Shields Like Fish Scales, Part 2: Shield Walls

We ended up looking at a paper from many years ago by an American scholar named Homer Dubs that tried to connect that observation in the ancient Chinese history to a fact from Roman history about a group of soldiers that were sent somewhere east after being captured by the

Parthian Empire in battle. And we ended up coming down with some major doubts about this particular theory, But it's interesting because of the various facts that connects to, one of which was simply that you could have a formation of ancient Roman soldiers with their shields overlapping so that they looked like fish scales. Now that's a kind of

striking image in itself. So I know, Rob that captured your attention and made us want to come back and talk about shield wall maneuvers more generally today.

little stronger than that. I think pretty much everybody agrees that the first armor of any kind was the shield. Body armor itself probably only goes back to the third millennium BCE, but the first shields are just lost in the shadows of prehistory. The use of shields likely emerged from just the use of found objects or nature facts defend off attacks. And of course we can easily imagine how one would quickly realize that, oh, the simple club that I can use offensively is also something I can

use defensively. What else could I do to this to make an even better block? Right?

Weapons on this topic. This is a great book that gets into I brought this one up in the show before as well, about the evolution of various offensive and defensive features for organisms, and then comparing that to various arms races in the development of different weapons systems among humans.

Emmlin doesn't have much to say about the shield specifically, but in general compares the development of human body armor to an interesting case that of the stickleback fish, with marine species having more spines, more pronounced armor plating, and then fresh water variations being like less spiky, less armored, And the idea is that this kind of underlines his general statement and that is that in general observation of

nature is that any kind of weapon is costly. You're putting biological energy into the development of those that armor or those weapons, and you're missing out on other things because of it. And you know, it's it's like that in actual warfare as well. I mean there are various human complications as well, but generally, if something is no

longer useful, it will stop being used. And if there is a need for something to keep up with some sort of other advancement, well then that's where the development is going to go.

It's getting heavier, it's harder for you to move around, it makes it it reduces the amount of space that you have access to and attacking and so forth. There are downsides to defenses. They're not only upside.

I do this, I find myself doing this. I'm like reading some sort of text about ancient warfare, and you know, it's a really good text, very well cited, making very rational arguments. But you know, I have seen movies like three hundred, I've seen movies like Gladiator and Troy and so forth, and you know those movies are going to inherently have errors, and they're just part of like my visual catalog of the time period.

out that the shield came first. Everything else followed. As we've discussed in the show before, you had the invention of the helmet, roughly twenty five hundred BCE being the time when this becomes popular, and this largely emerges as a counter to the devastating battlefield prowess of the mace, and so soldiers of the ancient world did typically wear helmes, but according to Fagan and Wholett, they typically wore no additional body armor and depended on the use of a

large shield to cover them from head to foot, with the frequent addition of a pair of greeves, they write to protect the lower legs. But we'll have more to say on that in a bit. So, yeah, this idea you go back to the ancient world is like you have a shield, you have a helmet, and you're essentially good to go. No notes, and they had this would remain standard for centuries upon centuries to follow and even on up into the sixteenth century CE among the Aztecs

of the America's a big caveat here. There's going to be a lot of variation in specific shields, but there are some sweeping generalities that are in play. Basically, they say it was a popular approach for various militaries at various times, in part because a simple shield was far easier to produce and mass produce compared to fitted body armor.

adds a great deal of additional protection. And unlike in your your RPG, you can't in real life you're you're not gonna say, well, I could give my character a shield, but would it look as cool as ultimately you know, it may just be like one point of armor class, two points of armor class, whatever the case may be in your game, but in reality it can make a obviously a huge difference.

