History
The earliest finds of European pattern mail are from the 3rd century BCE from Horný Jatov, Slovakia, and a Celtic chieftain's burial located in Ciumeşti, Romania. Its invention is commonly credited to the Celts, but there are also examples of Etruscan pattern mail dating from at least the 4th century BCE. Mail may have been inspired by the much earlier scale armour. Mail spread to North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, Tibet, Korea and Japan.
Mail continues to be used in the 21st century as a component of stab-resistant body armour, cut-resistant gloves for butchers and woodworkers, shark-resistant wetsuits for defence against shark bites, and a number of other applications.
Read more about this topic: Mail (armour)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
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—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)