Did the Seleucids Invent Heavy Cavalry?

[Alanus]

Hello, Michael

Does look like parade armor, but with practical variations. We see manica arm armor, a fancy horse "bonnet" of feathers, a face mask similar to Parthian, and (at far left) a lower portion of something like linothorax. We don't even know if the Seleucids had saddles. No doubt they had a contus because even Alexander's Companions used them. What we don't have is visual, dated, proof of Seleucids using heavily-armored cataphracts, or a historical description of shock cavalry.

   
Once again, we are left with an artist's "conception" of the Battle of Magnesia. Who knows how accurate it is?-- so what we really have is conjecture. To me, these cavalrymen look exceedingly "Greek"... for good reason, of course. It would seem to me, considering the time-frame, 190BC, that the Seleucids were quite conservative in borrowing "east of the Oxus cavalry technology," unlike the Chinese who jumped on it. I certainly have an "eastern" bias, no question about it, because I'm totally appalled at facts like Caesar's employment of German cavalry during the Gallic War, where we read of naked men riding without saddles.

   
Just a final note. Here we have a Qin-era "grunt" soldier, not even a cavalryman, yet he's wearing better armor than what I see in your illustration. Once again, this painting is rendered from extant archaeological evidence but it is only interpretive. We do find the same high collar on the armor and lamellar construction that we see on the Orlat plaque and the Yuezhi examples.

   
Here we have the actual terracotta "grunt" armor from Shihuangdi's Mausoleum, a copy of a real bronze or more-likely steel original. If an infantryman wore armor like this, what, then, did a cavalryman wear? And the Qin cavalry had saddles, two-handed swords, and 12-foot halbreds.

As a horse person and an armor fan, something more than linothorax (or even a probable over-cuirass) is needed to impress me in the "cataphract department."