Blue Helmets

[alex33]

I've watched one of this awesome unit previews of EB2 again. i need to see this awesome things very often to kill the time waiting for eb2. this time was the Peltastai Makedonikoi video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kO1LYrMa1w but then i saw that some of them wore blue helmets. Whats the matter with that? was it common for officers to wear such helmets? what are the sources for those blue helmets?

I will wait until the end times for this mod if necessary! xD

[Moros]

Blue helmets and other coloured helmets have been attested in ancient depictions. How common it was is always difficult to say considering the limited amount of pictoral sources and helmets there are left to base research on. However it seems that certainly well of soldiers and officers did at least occasionally wear vibrantly coloured helmets.

[yuezhi]

Do you have doubts about where those pigments came from? Judging from my own field of study getting blue was probably easier than it looks.

[Moros]

I've never really studied colour making in the ancient world. Light blue however shouldn't have been necessarily that hard indeed, a dark and deeper blue appears to have been much more expensive to make.

[yuezhi]

Wikipedia has a good article on blue pigments

[Ulfgard the Unmaker]

Now, I don't normally deal with the Mediterranean cultures, but I know for a fact that the Greeks in particular had this thing for horrendous eye-jarring primary color mashups, particularly when it comes to sculptures. Could the blue helmets in ancient depictions merely be reflecting this?

[smoesville]

I always find it funny that the reason i like classical marble buildings is because they're so simple from a colour perspective (plain marble) when in the Greeks and Romans would have been like "Hey, they forgot to paint their temple..."

[VektorT]

Well, according to my history books, Time Frame, from Time-Life, the macedonians not only used blue helmets but it was pretty popular, even amoung regular soldiers.

[paulus]

There is evidence for painted helmets (see in particular the tomb of Lyson and Kallikles) and so we thought it appropriate to include here and there. The inspiration for the widespread blue helmets is probably wholly or exclusively the paint residue on some helmets from the "Alexander" Sarcophagus from Sidon. The blue used on several of the helmets there could indicate blue helmets, but I would be inclined to say they indicate the use of iron. There is, on the other hand, a helmet painted on the ground in one of the upper registers that is red, but it features a couple of other colors as well (yellow, iirc). We use some painted helmets, some iron, some bronze, and think that is the best way to depict in-game what we know from history.