An example that the authors here bring up is the twenty five hundred BCE Vulture stela from Tello, which shows the troops of Sumerian ruler Inannatum dressed in helmets, brandishing spears and carrying large rectangular shields. The depiction, they also argue, seems to provide us with a very early depiction of a shield wall, so a collective formation of shields. However, as we'll touch on in a bit, just because you see shields position a certain way in art, even ancient art,

doesn't mean that's necessarily exactly how it was arranged. But we'll come back to that. They add that the exact kind of shield used would depend largely on the roll of the given infantry. So fast moving skirmishers are typically going to depend on small shields. They could be used

with precision and without hindering your speed and maneuverability. Meanwhile, you're plotting heavy infantry would often benefit from these big rectangular shield designs that they could provide a great deal of cover and could be lined up to present a

shield wall against attacks. A very late example of the former, though, you can look to the clans of the Scottish Highlands and the Highland Charge where they would would they would drop their musket after firing it and then rush forward with a with a small shield and a melee weapon. It's like a shock attack, but that would be a you know, prime example where you can benefit from the protection of the small shield with but still being able

to maintain a great deal of mobility and speedy. Now, one of the resources we turned to for this episode is the excellent blog of doctor Bretz Devereaux, a collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, which is a great blog if you're interested in the history of warfare, especially if you're interested in Roman warfare, but he gets into a lot of medieval warfare as well, and frequently analyzes warfare that we see depicted in the Lord of the Rings show, even

movies like Dune, and of course things like a Game of Thrones or Rome or you know, the latest Gladiator movie, and.

shield sizes. Quote, Battlefield shields tend to vary within a relatively narrow range of sizes and basically two major shape categories, either round or oblong. So there's a lot of variety, certainly as I already mentioned, but they tend to fit into these two broad categories. Alongside the usage already sighted, he also points out that there were never, so far

as he could tell, square shield. So if you see a square shield, like a perfect square shield in art or in some sort of TV show or movie, you were right to be suspicious.

we see in films and video games. The larger ones were broad enough to on their own block a significant portion of the soldier's body, and even the smaller examples could cover exceptionally well if you were turning your body, turning your shoulder toward the enemy, making yourself as narrow as possible behind the shield, which was typical.

of a church door. But an interesting thing that Devreeu points out as well is that most shields are going to focus on protecting the head in the chest, and even smaller shields are going to do this quite well. And as far as lower parts of the body goes

like you know, lower legs, the feet and all. He adds that in close combat, all strikes are going to originate from shoulder height, and you know, certainly you could aim at your opponent's feet in such combat, but it would be tricky and it would expose you to counterattack. So the defense is ultimately well placed here. Also, coming back to body positioning, you're going to have your body perpendicular to the combat. And on top of that, most of the shields you're looking at are going to be

maneuverable to some degree or another. I mean they're all maneuverable to a degree, but perhaps more so than a novice might assume just looking at images.

rather active defensive bit of armor. Now, as far as arrows go, Devereux points out that it's only short range that you'd need to worry about concerning like your lower legs and feet. Long range missiles are going to be coming from above anyway, So again, imagine yourself holding that shield up. You know, if it's positioned correctly towards the incoming arrows, you're not going to have to worry as

much about your feet. So basically, shields can provide a great deal of coverage for the individual fighter on their own. But then in formation we get into the widely used shield wall formations that you see in various militaries throughout the ancient world and for centuries and centuries after that. Now Devro goes into a great deal more detail about all of this that we're not going to cover. That post is a great deep dive, so I recommend checking

it out. But there are several key points that he makes about shield walls, and points about how shield walls are generally incorrectly depicted in video games, movies, and art. And again this is kind of important because these are the examples that end up coloring the way we think about it. So I'm compressing many of his points here, but essentially this one I found really entertaining and insightful. Really tight formations of soldiers with shields and swords just

look cool. They look cool now, and they look cool in Roman times, and as he points out, we actually see Roman depictions all their own troops locked into tight formations for seemingly this reason, like tighter formations depicted than they would have actually had on the field.

You would have different kinds of formations, and sometimes for various reasons, soldiers would close up into tighter ranks and hold their shields out. And we'll talk about some reasons for that as we go on, but they're not often in reality as tight as we see in fictional media. There's more space in between them for good reasons.

swing the you know, like your your rifle around. But this tight image of formations then is used to imagine formations for historic soldiers who were swinging around weapons or

using big spears or something. So that that's I think that's a great point as well, the way we take modern or at least more recent examples and then use those, perhaps even subconsciously to imagine the past, which you know, this is a big tool that we use in imagining the past in general, like start with what you know and then and then imagine like ancient people doing that. But you know, it doesn't apply, you know, one to

one for every situation. Another point that he brought up that I really liked was that, you know, in in various screen depictions especially, we see more unrealistic depictions of shield walls. And that is because fiction's off and revolve around some sort of novel and exciting solution to a tactical problem, when in reality, quote, like most tactics, shield walls are effective but not particularly clever.

