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Sean Manning
Armed Force in the

TeispidAchaemenid Empire
Past Approaches, Future Prospects
ORIENS E T OCCIDENS
Studien zu antiken Kulturkontakten und ihrem Nachleben | 32
Franz Steiner Verlag

Copyright © 2020. Franz Steiner Verlag. All rights reserved.
Manning, Sean. Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire : Past Approaches, Future Prospects, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020. ProQuest
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Oriens et Occidens
Studien zu antiken Kulturkontakten und ihrem Nachleben
Herausgegeben von
Josef Wiesehöfer
in Zusammenarbeit mit
Pierre Briant, Geoffrey Greatrex, Amélie Kuhrt
und Robert Rollinger
Band 32
Armed Force in the
Teispid-Achaemenid Empire
Past Approaches, Future Prospects
Sean Manning
Franz Steiner Verlag
Gefördert durch den Forschungsschwerpunkt ‚Kulturelle Begegnungen – Kulturelle Konflikte‘
und das Dekanat der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät
der Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck
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MATRI LAURAE REGINALD CHARLOTTEQUE BULL FILIAE
SEMPER TRES LIBEROS AEQUALITER DILIGENTI
ET
MEMORIAE PATRIS KELLY MANNING
A MORBO APUD MEDICOS ΜΥΕΛΟΜΑ DICTO NOBIS EREPTO
QUI ANNOS LXVI MENSEM I DIES XVII VIXIT
Acknowledgements
As I write these words, I flip through a copy of an article which arrived by inter-library
loan more than a decade ago on the other side of the world. Any academic project de-
pends on a network of systems and helpers, only a few of which can be recognized in
an acknowledgements section or footnotes. I will list a few here and give some idea of
what they have done without claiming to name everyone who helped or acknowledge
every way in which they contributed.
Instigators: Lana Simpson, Dr. Gregory Rowe, and Jona Lendering
Teachers and Colleagues: Prof. Dr. Reinhold Bichler, Julian Degen, Dr. Sebstian Fink,
Dr. Angelika Kellner, Dr. Martin Lang, Dr. Steve Muhlberger, Dr. Cinzia Pappi, Astrid
Rief, and Bernhard Schneider
Correspondents: Dr. Selim Adali, Dr. Josho Brouwers, Dr. Helmut Föll, Dr. Roel
Konijnendijk, Dr. Reyhan Körpe, Lucas McMahon, Dr. John Peter Oleson, Dr. Anick
Payne, and Dr. Lâtife Summerer
Makers: Matthew Amt, Christian Cameron, Todd Feinman, and Jeroen Zuiderwijk
Friends: Aaron, Anna, Diana, Nezam, Flo, Noah, Marlene, and Clemens
Sparring Partners: Patrick Waterson of the Society of Ancients, UK (†14 January
2020), Paul McDonnell-Staff of Brisbane (†12 March 2020)
My apologies to those I have forgotten.
This study was written a twelve-hour flight away from my private library. Any schol-
ar who has travelled knows the limited power of notes and borrowed books to replace
the physical and tactile knowledge of one’s own eclectic collection. I apologize for any
failures to document the ultimate origins of my ideas, which are shaped by many years
of reading, much of it outside the traditional boundaries of ancient history and ancient
Near Eastern studies.
In revising this work for publication, I have focused on removing redundancy,
strengthening my arguments in response to the reviewers’ comments, and expanding
references to ancient sources and to research which I read (or could have read) while
the original dissertation was written. For example, the site report on Ghalekuti, the full
progress of the number 120,000, and the details of which Red Figure vases show a par-
ticular type of shield are new in this version. Bruno Gombert’s 2018 University of Paris
PhD thesis L’Armée en Babylonie du VIe au IVe siècle av. n. È. appeared too late for me to
8 Acknowledgements
fully include. This encyclopedic work is focused on cuneiform texts from Babylonia,
so compliments my own research. I have also added maps, illustrations, and indices.
Some material in § 1.6 and § 1.7 has been incorporated into Manning forthcoming.
This research was supported from 2014 to 2018 by the Social Sciences and Hu-
manities Research Council, Canada. A number of small grants refunded some of the
costs of attending conferences. Layout and printing of this book were funded by the
Forschungsschwerpunkt ‘Kulturelle Begegnungen – Kulturelle Konflikte’ at the Leop-
old-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck and the Dekanat of LFU Innsbruck.
Bibliographic Abbreviations and Editions of Sources
This field draws on work in historical linguistics, classics, and Assyriology, each of
which have their own conventions.
Ancient sources are abbreviated in the styles of the Oxford Classical Dictionary and
the Reallexikon der Assyriologie. I have avoided abbreviating journal titles because what
is clear in one field in one decade can be confusing in a neighbouring field a generation
later. A few fundamental reference works have been abbreviated as follows:
ADAB = Naveh and Shaked 2012 EncIr. = Encyclopaedia Iranica
Briant, Cyrus to Alexander = Briant 2002a GAG = von Soden 1952
BHAch I = Briant 1997b Kuhrt, Persian Empire = Kuhrt 2007
BHAch II = Briant 2001 MacGinnis, Arrows = MacGinnis 2012
CHI = Cambridge History of Iran Meyer, Geschichte = Meyer 1939
CAD = Chicago Assyrian Dictionary RlA = Reallexikon der Assyriologie
Classical literary sources are cited through convenient editions and translations, often
the Loeb Classical Library. My first encounters with Herodotus were through Water-
field 1998. The sources for quotations, if not my own translation, are indicated in the
footnotes. In my view, the kinds of arguments which I am making are not ones where
slight differences in the text are likely to be crucial: or from another point of view, I am
not convinced that most previous researchers carefully examined the apparatus criti-
cus of a good edition before citing Herodotus as ‘proof ’ of a Persian military practice.
Careful text-critical work might reveal new things, such as Brian Bosworth’s discovery
that a type of Macedonian infantry called ἀσθέταιροι had been removed from the text
of Arrian by overzealous editors (Bosworth 1973, for later research see Anson 2010),
but this study is a work of ancient history more than philology.
For the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, I used the parallel-text edition in Behrwald 2005.
Most work on the Achaemenid royal inscriptions focused on the Old Persian ver-
sion, despite the fact that it is by no means clear that this was in any way ‘official’ or the
‘original language’ and that very few Old Persian texts other than the royal inscriptions
survive. I am most familiar with the Akkadian text of DB published in von Voigtlander
1978, and the text of DNb in Hinz 1969.
10 Bibliographic Abbreviations and Editions of Sources
Cuneiform tablets are published in three stages: a sketch or transcription, a trans-

