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[Frank Chadwick]

Just some random comments:

Armour: The Romans used over time four different types:
- lorica segmentata (kind of 'plate armour')
- lorica hamata (chain-mail)
- scale armour
- lamellar

AFAIK, no other ancient army used armoury as varied. The Chinese, for one, only knew lamellar until the Tang (7th c. AD).

And of course there was also the muscled bronze cuirass as well as the linen corselet, although I guess that's easy to view as a subset of lamelar

Helmets:
- AFAIK, the Roman metal cavalry mask is the first, and only, overall face protection in antiquity.

I'm pretty sure there were lots of eastern heavy cavalry wearing full face protection. The Parthian heavy cavalry may have been among the first to do so, but a lot of others adopted it eventually. I am unsure of the time of this, but I believe that the Romans may have copied the face mask from the eastern heavy cavalry.

I have even seen a reconstruction of a Galatian infantryman with a full-face protective mask! The evidence for this is not a slam-dunk by any means, but it's interesting. It's based on two statues of Galatian warriors with what appear to be full beards at a time when they are believed to have been clean-shaven, suggesting an armored face mask, as most armored face masks included a stylized beard. As I said, an interesting theory but the evidence isn't conclusive.

Frank Chadwick