OIP 69 - buckles, arrowheads and more!

Oriental Institute Publications 69 is a wonderful resource cataloguing a wide variety of archaeological findings from Persepolis, including axes, horse tack, dinner plates, jewelry, armor scales, a big iron sword with a flanged hilt strangely reminiscent of the Luristan bronzes, and, of course, lots of pottery.

I'd like to draw attention to several specific items.  On page 257 are two objects that appear to be the long-sought-after round belt buckle.  To my mind, they don't clear up the actual function very much.  They're basically shallow, hollow cones with a single thin bar on the inside.  To pass under or around these bars, the belt strap would have to be either much softer and more flexible than would seem practical on a weapon belt built to support a fully-loaded gorytos, or else much, much narrower than the buckle; in period art, it's usually the other way around.  There's also no hook, stud or other mechanism that would allow it to act as a belt the way I'm thinking.  I've previously been over the reasons I don't think the round disc itself was a button.

On page 303 is a collection of weapon heads.  The lancehead is apparently a stout, short kite shape made of iron.  Two javelin heads appear which are basically giant versions of the bronze three-bladed arrowhead.  And lastly there's a surprisingly wide variety of arrowheads.  The most common are the classic socketed bronze three-bladed ones, but also appearing are two-bladed ones, iron ones, tanged ones, and long, narrow ones with solid triangular or square cross-sections, looking like precursors of Medieval bodkins.  While I've yet to find anything like most of them on the market today, their existence does lend precedent to bringing greater variety to our kit by using points other than the standard socketed bronze trilobates.

Further thought on the domed hat

When I first examined low-res images of the Mede domed hat, I believed that the hat was bound around the outside.  However, having continued to examine the high-res images at Nirupars (such as the first and second images on this page) I'm forced to concede that the band is internal.  Possibly the edge of the hat was folded in and stitched down over it, but an easier method might be to sew small patches to the inside (like belt loops).  Either way, the band then passes through a hole in the back and is tied into a slipknot on the outside.