pteruge

plural pteruges

1. historicalA flexible feather-like strip of material at the edge of body or head armour, particularly used in Greco-Roman times, such as the flaps of a linothorax or the strips hanging from a Roman legionary's belt.

   In Metope VI a mounted officer, probably the Emperor Trajan himself, wears a lorica squamata of very small scales with a double skirt of pteruges and a cingulum about the waist.

   1975, H. Russell Robinson, The Armour of Imperial Rome, Charles Scribner's Sons, page 160

   2 more examples

   Under this come three fragments with vertical pteruges that are rectangular with rounded lower ends, and another fragment with pteruges angled up to the right, which perhaps form a swirl at the left hip.

   1989, Emily Vermeule, “Carved Bones from Corinth”, in Thomas A. Holland, editor, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, number 47, Chicago, Illinois: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, →ISBN, →ISSN, page 274

   Internal leather straps also fasten the eighteen pteruges, which are arranged in two overlapping rows. Each pteruge, which expands slightly at the end, is constructed of a leather backing superimposed with a steel border with a boxed edge and a raised row of leaves pointing inward, the center filled with riveted mail.

   1998, Stuart W. Pyhrr, José-A. Godoy, chapter 19, in Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance: Filippo Negroli and His Contemporaries, The Metropolotan Museum of Art, →ISBN, page 120