literation into Latin letters, and a translation. Texts published before 1980 are usually
cited by the editio princeps which often contains only a sketch, but more complete edi-
tions are usually available (often unprinted, but sometimes available on the Internet
or by email). Rylke Borger’s Handbuch der Keilschriftliteratur covers editions and com-
ments up to 1975 but nobody has continued his work.
Neo-Assyrian documents and letters are published in transliteration and English
translation in the series State Archives of Assyria (SAA) while royal inscriptions appear
in other, incomplete series with their own acronyms.
Akkadian texts in J. N. Strassmaier’s series Nbk. (Nebuchadnezzar), Nab. (Naboni-
dus), Cyr. (Cyrus), Camb. (Cambyses), and Dar. (Darius I) are often available in trans-
literation and French translation on the achemenet website under Sources Textuelles
(http://www.achemenet.com/fr/tree/?/sources-textuelles), although finding them
can be difficult. Most texts from the Murašû archive from Nippur are transliterated
and translated in Stolper 1985. Moore 1935 has transliterations and English translations
of TCL 12 and TCL 13. A variety of letters appear in transliteration and German trans-
lation in Hackl et al. 2014. A handful of letters from the Long Sixth Century are trans-
lated into English in Oppenheim 1967.
Most Aramaic texts cited in this thesis are published and translated in either the
Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt (TADAE) and Porten et al. (1996)
or in Naveh and Shaked 2012 (ADAB).
A variety of sources are translated in Kuhrt 2007 which has an index locorum and
cites other editions of and comments on the same texts.
ORACC, the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, part of the Cuneiform
Digital Library Initiative, is a convenient source of photos of tablets or sketches from
early editions http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ Tablets are occasionally cited by their
number in ORACC in addition to their accession number or the editio princeps. Simi-
larly, a variety of Sumerian literary texts are available in the Electronic Text Corpus of
Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ and links to this edition
are often included.
Philological Abbreviations and Transliteration Conventions
Table 1 Abbreviations (Language Names)

Aram. Aramaic Lat. Latin
Akk. Akkadian LBab. Late Babylonian
El. Elamite Med. Median
Gr. Greek OP Old Persian
Hbr. Hebrew Sum. Sumerian
Specialists in the ancient Near East use a variety of conventions to represent the spell-
ing (orthography) and pronunciation (phonetics) of ancient languages. The details
vary from scholar and scholar and field to field and are not always defined. The follow-
ing is a guide to the conventions used in this thesis and the most common alternatives.
It is meant to help readers pronounce all the ancient words in the thesis, and to name
the accented or non-standard characters used to transcribe ancient languages in the
Latin alphabet, not to be a precise guide to the phonetics of any ancient languages (but
see the further reading).
Table 2 Notation from Historical Linguistics

