heavy cavalry engaging heavy cavalry

[Alanus]

"Winners are grinners".

And it seems most likely the Massagetae heavy horse extended to the first recorded Alanic tribe, the Roxolani. But the Massagetae had contemporaries playing the same game. Herodotus mentions a little-known tribe called the Issedones who pushed the Scythians westward to the Pontic. (Herodotus, IV, 13). Archaeologists know them as the Sagarskaya culture. They lived just above the Massagetae, east of the Urals in the Tobal region, most kurgans found around the Isset River (aka "Issedones").

Their women had "equal authority with the men," just like the Massagetae; and 20% of female Sargat graves contain archery equipment. The bows, "usually survive in mortuary contexts only as four or seven bone plaques, which were used for strengthening the central part and two shoulders. Such a bow was about 1.5 meters in length. Iron and bone arrowheads, which appeared en masse in the 3rd to the 2nd centuries BCE, were used by this larger bow. As a result of this more powerful weapon, bone armor was replaced by iron. (Linduff & Rubinson, Bersenova chapter, 140). It seems likely that this bow appeared in the Sargat area earlier than in the Sarmatian territory (Moshkova 1989, 184)." This so-called "Hunnic" bow was developed in a region 1,000 km west of the Xiong-nu, the supposed developers of the style.

Bersenova then moves to heavier equipment, "The complex of Sargat elite armament included a bow, dagger, long sword, and in special cases, a shield, helmet, and lamellar armor, initially fashioned from bone and leather, and later from iron. The elite weaponry recovered from unrobbed graves in Sidorovka and Isakovka I belonged to the catafractian type of heavily armed mounted warrior, which became widely known in Eurasia from the last centuries BCE (Matyushenko and Tataurova, 1997; Pagodin 1998). There is a direct analogy between Sargat weapon types and those of the Scytho-Sarmatian world." Here is a Russian artist's reconstruction drawing of a Issedone/Sargat cataphract. Also an archery thumb guard, an akinakes hilt, and the remains of a long sword.

[attachment=9804]Sargatskayaculturehorseman.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment=9805]Sargatskayathumbring.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment=9806]Sargatskayaakinakesandsword.jpg[/attachment]

So, what we are looking at is a sophisticated heavy-horse society, powerful enough to eject the Scythians from their homeland... and clever enough with bent-wood technology to define a newer-and-deadlier composite bow.