"Seleucid cataphracts" Topic

Xyston armed, or lance armed?

i.e. longer two handed weapon, or shorte under arm / over arm job?

Camels?

Cataphracts.

- forgot the title skips over to the side on a posting

Good question. I don't actually know for absolute certain. But using a little logic… The Seleucid cataphracts were modelled on the Parthian Cataphracts who used the long kontos two handed. Indeed, Armenian, Palmyran, Sarmatian and eventually, Roman, cataphracts all also employed something akin to the Kontos. So I would say the Seleucid cataphracts did too, as that appears to have been the weapon of choice for cataphracts at the time.

Bar Kochva refers to both xystoforoi and lonchoforoi (Cambridge University Press, 1976 pp74-75).

But he also comments that it is anyone's guess. I too would go for the Parthian option.

Konstantinos

I would concur with the Xyston as the best guess

The long two-handed looks more impressive in a lineup of miniatures; so go for that….

There so much confusion here…. it would be nice if we had ANY reference for Seleucids.

Some will state that the xyston is itself a doru used on horseback (Heckel)… which makes sense if one compares the the short spears and javelins used by everybody else. The stout nine foot long cornel wood doru would be longer than anything the Greek or Persian cavalry concurrently used, and already had the well described butt spike, often described in action.

Art and other reference seems to make identifying the xyston as longer, and yet there is always the nagging issue of the so-called "lancers" which cause extra confusion because using a 16 foot lance from horseback is kind of silly.

If Arrian is correct that the xyston is the same as a kontos, that causes issues as well since the combats Arrian describes are not what one would expect from a two handed weapon, more of a two headed spear of decent length- so Heckel may be right….

So if Alexander is using a "lance" on the Alexander mosaic, what are the rest of his cavalry using, overarm like regular hoplite spears?? Also the absent spear on the Alexander Sarcophagus doesn't seem to support a twelve foot kontos and the overarm stance is puzzling…. would anybody use a twelve foot spear overarm-- even on foot? If you look at it, a twelve foot spear would hang out about four or more feet outside the Sarcophagus' edge, which certainly busts the symmetry of the composition.

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Now my own website kind of supports the "standard view", but I can be full of , as easily as trained experts.

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So when I am alowed to guess.. and I am since this is TMP..

My guess is that the Companions probably used a typical hoplite spear… of eight or nine feet long, which the Macedonians called a xyston.

The special lancer units used a longer version based on Thracian influences, which was up to 12 feet long.. this is what is shown being used by Alexander on the mosaic and the unarmored "kinch tomb" rider… over the years this lance may have become what was known as a 'xyston' and this information is what was passed down to us and somehow the 'xyston' became confused as the same thing as a kontos.

The kontos is thicker and heavier (thus the name kontos-barge pole), so it's under handed use is well displayed by the Parthian and later art, as well as specific commentary. This makes sense for such a heavy weapon.

And to be even more cart spilling, I reckon it's tough to find a reference that Parthian cataphracts in the Seleucid campaigns used a kontos like weapon. The reasonable evolutionary backtracking that takes the development of the nomadic armored horseman back to the Skythian Massagetai, doesn't totally infer that longer spears are part of their earlier gear. In fact to do the connections one has to go to descriptions of Gaugamela where it is reported that Darius gave his heavy cavalry longer spears to compete with the Macedonians. Thus the bridge of heavy armored with barding cavalry and longer spear is noted for the first time in 331 BC (by my reckoning).

Now the Parthians being part of the Dahai confederacy would have also witnessed the heavy nomadic neighbors use longer spears, so their innovation may have been to simply copy that. So it's possible that the heavy Parthain cavalry of 200 BC was just barded armored cavalryman with a nine foot spear, and over the next hundred years the spear developed into the heavier kontos???

So how does that answer the question? poorly …

I would think a Seleucid cataphract would use a xyston. What is a xyston? Well if you got this far then you can decide on your own.
JJ

blimey.

how about this then.

If you are armed with something minimum 9 feet long, (probably at least 12)
- could you wield it at a trot?
- could you wield it at a gallop using a hand grip?

trotting, prsumably, would be impossible, just like juumping up and down on a rope bridge, it would be all over the place at the end you were trying to aim with.

I would suspect the same problem for a gallop a well – but I'm not a horse person.

Any thoughts on that ?

One does not necessarily use hands. The horse could be gripped and guided with just the knees. Skilled horsemanship required, but doable at any pace.

And the trick for aiming the "barge pole" is in the use of BOTH hands; one balances/holds the weapon, one actually aims from further back. It worked.

It is worth noting that is is debatable if Kontos useres actually charged infantry at full gallop. It is more likely – In my eyes any way – that the very length of the Kontos reveals the manner in which it was truly used. That is, moving at a slightly slower pace, along the line rather than at it, probing infantry from beyond the reach of infantry weapons. So although it may have been possible to gallop with a Kontos, it may not actually have been required to have been USED at the gallop.

All guesswork of course. Sorry. But there really is so little concrete evidence.

Robin Lane Fox had some useful observations after "riding with Alexander" in the Oliver Stone film:
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This is a good response to Markle:

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JJ

Assuming that by 'cataphract' you mean armoured men on armoured horses. The steppe culture that used the horse armour used a long (4-5m) two handed lance with a leaf shaped head and a butt spike as a common melee weapon to supplement the composite bow. This wasn't particularly heavy (despite the later 'barge pole' name for what were probably similar weapons).

In reality this wasn't that different from Xyston or Doryu (or even the mounted sarissa).