A Parthian Mounted Archer on a Fired Clay Plaque
A Parthian horse archer, moulded in fired clay in the first to third century AD and now in the British Museum. The bow drawn from the saddle is what destroyed a Roman consular army at Carrhae: mobile, unreachable by infantry, and resupplied from camels carrying spare arrows.
Crassus took seven legions into Mesopotamia in 53 BC and lost them to a force perhaps a fifth the size. The Parthians declined to close, rode circles around a formation built for close order, and shot until it broke; the cataphracts finished what the archers had loosened. Rome lost some twenty thousand dead, ten thousand prisoners and seven eagles, and the standards were not recovered for thirty years. See Rome's catastrophe at Carrhae.
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