Sarmations

As scanned from The Armies and Enemies of Imperial Rome, by Phil Barker.

[Last updated Monday, 13 November 2000]

I'm planning to pull together a Sarmation ally command of 7 Kn(F) for my Early Imperial Roman DBM army using Revell Roman torso's (primarily the figure in scale armour as per my cavalry technique) and Italeri Mongol catafracts.

Who were the Sarmations? Well, they were a semi-nomadic steppe people from around the west and north of the Black sea, who ran around with knights, light horse and not much else - a more detailed explaination to follow (yeah, right! Suffice to say, not any time soon!).

I'll later expand the number of knights to 10 for a full blown DBA army (including one LH and a Ps) and Sarmation ally for my Dacian army. Imagine it. 10 Kn(F), half a dozen Bd(F) and 40 odd Wb(F) (as well as supporting cast of Ps and LH). Completely un-controllable, but when things go right for them, un-stopable. Glorious! And when things go wrong, well at least it'll all be over pretty quick...[as an example, read my report of The First Battle of Woodbury Plain]

The initial idea for some Sarmations came from Luke Ueda-Sarson, when we were discussing the composition of my first competition 25mm DBM Early Imperial Roman army for the '99 nationals. He suggested that I take a Sarmation ally with me, using my Celtic Light Horse/Cav figures (his reason being that the whole army was plastic so it didn't need to be accurate anyway!).

I balked at that comment, but decided to pull apart the Celts and rebuild them as Sarmations. Luke showed me a picture of what they looked like from Greece and Rome at War, and lo and behold the rider looked just like the Revell figure to the left (apart from the helmet). So I decided that it was a possiblity, especially since the picture had him riding on an un-amoured horse. I proceeded to pull apart the Celts and re-build them as Sarmations - hence the two figures above already having painted horses and flocked bases.

As it happened, I didn't get them finished in time, but thought it a good enough idea to continue with. I had just started fiddling around with making some horse armour out of paper when Claudio sent me his review. Using the Mongols' horses is a much better idea!

It looks like I may even be able to use some of the Italeri riders as well, which will add a bit of variety to the army.

For the conversions, I took the Revell figures, sliced off their javelins and shields (which leaves their left arm looking a bit clunky...and the odd one or two with quite badly mangled appendages), chopped 'em in half and stuck 'em on my old Celtic LH/Cav horses.

I then added a 15mm lead pike [which I have now replaced with some thinner 1/32^nd brass rod, as the pikes looked too thick - nice spear head though] and added a couple of accessories. The head on top of the kontos of the top right figure on this page is actually from an Esci Barbarian. [Postscript - I've since lost the head when switching from plan A to plan B. Bother!]

I've yet to add a cloak (from tissue paper), perhaps a bow or two (they were apparently armed with both bow and kontos, though they never got a reputation as great horse archers) and then figure out how to extend their scale coats to their knees. It'll probably be painted on, at some stage...

As for the horses, I'll replace the original Esci Nap horses, the ones who used to be my generic Western barbarian Light Horse, with the Italeri Mongols (converting back to Light Horse again!). As it would seem that only about half of the knights had fully armoured horses, I reckon two boxes will suffice.

That'll give you...

• two fully armoured elements
• two with two armoured horses
• three with one and
• two completely unarmoured elements

and you'll still have enough for two Light Horse elements besides.

Now I just have to find some...and the money to pay for them! [Actually, as it happened, I simply flogged a couple of packs from my stock of figures that I sell!]

As for painting them, the scales for both horse and rider were mostly made from Horn (chopped up horses hooves which was apparnently a greenish blue) or rawhide/leather, with only the richest being able to afford metal armour, and that only for the humans.

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