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:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)