This is not the exciting ideas make for on the battlefield, make for great stories, but at the end of the day, there's a formula that works, and nearly those generals are going to stick to it as much as possible.

Shields were also large again and could cover an individual quite well, even against incoming arrows which he drives home. Were not as plentiful and rapid fire as films make it seem, so troops could and did advance against incoming arrows like arrows, like it's not just you know suddenly that it's raining arrows and the troops just can't move for five minutes.

And all of this was the domain of domain of trained soldiers. So Devro warns that it's easy to air. On either side of this realization, you'll you'll either assume that the troops were inexperienced and untrained, or that they were robots or just superhumanly trained, you know, professional soldiers who just could not air and you know, and would not break.

like an unbroken physical barrier of matter. The shields are all right there next to each other, but that just the threat of a soldier paying attention to the space in between the shields is in reality a barrier that you can't really get through because it is a threat barrier.

It's not that the shields are physically touching all the way down the line, but you can't just like rush into that space because you know if you rush into that space, you will almost certainly get get hit with a spear or a sword.

three BCE. He says that they made their way east into Asia and fought in in a battle against the army of the Han Chinese Empire in the thirties BCE, and then eventually that's the survivors same group of Roman soldiers settled in a region of northern China and became

the ancestors of a group of people called the le Chien. Now, in the previous episode, we raised a number of reasons for doubting this hypothesis, with different levels of doubt for the different parts of it, particularly doubting the Roman ancestry of the le Chien people at large, which was I would say pretty thoroughly discredited by y chromosome genetic analysis published by Joe at All in two thousand and seven

in the Journal of Human Genetics. We also raised doubts about the role of Romans in the historic battle between the Hun warlord Chicchi and the Chinese army. There's less direct evidence against this, but we just noted that it's an interesting idea. But many scholars with the relevant historical specializations have disagreed with dubs and we observed personally from reading his paper that it just rests on a lot

of speculative assumptions. He's making a lot of jumps and is it's dubious the amount of certainty he seems to have when he gets to the conclusion. It's more I would rank it more like kind of an interesting possibility. Yeah, this is kind of a side note, but I've mentioned this on the show before. It's the kind of idea that I think benefits from what I would call esthetic epistemology, the kind of thing that people want to believe is

true because it's cool to think about. And you know, I think the age we live in and the podcasting medium in particular, really have a weakness for esthetic epistemology. I don't know why it is. Podcasts, but it seems to me podcasts today are a place where it is so easy to leverage interest into factuality. And there are some big shows out there that make this, I would say, almost their entire project. It's just something something, it's a

really cool idea. It kind of changes everything you know about history or it's like whoa, you never would have thought this could have happened, But that's crazy to imagine. And so it just starts to be like, well, then it is true, and if you doubt it, you've got your covering it up. You're trying to hide something. It's just something I think podcasters and podcast listeners should be aware of.

battle against the Western Chinese army. The reason he says they're Roman soldiers is a line in a Chinese history composed mostly in the first century called the History of the Former Han Dynasty or sometimes just the Book of Han, and it's a passage describing the battlefield in this battle based on a painting made by someone who is there,

and it mentions a troop formation defending the city. As quote, more than one hundred foot soldiers lined up in a fish scale formation, and Dubbs takes this to mean that the soldiers were holding shields in their hands and that the shields were overlapping one another and covering the men all around, like the scales overlapping on the skin of

a fish and covering the fish. Now, for a number of reasons, Dubbs argues that this description really could only refer to Roman legionaries holding a particular type of center grip shield called a scutum or plural scuta, and performing a maneuver called a testudo. Now, whether or not Dubbs was correct about the battle, it's again, I think it's not impossible. Interesting idea, but there are a lot of causes for doubt. It is worth taking a look at what the testudo was and what we know about it.

