The use of the two-handed Kontos by heavily armoured soldiers on horseback, known as Cataphracts, was developed first by nomadic eastern Iranian tribes and spread throughout the ancient world.

The backbone of the Spâh in the Sassanid era was its heavy armoured cavalry, known since Classical antiquity in the west as Cataphracts.

Cataphracts would often be equipped with an additional side-arm such as a sword or mace, for use in the melee that often followed a charge.

Cataphracts served as either the elite cavalry or assault force for most empires and nations that fielded them, primarily used for impetuous charges to break through infantry formations.

Armored Cataphracts began to be deployed in eastern Europe and the near East, following the precedents established by Persian forces, as the main striking force of the armies in contrast to the earlier roles of cavalry as scouts, raiders, and outflankers.

Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros Phocas analyzes the wedge formation of the Byzantine Cataphracts in the third chapter of his Praecepta Militaria.

The ponies were almost uncontrollable.

I knew that three or four of them were almost always present in the hall, but what they were doing, and exactly where, I could not tell.

Their conversations were, almost invariably, accompanied by the same gestures -- arms and pointed forefingers darting toward each other in arclike semicircular motions.

To help him do so The Prince had conferred control of his land forces on a soldier who was different from him in almost every respect save one: both were eccentrics of the purest ray serene.

We were almost the same age, she was fifteen, I was twelve, and where I felt there was a life to look forward to Lilly felt she had had as much of it as was necessary.

The wholesome activities were to be provided by many organizations including the YMCA, the Knights of Columbus, the Jewish Welfare Board, the American Library Association, and the Playground and Recreation Association -- private societies which voluntarily performed the job that was taken over almost entirely by the Special Services Division of the Army itself in World War 2.

I never found it among any of the Chinese with whom I spoke, though granted they were, almost all, members of the official family who, presumably, harbor official thoughts.

The children he painted were almost always in rags, his portraits were often ruthless to the point of ugliness, and his nudes -- including several self-portraits -- were stringy, contorted and strangely pathetic.

His hands lay loosely, yet stiffly -- they were like wax hands: almost lifelike, not quite -- folded in his lap ; ;

It was a word he was proud of, a word that meant much to him, and he used it with great pleasure, almost as if it were an exclusive possession, and more: he sensed himself to be very highly educated, four cuts above any of the folks back home.

The doctor's wits had not left him, however, for all his sixty-eight years, and the wails were almost immediately lost in the sound of water rushing out from the showerhead.

Before that we lumber dealers were working almost single-handed on the problem ''.

It might be that certain people were born with a compulsion to complicate their lives, while others could live blissfully motionless almost indefinitely, like lizards in the sun, too indolent to blink their eyes.

A borderline schizophrenic young man told me that to him the various theoretical concepts about which he had been expounding, in a most articulate fashion, during session after session with me, were like great cubes of almost tangibly solid matter up in the air above him ; ;

If we thus spent our very first day in the midst of a large number of your people honoring a new hero and a great national achievement, our last day, to us at least, was equally impressive and very moving, even though the crowds were absent and there was almost complete silence.

If pressed by the sitter for more detail, she may be able to bring the picture more into focus and see more sharply, almost as if she were physically going closer.

But we must never forget, most of the appropriate heroes and their legends were created overnight, to answer immediate needs, almost always with conscious aims and ends.

The conductor did recall having priests as passengers and this satisfied police, although the conductor also pointed out that in heavily Catholic Fall River there were priests riding on almost every trip the streetcar made, so Morse's statement really proved nothing.

I discovered in the course of a visit there that almost all the pupils were Negroes.

Later, the word became almost exclusively applied to a cow thief, startin' from the days of the maverick when cowhands were paid by their employers to `` get out and rustle a few mavericks ''.

In a sample of new members of Pittsburgh churches, almost 60 per cent were recruited by initial `` contacts with friendly members ''.

The Indians were not impressed and held to the Carolina traders, who swarmed over the country, almost to the Mississippi.

Values of this order for the absolute zero were not, however, universally accepted about this period.

On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail.

Shortly after this era, boxing commissions and other sanctioning bodies were established to regulate the sport and establish universally recognized champions.

However there was no consistency in Whig ideology, and diverse writers including John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke were all influential among Whigs, although none of them was universally accepted.

The economic ideas of the Jacksonian era were almost universally the ideas of classical liberalism.

This method continued even when cathode ray tubes were manufactured as rounded rectangles ; it had the advantage of being a single number specifying the size, and was not confusing when the aspect ratio was universally 4: 3.

When Defoe visited in the mid 1720s, he claimed that the hostility towards his party was, " because they were English and because of the Union, which they were almost universally exclaimed against ".

The term deuterocanonical is sometimes used to describe the canonical antilegomena, those books of the New Testament which, like the deuterocanonicals of the Old Testament, were not universally accepted by the early Church, but which are now included in the 27 books of the New Testament recognized by almost all Christians.

The last emperor to be crowned by the pope was Charles V ; all emperors after him were technically emperors-elect, but were universally referred to as Emperor.

Ekman's most famous work revolved around the finding that certain emotions appeared to be universally recognized, even in cultures that were preliterate and could not have learned associations for facial expressions through media.

Among those from whom he procured portrait commissions were Pedro Téllez-Girón, 9th Duke of Osuna and his wife María Josefa Pimentel, 12th Countess-Duchess of Benavente, María del Pilar de Silva, 13th Duchess of Alba ( universally known simply as the " Duchess of Alba "), and her husband José María Álvarez de Toledo, 15th Duke of Medina Sidonia, and María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, Marchioness of Pontejos.

Though the common authorship of the three epistles is still almost universally accepted, scholars such as Heinrich Julius Holtzmann and C. H. Dodd have maintained that the epistle and the gospel were written by different authors.

In contrast, the major writings and most of what is now the New Testament were Homologoumena, or universally acknowledged for a long time, since the middle of the 2nd century or before.

To establish a universally accepted foundation for the definition of the metre, measurements of this meridian more accurate than those available at that time were imperative.

These accusations were rebutted universally — most prominently by Andrew Tanenbaum himself, who strongly criticised Kenneth Brown and published a long rebuttal on his own personal Web site.

This new campaign was not universally embraced within the Dalit community, as Ambedkar condemned Gandhi's use of the term Harijans as saying that Dalits were socially immature, and that privileged caste Indians played a paternalistic role.

This capability was not universally implemented in MUMPS systems before the 1984 ANSI standard, as only canonically numeric subscripts were required by the standard to be allowed.

No resistance is known at that time, but it would have been entirely normal if his reign were not universally accepted.

According to the 1999 edition of Religion and Politics In America Unification Church followers were known " universally " by the term.

Dependent holdings were held nominally by arrangement of lord and tenant, but tenure became in practice almost universally hereditary, with a payment made to the lord on each succession of another member of the family.

Of the six players with retired numbers, five were retired for their play with the Phillies and one, 42, was universally retired by Major League Baseball when they honored the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breaking the color barrier.

The Dionysian writings and their mystical teaching were universally accepted throughout the East, amongst both Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians.

If it were a being, it would have a particular nature, and so could not be universally productive of all being.