Early Bedouins
The early Bedouins (aka Midianite Arabs in DBA 1.1) are an interesting
army. They are one of the very few armies that use camelry.
They cover a fairly long time period, from the "Biblical" era to the
Classical era. They provide opponents for several of my existing
armies, such as the New Kingdom Egyptians and Early Hebrews.
I had a number of Italeri Sarcen Camels and riders lying around,
because the later Muslim armies didn't use camels in battle. I
considered doing Tuaregs but wuold have needed even more camels than
the 15 I had, so I settled on Early Bedouins for the reasons noted
above.
Assyrian reliefs often show the Bedouins riding two-to-a-camel, often
with a driver and an archer shooting backward, and being pursued by
Assyrian cavalry. There is some question as to whether this was
the usual way of riding to battle or if it is just a depiciton of a
panicked rout, with an infantry man scrambling onto the camel with its
normal rider to get away. Camels are certainly strong enough to
carry two people, so I decided to model one stand with two riders and
the rest with just one.
For riders, I used some of the Italieri Saracens. I removed the
stirrups and relied on painting to give them bare arms and legs.
Bow-armed riders came mostly from some Imex Souix. Feathers were
obviously trimmed off, as well as the fringe of their clothes, and I
painted them as though they wore only a tunic. Some dollar-store
"Indians" from a cowboy & indians set provide some additional
riders, as did a single Numidian. The Indians needed a bit of
work, as they were very poorly sculpted.
These are all "Indians" with some hair added (globs of Liquid
Nails). A kilt was painted on each, as was a beard. The
original figures were probably meant to be wearing trousers but only a
belt was sculpted on them.
This element has two riders per camel. The froint riders are
Saracens (L,R) and a Sioux (center) while all the rear riders are
Siuox. I had to trim the saddles a bit to accomodate the extra
rider but otherwise left the bowcases etc. intact.
The last element could be the Camelry General. The left figure is
a Numidian, the other two are more "Indians". You can see their
proportions are out of wack. The center figure is a bodybuilder
with a pin head, and the archer has misshapen arms and a huge
head. But at arm's length they look ok.
For the infantry, I used some ESCII Muslims as Auxilia and HaT
Macedonian Light Infantry for Psiloi. Some of the Psiloi were
converted to archers from javelinmen: one javelin was bent, the other
trimmed, and a quiver added.
Lastly, the army has a very unusal DBA element: light camelry
(2Cm). These move and fight in all respects like Light Horse but
get the Camelry's terrain modifiers, meaning they treat Dunes or Osases
as good going!
These are basically normal Saracens with stirrups trimmed off
with arms and (for one) legs painted as bare.