Testudo is a Latin word that means tortoise, and if we look at some passages in ancient Roman texts, we can see a bit about what it was and how it was used. For example, I picked up a few references to the Testudo in Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War. This is a text that Julius Caesar wrote himself about his first hand experience of military conquest and suppression of uprisings in the region of Gaul. That's a

lot of modern day France basically. And yes, he did write this himself about his own experiences, and yes he does refer to himself in the third person, so it's quite funny. So the first passage I was going to mention. And by the way, this is the English version translated by McDevitt and Bond.

able to maintain his position upon the wall. So this is describing the galls attack on the wall of a fortified position. They gather around the walls. They're throwing stones. I guess you have to imagine missiles are probably going both directions, and mainly they're throwing stones to get the defenders away from the edge of the walls. And then quote, forming a testudo, they advance to the gates and undermine

the wall. So the testudo is something they assemble into when approaching the gates of a fortress or a walled town. There's another passage in book five, chapter nine. Caesar is describing leading a detachment of Roman soldiers to meet the enemy in a position I think in a forest, and referring to the enemy, he says, quote, they advancing to the river with their cavalry and chariots from the higher ground,

began to annoy our men and give battle. Being repulsed by our cavalry, they concealed themselves in woods, as they had secured a place admirably fortified by nature and by art, which, as it seemed they had before prepared on account of a civil war, for all entrances to it were shut up by a great number of felled trees. Okay, so

that's the setup. The enemy has retreated fortified position in the woods, then Caesar says, they themselves rushed out of the woods to fight here and there, and prevented our men from entering their fortifications. But the soldiers of the seventh Legion, having formed a testudo and thrown up a rampart against the fortification, took the place and drove them out of the woods, receiving only a few wounds. Okay, So once again the testudo, this time created by the

Roman soldiers of the seventh Legion. It's described as a formation useful for approaching and eventually overtaking a fortified enemy position. Now, in both of these cases, Caesar does not bother to explain the testudo. He doesn't say what it is. He just assumes the reader will already know. So what exactly is being described here, Well, we'll get a more complete description in Plutarch's Life of Antony, which comes in the middle of a description of a Roman campaign against the

Parthian Empire. That of Antony, not Crassus this time, and this is a version of this section translated by John Dryden. At the descend of a hill where the Romans were obliged to pass, They got together and let fly their

arrows upon them as they moved slowly down. But the full armed infantry facing round received the light troops within, and those in the first rank knelt on one knee holding their shields before them, the next rank holding theirs over the first, and so again others over these, much like the tiling of a house or the row of seats in a theater, the whole affording sure defense against arrows which glanced upon them without doing any harm. So

here's the testudo formation. It is like a tortoise pulling its head and legs inside its shell. Soldiers in a testudo formation close in tight with one another, so the men in the front row present a wall of shields held side to side or overlapping like roof tiles, facing the o enemy. And sometimes shield walls would also be formed on other sides of the formation, depending on need

I guess, depending on where the enemy was facing. And then the men behind the first row would put their shields up on top of the formation and then layered, going row by row all the way back to create a protective roof. So it's like you if entered the tortoise's shell.

slow to move. It's like, for one thing, maintaining that barrier is going to be actually kind of difficult to do. And the troops are going to be bunched very close together. So the formation can move, You can march this way, but it can't move very fast, and it's not going to be very maneuverable, Like moving around things or changing directions is just going to be difficult. You can also imagine that for most soldiers within this formation, visibility is

going to be greatly reduced. You can't really get a very good idea of what's going on around you. If you're at one of the edges, maybe you can peek out, but even then you're probably gonna have limited visibility in the other directions, you know, not the side you're facing anything except the side you're facing toward. So yeah, that's going to be a problem as well. Also, soldiers can't

fight in this formation. Armed infantry are not only supposed to move around and avoid getting killed, they need to be able to age with the enemy and either drive them back or kill or wound them. And in fact, we see examples in the ridings of Cassiustillo of Roman soldiers in the testudo formation actually not doing very well because they're being savaged by heavy party and cavalry charges.

