ABSTRACT
The period under review in this chapter shows the military divergence between the eastern and western parts of Eurasia. While in Western Eurasia, the Roman military machine was centred on heavy infantry, in Eastern Eurasia, cavalry played the dominant role. Unlike the ground war, which was characterised by divergence, naval warfare in the Mediterranean exhibited convergence. This was because both Carthage and Rome adopted and upgraded the Greek–Phoenician–Persian maritime tradition. Parthian cavalry, which the legionaries would face in the near future in the Middle East, was a different matter altogether. The Roman military system had no credible answer to the Parthian way of war in the flat plains of Mesopotamia. In fact, the Turkish cavalry from the ninth century onwards more or less followed the Parthian tactics against the Rajputs of North India and against the Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire in Asia Minor.
