On the Roman-Byzantine adoption of the stirrup once more: a new find from seventh-century Aphrodisias
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Archaeological evidence and the text of the Strategikon show that it was only in the late sixth century AD that the Roman-Byzantine military adopted the stirrup. It is now widely argued that the Avars, who settled in the Carpathian basin in the sixth century, played a key role in introducing iron stirrups to the Roman-Byzantine world. However, the evidence to support this assertion is limited. Although hundreds of stirrups have been found in Avar graves in the Carpathian basin, very few stirrups of sixth- or seventh-century date are known from the Roman-Byzantine empire - no more than seven - and only two of these are of definitively Avar type. The text of the Strategikon, sometimes argued to support this Avar source, can be interpreted differently, as indeed can the archaeological evidence. While the debate about the Roman-Byzantine adoption of the stirrup has focused mostly on finds from the Balkans, two early stirrups are known from Asia Minor, from Pergamon and Sardis. This paper presents a third, previously unpublished stirrup, from a seventh-century deposit at Aphrodisias in Caria; this is the first stirrup found in Asia Minor from a datable context. Here we present this find and its context, and use it to reconsider the model of solely Avar stirrup transmission that has dominated scholarship to date. So varied are the early stirrups that multiple sources of influence, Avar and other, and even a degree of experimentation, seem more likely to underpin the Roman-Byzantine adoption of this technology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".