Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of, I believe it's 160. I think I plucked that out of my

imagination. Welcome to episode 160 of ancient warfare answers. I'm on my own. So it's the

cats away, Jasper the Cat and Murray will play, which we're going to do. So I'm going to answer

your questions. Now, of course, you could ask a question and you can become a patron of the magazine. So there's just for a few dollars, you can

support us at one of three levels, and you get a copy of the magazine. And of course, you can ask

us a question. You can ask us a question anyway, but, you know, it just pays when you are. So the first question is from one of our patrons, Zoe.

And she's asked, we know about the forehorn saddles of the Roman cavalry used, but do we have any idea what sorts of saddles might have been used elsewhere in the ancient world?

Now, I must straight up say, I am not a horsey person, so I apologize in advance if I get any of the pronunciations or identifications of the following bits wrong. Indeed, there are roughly two types

of saddle in the ancient world, certainly by the High Roman Empire. You've got the forehorn saddle, which is probably

one of the best stories I ever know about that is the idea that theoretical historians were

talking about how you couldn't couch a lance with Roman saddles, and therefore we had to come up

with different ways that Roman cavalry operated.

This was, of course, despite the fact that in archaeological reliefs and things and pottery,

we have pictures of cavalry charging with couch glances.

And it was with the forehorn saddle.

You couldn't do that.

And then, you know, behind him, someone with a, uh, a rebuilt,

reenactment saddle does exactly what the historian says you can't do. So it's one of those wonderful moments where, uh, experimental archaeology and history combined to, to improve our

knowledge. So, uh, you have got the four-horned Roman saddle, which is technically what they call a tree saddle, but we'll get to that as I go through hopefully without destroying any pronunciations.

So what you've got with the earliest cavalry, which are Assyrian, which you'll know from the last podcast we did on the

Assyrians in ancient warfare magazine, are that they introduce cavalry around about the

8th century, and they have three things on them, which are the origins of the saddle.

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