted to the old Egyptian religion and each year would go on a mass pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Isis on the Island of Philae. The specific civilization that emerged from the fusion of these elements is named the X-Group or Ballana culture.

The nameless kings from Ballana and Qustul
It was in Ballana, and also at nearby Qustul, that the cemeteries of huge tumuli with burials of tribal rulers were found. The dead were equipped with immense splendor – the burial gifts included breathtaking crowns that used the symbolism of ancient Egyptian motifs, and highly precious silver vessels imported from territories of the Roman Empire. The political significance of those nameless kings is highly obscure. Probably we shall never know whether the two Nobatian rulers, Silko and Kharamazeye, mentioned in the inscriptions on the temple walls in Kalabsha, had also been buried in one of the Ballana tumulus graves…

So no less an authority than Pliny described the Blemmyes as "a wild headless race with eyes and ears rising directly from their shoulders," and later artists depicted them as very strange indivudals with their mouths and nose arising in their chest (see drawing below).

As far as I know, there have never been found any skeletal remains of such individuals. However, in the 3rd C the Blemmyes were a belligerent group who fought with everyone in the area, including the Romans, and likely wore their body armor in encounters with other groups. The picture shown by Linus Linothorax indicates a type of body armor that extended from "the eyes to the knees of the wearer." You can see that this is an accurate description by the positioning of the arm holes, which are quite low. Now if the Romans only saw these people in their armor, it would indeed appear that their eyes were at the level of their shoulders, and therefore their mouths and noses must be in their chests. The term Blemmyes comes from the Latin blemmyae meaning "headless" (cf. Greek akephaloi). The picture below shows a 15th C artist's idea what such a person looked like and is taken from a woodcut in Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).

Over the years, a number of attempts have been made to explain what people thought they saw in ancient times when they described this headless race. Some have said that their heads were hidden between their shoulders by hoisting those up to an extravagant height. I think we have a simpler and more compelling explanation in the form of the armor they used. From the shape shown in the accompanying picture, it can be seen that the eyes of individuals wearing such armor would have appeared at the level of their shoulders (i.e. the upper level of the armor over their shoulders which was suspended above their actual shoulders to protect the neck and face).

This explanation for the race of Blemmyes does not appear anywhere in the historical literature that I have searched, and appears to be a new observation.

Ian.