NOVA

I think it's very telling, that in the new kingdom the highest military honor for bravery was a golden fly. You think about a fly, it's persistence. It's actually quite a brave little creature. It comes to sit on your nose. You swatted, it goes away. It comes back again. And I think that's what chariot warfare was like. There's no point in having a mobile platform unless it's mobile and there's no point parking the chariots and shooting at them. You've got to go in and that's the advantage and shoot closer. You're getting maximum impact to shoot at the enemy. Hit-and-run, hit-and-run, annoying and pestering just like a fly. But how close is sensible? If you look at a horse you see how vulnerable it is side on. Certainly they wouldn't be running like that. And the horses had armor, and many of the men had armor. This is a reproduction of Egyptian armor. It's a rawhide armor, leather armor. There's leather armor in Tutankhamen tomb. There's wall paintings showing armor and it's like this, it's lamellar armor. It's made of little scales and they're all sewn on a linen backing and each scale overlaps one row over the other and each scale overlaps one to each side of it. So any points you hit, you're actually hitting three scales. You could have bronze armor with scales made in bronze and these have been found. So, it could be magnificently resplendent with bronze scales alternating bronze and leather. But this is a little bit heavier and an awful lot hotter to wear. What we need to understand is how effective this was because that will tell us how safe it was to go how close to the enemy. I don't think anyone has ever tested it before. So I am going to set this up and shoot an arrow at it. Look at that it bounced down. So it's just bitten into one of the scales. You can see it's gone through this scale here but it hasn't got through the underlying scale. And that was at 10 yards with a 75 pound draw weight bow, extreme close range. You wouldn't do that against formed infantry but it could be at that range, chariot to chariot at warfare. The point is, armor works.