Quote Originally Posted by Stycks View Post
but even the most amateur general can tell if the horsemen they fought against sucked or not...
if it sucked, why care about it?
if its any good they'd stick it in their armies (or a copy of it) as soon as time permitted
so i guess that the cav there sucked, the invaders prob took no notice of them and the invaded prob abandoned them (ie, the sacred band inf that was sodomized in the punic war and was never used again)
First of all, mind the language please.

Secondly, the Romans encountered a lot of good heavy cavalry during their expansion phase (including the cavalry equivalent of the Carthagian Sacred Band), yet they waited until well into the empire before adopting similar shock cavalry, so things are not clear-cut as you suggest.

Thirdly, you are probably right that the Semitic states of EB's time-frame did not possess good cavalry corpses, but keep in mind that the powers that (tried to) control Judea and the Phoenician cities possessed some of the best cavalry of the time, so the Semites were bound to look bad.