Spring Clean Challenge Sassanids Revived
Confession time
I’m going to confess to a slight historical failure. Whilst we don’t know much about Persian costume in battle and how it evolved over time one thing is pretty certain, they liked pattern and colour. Research on this shows very detailed designs represented on greek vases and ultraviolet analysis shows similar on greek statues. For more see this exhibition:
3:08 shows a Persian (Scythian/Trojan/Paris) archer which gives you an idea of the problem.
Persian ArcherSo as a speedpainter I’m going to chicken out and not do the patterns. I will go for bright colours and according to Dr David Nicolle the Sassanids liked the colour schemes used on chess sets, where yellow/green played red/black so there might be some of that. There was also a blue clothed regiment recorded in royal armies before Sassanid times and I like blue so we’ll definitely use that.
Decision made I’m starting on the main infantry block. 12 bases of militia levy, half spearmen, half archers and a sparabara (large wicker and leather) shield palisade to put in front of them from Aventine.
Miniatures will be a mixture of Black Tree Designs metal and Wargames Factory, Wargames Atlantic and Victrix plastics. The metals are only in 4 poses so you can see a bit of razor saw surgery going on here to put a bit of life into them. Taking off the right hands/arms and swaping them around or adding plastic ones gives enough variety.
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