Assorted Historical Questions - Gertrude et al, ask them here!

[paullus]

Alright, here's a space for asking basic questions.

I'll start with the question about Ptolemaic kataphraktoi, and Gertrude and others, if y'all have questions, add them in subsequent posts.

We don't know whether the Ptolemies might have experimented with kataphraktoi at that time, we actually have rather limited information on the armament of Ptolemaic cavalry at any time after Raphia. There are a handful of terracotta figurines of 2c or 1c bc Egyptian horsemen, and a single cavalryman from the Sidon stelai, but we get very little information on the equipment carried by the Hellenic cavalry units. The papyri don't mention kataphraktoi, but then again the picture of the Ptolemaic cavalry in the 2c bc isn't particularly clear: we see some references to hipparchies (cavalry commands), and many to the katoikoi hippeis (settler cavalry), but the former could refer to any sort of cavalry, and many of the latter were not horsemen at all. So while the state of the evidence is such that the Ptolemies could have had some kataphraktoi, perhaps drawn from their Cappadocian/north Cilician cavalrymen, we don't have the evidence that would show it well one way or the other. Those same Cappadocians and their neighbors may have been the same soldiers who, in campaigns into southern Egypt in the 3c, used felt armor to cover their horses. Its possible that these felt kataphraktoi persisted, but that's hard to track. If we assume that the felt-armored cavalry in the southern expeditions were in fact the Cappadocian/north Cilician cavalrymen, then we can track their unit down to the late 3c, when the son of a commander on an elephant hunt is a hipparch in the army. But the presence of those soldiers does not necessarily mean the presence of felt kataphraktoi.