Hi everyone. It's Murray Darm, the assistant editor of Ancient Warfare Magazine, flying alone

yet again on another ancient water warfare answers episode. This time we've got a question from

Carlos, who's one of our patrons on Patreon. You too could become a patron on Patreon. You just need

to go to the Patreon website forward slash ancient

warfare podcast and you can support us and hopefully allow us to answer more of your questions.

Now Carlos, Carlos asks, how did Roman armies and others counter the firepower and mobility

of horse archer armies.

And he asked not only the Romans, but also near East powers,

he talks about the firepower and discipline of mobility,

sorry, the firepower discipline and mobility of horse archer nomad armies.

Now, interesting when I read that first time,

I thought discipline was not something you would necessarily associate with most horse archer nomad armies.

Pastoralists, if we're being more politically correct today.

Now, I think the interesting thing is when those sorts of enemies are first engaged, they

indeed fight in a different kind of way from most of the heavy infantry-based enemies.

So suddenly they're coming up against horse archer armies, and they need to weather a storm,

try and engage in hand-to-hand combat and

then try and deliver one of their own decisive cavalry charges.

Later, that doesn't really change.

You have to weather the storm.

We've got evidence at the Battle of Cari in 53 BC, for instance, of the Parthians being resupplied with arrows. So they aren't going to run out. Poor old Crassus and his son are sort of stuck there trying to, you know, shield and hide behind their shields and deal with all of these missiles coming in that they can weather

and waiting for their moment and it's not going to come.

...