Middle and Late Bronze Age Metal Tools from the Aegean, Eastern ...

include bandages, pack-saddles, reins and blinkers. 280 Other potential leather products
include clothing, dress accessories, footwear, sack-like containers, strips and thongs.
Egyptian tomb paintings from the New Kingdom depict other leather items including
shields, tires, chariot body coverings and quivers. 281
The number of leather products from
that era seems limitless, as Trantalidou’s list conveys:
The largest pieces of leather were used in saddle-making, for defensive weaponry
(shields, helmets, panoplies), offensive weaponry (bows), cabinet making (folding stools,
footstools, beds, mattress bases, pillows, revetment of wooden chests, etc.), shelter and
housing (tents door canopy, curtains-vela etc.), shipbuilding, musical instruments, toys
282
[and] bellows for smelting and casting metals.
The palatial demand for leather products must have been significant, and the raw
materials would have been supplied by the skins of animals sacrificed and/or slaughtered
in official ceremonies, like elite-sponsored feasts. The best evidence for the Aegean
leather industry and its operations seem to come from the Linear B tablets.
Numerous tools were required to process hides as well as to manipulate leather
into desirable finished products. Awls certainly would have been useful implements in
puncturing holes in leather pieces, but the leather industry would require other
implements as well. Knives and/or scrapers, for instance, were necessary to remove the
hide from an animal and to clean it by scraping away the flesh from the hide’s underside.
Chipped stones were very effective as cutting and scrapping implements for this task, as
demonstrated by ethnographic evidence, but metal knives would also have been useful.
The objects identified here as small craft tools probably represent only a portion of any
280 Voutsa 2001, 151.
281 Trantalidou 2001, 279.
282 Trantaliou 2001, 284.
283 Chipped stones (“large biface –reduction flakes”) have been shown as effective butchery implements on
modern elephants. See, Frison 1989, 777-779, 783, Figure 10. Archaeological evidence also indicates the
utility of chipped stones in butchering. Take, for example, the Early Holocene site of Akrotiri-Aetokremnos
(Cyprus), where hundreds of small thumbnail scrapers have been found. These stone tools were utilized in
the butchering and processing of pygmy hippopotami carcasses. See, Simmons 2001, 9-11.
283
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