Fueled by a breakfast of red wine and dry bread, the Greek soldiers armed themselves one by one, donned their bulky, insect-like armor, and prepared for battle.
They aimed their spears at wooden targets, their chariots were hooked up to treadmill motors, and for 11 hours the Greek army's elite soldiers fought as if it were the 15th century BC.
They were recruited to help determine whether the 3,500-year-old suit of armor known as the Dendra Panoply, one of the oldest pieces of European Bronze Age armor, could have been worn in battle or, as some scholars have previously argued, was for ceremonial use only.
In a paper published May 22 in the journal PLOS One, soldiers wore replica suits while scientists tracked their blood sugar levels, heart rates, and other physiological measurements to find that their bodies could withstand the strain of the gear.
Lead author Andreas Floris, director of the FAME Institute at the University of Thessaly in Volos, Greece, where the battle took place, said the mock battle and other findings showed the armour was “highly advanced military technology” for its time.
“If you had a piece of wood or a stone or even a spear, or something with a bit of bronze on the front, then the person wearing this armour would look like a giant robot in front of you,” said Dr Floris, professor of physiology at the University of Thessaly.
Ancient Battles Guide
According to the study, there are no historical records of how Dendra armour was used, so the soldiers' battle dates were based on an analysis of Homer's epic poem, “The Iliad”, about the Trojan War.
The authors acknowledged that the Iliad does not provide an accurate account of the Late Bronze Age warfare that took place about 500 years before Homer wrote the epic poem, but said it was a “reasonable starting point” for their research.
In the combat study, soldiers fought on foot and in chariots, using replica weapons such as blunt and sharp spears, spent a lot of time walking and riding in chariots, and followed a meal plan created by the researchers, with breakfast consisting mainly of dry bread, goat cheese, green olives, and red wine.
Soldiers could not wear the Dendra armour from around 1450 BCE. Instead, they wore replicas made from an alloy made mainly of copper that was the closest to the original bronze available, the study says. The replicas were made in 1984 by students and staff from the metalwork department at the now-closed Bournville College of Art and Design in Birmingham, England.
Wanted: Ancient Greek Soldiers
The researchers sought out Marines with similar builds to the elite soldiers who fought in the 2019 mock battle.
The 13 unpaid volunteers they recruited were all men in their 20s and 30s, with an average height of about 5 feet 7 inches and weight of 163 pounds.
The soldiers underwent two days of training before each battle, beginning with a 5:30 a.m. awakening. Their physiological data was monitored throughout the day, and the study found that they were capable of fighting in armor weighing 23.3 kilograms (over 51 pounds).
The training took a toll on the soldiers: studies showed soldiers reported extreme fatigue, pain in their upper bodies due to the weight of the metal, and pain in their legs from walking barefoot, running, riding in tanks, and combat.
Dr Floris said the find sheds light on why the Mycenaean civilisation was able to dominate much of the eastern Mediterranean before collapsing at the end of the Bronze Age. “This study provides important support for the hypothesis put forward by many that military technology had a lot to do with it,” he said.
The limits of Bronze Age warfare in the 21st century
Dr Floris said the study used conservative measurements because of limitations in recreating combat from thousands of years ago: For example, the soldiers in the study were not trained to fight in those conditions at the same level as the elite soldiers of antiquity, and they participated in wars for scientific reasons, not as a matter of life and death.
To address some of these limitations, the researchers ran mathematical simulations to test what would happen if, for example, a soldier wearing Dendra armor's heart rate reached 200 beats per minute instead of 140.
Lee L. Bryce, a history professor at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Ill., who was not involved in the study but teaches his students about Dendra armor, said he thought the armor might be useful for tank warfare but would be too tough for combat. “They proved that old idea wrong,” he said.
Because Dendra armour was worn only by the highest-ranking Mycenaean warriors, the study doesn't reveal much about ancient soldiers more broadly, Dr Bliss said.
“At best we know that some very talented people were able to wear this and perform very effectively in combat,” said Owen Rees, a lecturer in applied humanities at Birmingham Newman University in Birmingham, who was not involved in the study.
Dr Rees said that although historians had sought to avoid using the Iliad to understand the Mycenaean wars, the paper nevertheless succeeded in challenging the hypothesis about Dendra armour.
“It's easy to look at this as a strange novelty,” Dr. Rees says, “but this kind of research makes sense.”