Quote Originally Posted by AqD View Post
But when? where? what they look like in the beginning of EB timeframe? I'm trying to find some sources and battle records......
Of course, this all boils down to what you define as a cataphract. If you define a cataphract as any horseman who is heavily armoured and himself rides an mount armoured in some substantial way (i.e. not necessarily full barding), then there is evidence for the existence of Iranian cataphracts centuries before the beginning of EB. Following this same criteria, we also hear of and find archaeological evidence for the existence of Achaemenid Persian cataphracts from the fourth century BC.

If, however, you consider the cataphract to be a cataphract in the sense that the authors writing during the EB timeframe likely meant it - an almost entirely armoured horseman riding a horse wearing full or close to full barding whose main mode of attack was in using a long lance - then we don't know when or how they emerged among the Armenians. A best guess would be that they were in use by around the middle of the second century BC, and maybe even earlier. It must be remembered that the Seleucids did not adopt the cataphract until after Antiochus III's expedition to the east in the last decade of the third century BC, implying that they were probably not in use west of Parthia during that time.

As for what they looked like at the beginning of the EB timeframe, we simply don't know. The earliest representation of a cataphract from around this region comes from Iberia and dates to the 1st c. BC/1st c. AD, and so would not be representative of the cataphracts found in the early EB timeframe.