Bret Devereaux

What thureos were you using? But yes, aggressiveness will affect that sort of thing.

I *believe* it was built to historical spec. It was considerably smaller than a scutum, probably as wide as armpits and going from above the knee to my throat. I kept chafing my wrist on the inside of the boss, and solved it by tying a bit of felt around it.

We're not as super-well informed about the design of the Thureos, esp. thickness as we'd like. Most reconstructions assume that the thureos follows the thickness pattern of the scutum. Thing is, the scutum is a lot thinner on the edges than in the core...

...(Plb. 6.23.2). The Kasr-al-Harit shield is normally the guideline for that sort of thing. But I suspect that means, if you make a Hellenistic thureos as thick as the scutum in the center, you don't actually save so much weight by making it shorter and narrower...

So the Kasr el-Harit shield is notoriously unreliably published (unless I've missed a new study of it since its alleged rediscovery), but is reportedly thinner (and with less taper) than the Dura Europos scutum it allegedly outweighs. Material/method matters!

Nothing new on it that I know. Publication of all of this stuff is a damned nightmare. The number of things I had to track back to museums to get a thickness or weight measurement - and the number you can't track at all. Damned nightmare.

Quite. But to finish a bit of math here, the tapering is not very extensive on the D-U and K e-H shields. Their surface area to estimated weight is approx. 57-107 inches square per pound. At similar ratios a thureos may have been 5.3 to 10 pounds. I'd lean toward 8-10.

I think that's likely right. I wish we had more archaeological remains for the thureos, rather than being broadly stuck with representational evidence. My big question: were they metal rimmed, or rimmed in leather? Both methods occur in similar shields.