Scale armor

Via the History Blog, I learn that a Yanghai grave included some leather scale armor dated to 786–543 BC. The Neo-Assyrians (Assyrians to the rest of us) had invented this, though the climate there was such that none survived except in pictures--though Tut apparently had a very damaged/decayed sample. Another sample of about the same antiquity in a museum, of unknown provenance, was associated in the museum "with finds and depictions from the Near East, the adjacent northern steppe areas and the territory of China", so they guess it was related.

The stylistic correspondence but slightly differing functional specifics suggests that the two armours were designed as outfits for different units of the same army: the Yanghai armour possibly for light cavalry (Fig. 15B), the MET armour perhaps for heavy infantry (Fig. 15A). Such a degree of standardization of military equipment about the 8th to 5th century BCE was only reached by the Neo-Assyrian army after the reforms of Sennacherib

I.e. the two look similar enough to maybe be like uniforms, but one was a little heavier so maybe they were for different types of warrior. And because they're so similar, they're either from or closely patterned off the Assyrian model, since they were the ones standardizing at the time.

So far as we know.