Question About Cavalry in General, during Ancient Times

[A Terribly Harmful Name]

Hello,

I think this question was asked many times before, but I came across this interesting discussion on Roman Army Talk when searching about Gallic Cavalry. The comment that was really enlightening was this one, made by L.C.Cinna (who is also a Citizen in the TWC forums):

hmm here's something i posted over at onother forum. it's rather disorganized and short but maybe it helps>

It's a rather complicated thing and there are ongoing discussions about how cavalry charges work in real life. there are several misconceptions, people often get a wrong picture because of some stories and myths and it's hard to test it.

most ancient cultures used some kind of skrimishing tactics with their cav instead of a "medieval" style. read Josephus description of engagements between Roman cav and the Judaeans or Arrian's description for example. It's skrimishing with javelins and then engaging with swords or stuff like that, chasing fleeing or broken units.

Not too sure about the actual charge. the cavalry might actually engage at rather slow speed instead of a heavy charge.Modern experiments and texts from Napoleonic times (the closest sources we still have on the actual use of cavalry) show that it's close to impossible to get even a trained horse to run into a mass of people, besides that you don't want to lose a trained horse and resupplyment in the field might be very difficult.

Note that this tactic of the slow advance and mellee engagement instead of full charges has NOTHING to do with the stirrups myth. You don't need stirrups to fight on horseback or to charge. they are only helpful for horsearchers. The saddle is the important feature in ancient and medieval warfare. Considering that the Macedonian cavalry didn't use saddles you can actually exclude the possibility of a real charge. They proably used to get into close range fast and then used to advance slowly wearing the enemy down with their long lances. To counter something like that is hard enough for an infantryman. I don't think Alexander's cavalry was able to perform something coming close to what usually is understood as a charge.

The Roman and Parthian cavalry (talking about around 100bce onwards) performed much better and where able to outperform any other cavalry because of the horned saddles they used. These saddles are not as strong in the back as medieval saddles were but they allow to charge cavalry and fight mellee with swords or spears very well. Note that it's the same for medieval warfare, the saddle is the important thing, you don't even use the stirrups for the charge.
Still as I said above, you can't force a horse to run into a group of people.

Now, general knowledge tells us that the Hetairoi were skilled lancers, well able to charge at infantry formations with just slight hints of a lack of organization. But I'm really interested in knowing whether it is true that Macedonian Cavalry did not use saddles and whether they resorted to full shock tactics or to the attrition described in the post. I've read somewhere here that the bulky 2h grip as depicted on the EB Hetairoi was also a later invention and that the Alexandrian cavalry used 1h ones, which would be slightly more appropriate for close combat in my knowledge.

On to the question, did the bulk of the Eastern Heavy Cavalry, and Cavalry in General (such as the Brihentin and Curepos) use saddles during the EB timeframe, or were they a later invention? Any insight would be welcome. Also did their tactics consist of massive charging or more like the engagements mentioned above?