Around 1700, the helmet was replaced by a wide variety of other head protectors, including hats, although helmets continued to be worn by cavalrymen, who fought with lances and swords. A collection of gleaming helmets in the National Military Museum in Soest shows that protective headgear like this became smaller over time. Helmets have come in all shapes and sizes over the centuries, their design mainly reflecting the type of weapon they were supposed to protect against. The unique piece dates from the late Bronze Age (1100–800 bce). This was a common ritual in late-prehistoric times, and the oldest helmet found in the Low Countries also comes from a river: a bronze helmet dredged up from the river Scheldt near the village of Schoonaarde, east of Ghent in Flanders. It has been linked to a battle fought there by the Roman general Julius Caesar, but it is more likely that the object was deliberately placed in the river as a sacrifice. The earliest was made in the 1st century bce and is a Celtic helmet found by an amateur archaeologist at a sand dig near the river Maas at Kessel. The oldest helmets known in the Netherlands were excavated by archaeologists and date from the Roman era. The advent of metal, however, meant that the helmet became identifiable as a design for head protection. A woollen or leather head protector, for instance, could have served other purposes too and so cannot be clearly identified as a helmet. We don’t know what kind of protection, if any, people might have worn in the Stone Age. Human beings obviously attacked one another even before they had metal weapons or protection for the body: at first they used stone axes and hunting weapons with flint arrowheads. As soon as people had mastered the technique of making swords from this metal, the first bronze helmets appeared too, which means that the helmet is just as old as the sword. This was the late Bronze Age, the period from 2300 to 800 bce when, as its name suggests, our ancestors forged the first objects made of bronze. He tells the story in the Iliad of the Trojan War, which must have occurred sometime around 1200 bce, several centuries before the poet’s own birth. It was Homer who offered one of the earliest descriptions of a soldier’s helmet.
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