So they form a testudo and then the armored horses rush on them and they're overtaken, and it apparently just you know, crashes through the shields, and you know, many men are killed, are killed or wounded. So, despite what you're going to see in a lot of movies with medieval combat where you see something like the testudo often used, at least the one row of shields, you know, all lined up like a wall. It was not very useful in situations of melee contact with the enemy. So what

was it actually good for. It seems that the testudo was an ideal formation if you wanted to protect infantry from a heavy barrage of missiles, from arrows, javelin, even thrown stones. And this is why you often see it being used for attacking maneuvers during sieges or in approaching fortified positions. So there are defenders up on the city wall and they're shooting arrows or throwing stones, and you want to approach the wall or the gate to attack

it or to undermine it. The testudo formation is useful because it allows you to close that distance with minimal casualties from airborne missiles along the way. That's something that it is very good for.

Is that what you call it, that that someone can make baskets with better regularity and control if they're using a granny shot, like you know, between the legs, underhanded as opposed to the more cool looking and and I think, you know, largely more effective in other areas of the game,

you know, overhanded pitch of the basketball. So it's kind of like that, like if you the testudo is going to be highly effective in very certain circumstances, and if you tried to use it outside of those circumstances, or those circumstances were compromised, then it might spell disaster, I would say. The The other thing about the testudo, like the granny shot, is that it does look kind of stupid. And I think I think this is worth acknowledging. Like

the testudo looks, Yes, it does look really cool. It is really neat. It is kind of this idea of perfect you know combat in defense in UNI and by trained soldiers, and we love that aspect of it, but it also just looks weird and kind of dumb, you know, like they're they're becoming a turtle. They're making a little house on the battlefield. And at the same time, it's amazing people becoming a shape individual shields becoming an enclosure.

So I find myself entertaining both of these feelings anytime I look at like an illustration of the testudo, or I found a video online where some class somewhere had had managed to get children to form one with like plastic shields and swords while the I assume the teachers pelted them with things, and then they successfully advanced on the teachers and then mastered them. Now one more observation that Devereaux makes about shield walls, studos and how they're

depicted in modern entertainment. He pointed out something that I've seen at least one of the shows that he's he's referencing here, but I just it did not occur to me.

He said, if you watch Game of Thrones, there are episodes where you see the Lanister troops engaging some sort of system where on the front line you have dedicated shieldmen, so guys who have no weapons, just a two handed shield of some sort, and then behind them there are people with a with a like a pike, a two handed pike, and then behind them you have people with bows, And he points out that this idea of having like a dedicated shield bearer and a dedicated spear bearer, you

just don't see this like it just it might look cool in a film like this, but it's almost always it's always going to be like a shield and spear bearer or shields and swords. And a big part of this is that otherwise, like your shield guy gets taken out, the guy behind him doesn't have a shield, he just has a pike. That means that defense on that line

has just completely fallen apart. Like one of the strengths of a shield wall or the testudo is that any individual in the formation could step up and replace somebody who's injured or killed.

So of course the use of shield walls and fish scale like formations fell in and out of fashion on through to the Middle Ages and ultimately became obsolete in the age of gunpowder. But it is often pointed out that you do still see some version of these tactics used with say, riot police, who are contending generally not with firearms, but with improvised projectiles and simple hand to hand weapons that may be improvised as well. So you

can look up various images of this online. You know, some sort of like big kind of plasticy looking shield, like a riot shield, and then you know, they'll often form some sort of a wall, and sometimes they will also form the roof over the heads of the soldiers. Not as the examples tend not. They don't look as regimented as a proper testudo, but it is kind of like the spirit off it's still still useful in very

certain stripped down circumstances in our modern world. Likewise, you also see examples of protesters using the shield walls of one sort or another another as well. Yeah, but no football players again for some reason, no shields on the American football field, or the British football field for that matter. No shields there. All right, Well, we're going to go and close out these episodes here. I hope that everyone has enjoyed our detour into the world of shields and

shield walls. But we're going to be back with something else next week. In the meantime, Yeah, we invite you to write in if you have thoughts about this, especially some of the various media that we've mentioned. You know how this stuff plays out on TV, in films, in video games. Devereux frequently cites Total War as being a franchise that often influences the way we picture things like this, So write in. All that is fair game, just a

reminder of the stuff to blow your mind. Is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.