Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we are back with part two in our series looking at shield walls.

Now, in the last episode, we ended up focusing primarily on one, maybe unlikely, but a pretty interesting explanation of a passage in a first century Chinese history that described a group of soldiers in formation with shields overlapping

like fish scales. 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.

That's right. And before we get into shield walls, I thought it would be helpful to just talk

about shields for a minute, acknowledge the underlying invention. So as Brian Fagan and Thomas Hewlett

describe in the 70 Great Inventions of the Ancient World, a book I've referred to on the show many times. The shield likely predates human body armor. In fact, I'd say it seems to be a 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 effects to fend 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. Just going from holding any object to fend off an enemy attack, maybe any hard object, and turning that into

more dedicated design, something that has a broader, broader face maybe to face against the

...