Homeric shield from Dura-Europos

[1] This shield and those found alongside it date from the middle of the 3rd century CE, a period in which a large portion of the city was co-opted as a Roman military base.

[3] In the 1920s and 30s, Yale University and the French Academy held joint excavations of Dura-Europos, after the modern rediscovery of the site initiated with the widely published photos and findings of James Henry Breasted.

Further, the wood was still very delicate, and even though there were geometric designs on the reverse sides of all the shields, at the time it was judged not worth the risk to the objects to attempt to turn them.

The expedition artist, Herbert Gute, took responsibility for transporting and cleaning the shields, and on-site painted detailed watercolor reproductions of them.

[4] The shields garnered a significant amount of media attention, with both London Illustrated News (in an article by Hopkins) and Fortune publishing Gute's watercolors.

The label over his body was transcribed upon discovery as "Κεβριόνης", or Kebriones,[14] a son of Priam who was shot on horseback by Patroclus far before the Trojan horse would have entered the city.

A swarm of Greeks, depicted here in typical contemporary Roman military armor, push the citizens of Troy against the ground and raise swords above them.

[16] Cumont, in the preliminary report of the excavations, links the shield to previous Trojan horse depictions in the Tabulae Illicae, the frescoes of the House of Menander in Pompeii, and most strongly with a scene from the Codex Romanus.

[18] Although both the preliminary and final reports of the excavation describe the shields' material as poplar,[3][19] in 1935 Samuel Record, a Yale forestry professor, identified it as a local species of pine.

Anne Gunnison and Irma Passeri theorize in their investigation of the shields that steam was used to bend the wood over a mold to achieve this convexity.

Following that ground, the artist painted the entire shield (save for the central decorative rings) a reddish-brown color (rose madder), which served as another preparatory layer and a background for the figures.

Cumont writes that there's no reason to assume they wouldn't have been used in combat if finished, but also introduces the possibility that they could have been used solely decoratively, perhaps as display pieces for a shield-painter's shop.

In addition, he raises that they may be shields used for cavalry sports, citing Arrian's description of cavalry sport armor in Ars Tactica: "[Cavalrymen] also carry shields, not of the kind used for battle, but lighter in weight (since their exercises are directed towards speed and elegance) and multi coloured [or 'cunningly-worked'] to look attractive': Arrian Ars tactica 34.5).