Posted on 03/16/2020 9:42:19 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Hittites.
Just WOW!
Huns = Step Peoples
The Persians taught the Byzantines how to create Cataphracts (Heavy armored cavalry armed with lances)
I remember reading that stirrups are one of the reasons the Hun invasions were so successful.
On horseback and at speed, they could launch arrows almost non-stop in a standing posture. They were very adept at that and it represented a lethal advance in warfare.
At first I thought, “Why would a horse wear a brooch?” then, “Oh, I get it.”
***
I was just as confused. I thought maybe it was some sort of harness or saddle decoration. I’m not that familiar with horse culture so figured it was just some common to them vernacular.
A picture’s worth a thousand words...
I thought the same thing.
Roman rule in Britain was (despite the modern anachronistic, inaccurate, nationalistic myths) largely peaceful, prosperous, and uneventful. Adoption of Roman ways was creeping in even before the conquest under Emperor Claudius, and the first Romano-British villas seem to have appeared during the 1st c AD, iow, within a few decades, and an even shorter time after Boudicca's rebellion was obliterated. One problem that arose centuries later was that the locals had no experience, tradition, or even much interest in, the kinds of self-defense skills and local self-governance that might have come in handy in the face of Angle, Saxon, and Jute invasions, and not much later, the Danes and other Scandinavians.
Thanks!
Looks like a good law-abiding citizen instead of some sociopath or vandal.
The dating is reinforced by the lack of stirrups. Rome's first encounter with the stirrup was the type used by the Sarmatians, who, after their defeat by Rome, were parted out to different parts of the Empire, with the Sarmatian horsemen formed into auxiliaries for service in places like (ta-dah) Britain. There's a sort of eccentric view that the "real King Arthur" was a Sarmatian cavalry commander. Stirrups probably originated all over the place; the earliest representation in ancient art is from India.
Glad I wasn’t the only one who read the Brit English as describing a piece of horse tack...
I don’t know how old the stirrup idea actually is... BUT I thought that the innovation didn’t reach Europe until after the first sack of Rome. Was it 437 AD?
Despite the fact that the Romans studied everyone and everything they came across, and did an excellent job adopting and improving things, in the armed forces they were just hidebound enough not to start using the stirrup, and of course, they still had the auxiliary cavalry as well as Roman regular cavalry. By the time of Trajan, the Roman regular army was itself made up of non-Romans who were nonetheless citizens of the Empire.
It's also worth considering the possibility that the Roman cavalry *did* use the stirrup and that the idea that they never used it arose as a sort of just-so faux explanation, perhaps by Gibbon.
:^)
About 60 years ago, while in Uncle Sam’s Army in Japan, I checked out a library book, THE SECRET OF THE HITTITES, of all things. The author, of whose name I have no clue, made a number of claims as to the forgotten power and influence the Hittites exerted upon surrounding cultures, including, if memory serves, ancient Egypt. One of which was that they were one of (the first?) to attach stirrups to their saddles. FWIW.
Great question that intrigued me so I did a little research
No record on Romans using stirrups—or anyone in the West—for that matter until somewhere around 800AD. Most sources place the invention around 200B.C. in India. Apparently the invention moved slowly out of the subcontinent.
Romans had saddles with large horns on four points of the seat that kinda gripped the rider or he gripped to maintain his seat in the saddle. Probably used mostly for heavy cavalry.
Interesting theory about the origin of the Arthur legend.
Stirrups are introduced to Europe around 800 AD. This invention led to the concept of heavy cavalry which was unknown in the ancient world.
That was one of C. W. Ceram's (real name Marek if memory serves, he was from Poland; his best known survey work was "Gods Graves and Scholars", and he revised that from time to time up until his demise).
:^) Based on post-Roman large structures (so-called Offa's Dyke is hundreds of years before Offa; the Wansdyke was dubbed that -- 'Woden's Dyke' -- by the A-S because they couldn't believe it had been built by humans), there was some kind of post-Roman authority prior to the Anglo-Saxon dominions, but I think the Arthur legend (other than the most familiar one, which grew entirely in the mind of Sir Thomas Malory and was very much of its time and influenced by unrelated French tales) was a pastiche of different legends that reach back into the Roman occupation era, and perhaps before. Of what I've read (which isn't much), Geoffrey Ashe's book "King Arthur: the True Story" was most compelling. The most fun fictional version is the Mary Stewart series, and that author includes an essay in one of the volumes discussing the possible historical foundations.
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