> “becomes” * non-standard form
< “comes from” <> orthographic form
+ reconstructed form [] phonetic form
Examples: Latin vinum > French vin; Aramaic hkl < Sumerian e2-gal; Proto-Indo-Eu-
ropean +kʷekʷlo “wheel”; English *dunno “do not know”; Babylonian <{m}Da-ri-ia-
muš>; Babylonian [Darijawuš]
Note that some writers use * before both reconstructed forms and non-standard
forms.
Philologists worry about distinguishing words written according to their native or-
thography and words written as phoneticists see them. Specialists in ancient languages
12 Philological Abbreviations and Transliteration Conventions
have their own conventions. Words in languages whose native writing system was an
alphabet (Latin, Greek) are usually transcribed in that alphabet. Words whose native
writing system is an abjad are transcribed into the Latin alphabet as a sequence of con-
sonants. Their reconstructed forms can be identified by the addition of vowels and the
replacement of some of the consonantal signs with the vowels which they stand for.
Words whose native writing system is cuneiform (Sumerian, Akkadian, Old Persian)
are written orthographically as a sequence of phonograms and logograms joined by
dashes. Their phonetic equivalents can be identified by the absence of dashes, the indi-
cation of vowel length with diacritical marks, and sometimes the differentiation of [j]
(pronounced as in Latin or German) and [i].
Foreign words and phrases embedded in English sentences are written in italics.
Translations of words or short phrases are written in quotation marks. I have reluctant-
ly preferred ‘Latin style’ spelling of Greek person-names and place-names (Cunaxa
not Kounaxa, Darius not Dareios) and ‘biblical’ spellings of the Assyrian kings’ names
(Esarhaddon not Aššur-aḫa-iddina) because most of the names in this book are familiar
in their Latinized form. Above all I have tried to spell a given name consistently. Since
most places have multiple names (Anšan/Pārsa-/Persis/Fars) and a name can mean
different things in different contexts (not everyone whom an Assyrian called Ionian
was ethnically Ionian) any choice has disadvantages.
Table 3 Special Characters Used for Transcribing Ancient Languages

Transcription Name Approximate Pronunciation IPA
ˀ Aleph (Hbr.) Very brief constriction of the throat as between ˀ
n/a the syllables of uh uh
ˁ Ayin (Hbr.) No English equivalent ˁ
n/a
ç n/a Possibly <s> as in English sap n/a
C with cedilla
ĝ n/a <ng>as in English running ŋ
G with circumflex
ḫ n/a Classical Greek chi, <ch> as in Scots loch, x
H with breve German ich

below
ḥ Chet (Hbr.) A breathy <h> sound ħ
H with underdot
q Qoph (Hbr.) A strong <k> sound kˁ
Q
r̥ n/a Possibly <uhr> or <ahr> ər
R with ring below (OP R̥ taxšaçā- = Lat. Artaxerxes)
Philological Abbreviations and Transliteration Conventions 13
Transcription Name Approximate Pronunciation IPA

ṣ Tsade (Hbr.) <ts> as in English bits ts
S with underdot
š Shin (Hbr.) <sh>as in English fish ʃ
S with caron
ś Sin (Hbr.) A strong <s> sound s
S with acute
accent
ṭ Tet (Hbr.) A strong <t> sound tˁ
T with Underdot
θ n/a <th> as in English thing θ
Theta (Gr.)
x n/a In Old Persian, <ch> as in German auch x
X (not [ks] as in English hex)
This is a rough guide to how these characters are usually pronounced, named, and
typed. Specialists in the phonology of a particular language are likely to interpret some
characters differently (eg. there are questions whether š was aspirated in Neo-Assyrian,
and word-medial <m> was probably pronounced <w> in Late Babylonian). A chart of
the International Phonetic Alphabet with recordings of pronunciations is available at
http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/
Conventions for Transcribing Cuneiform
My transcriptions of cuneiform follow the conventions of the Oracc Akkadian Stylesheet

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/languages/akkadian/akkadianstylesheet/
index.html These include the use of numbers after a syllable to indicate which sign with
that pronunciation is meant, the transliteration of logograms in capital letters and of
phonograms in lowercase letters, and the writing of determinatives in {curly brackets}.
Note that some writers transcribe characters read phonetically in italics, characters read
as logograms in plain font, and determinatives in superscript and use accent aigut <á>
and accent grave <à> to indicate the second and third most common signs with a given
pronunciation. This is not very accessible for readers with poor eyesight, and it is hard to
proofread.
Long vowels in Akkadian words are marked with macron <ā> or with circumflex
<â> depending on their etymology.
Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, like the scripts of Classical Latin and many Semitic
languages, does not distinguish between [j] and [i].
Aleph is sometimes written with an apostrophe <'> or a half-ring <ʾ>. Transcrip-
tions of Akkadian sometimes write <ḫ> as <h> because Akkadian lacks a soft <h>.
14 Philological Abbreviations and Transliteration Conventions
Some writers transcribe Aramaic in the Hebrew square script. Adding another writ-
ing system to a thesis written for historians rather than philologists did not seem like
it would be helpful.
Further Reading
Phonetics and transcription of Aramaic: Takamitsu Muraoka and Bezalel Porten, A

Grammar of Egyptian Aramaic (Leiden: Brill, 1998) Part I {no IPA equivalents provid-
ed}
Phonetics and transcription of Sumerian: Abraham Hendrik Jagersma, A Descriptive
Grammar of Sumerian (PhD Dissertation, Leiden University, 2010) § 3 Phonology
Phonetics and transcription of Akkadian: Wolfram von Soden, Grundriss der Ak-
kadischen Grammatik {the classic grammar but not by a phoneticist}, Erica Reiner, A
Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian {brief comments using slightly different names than
Anglophone linguists use today}, Robert Hetzron (ed.), The Semitic Languages {Prints
the letters from transcriptions in the order of an IPA chart}
Phonetics of Old Persian: Rüdiger Schmitt, “Altpersisch” in Rüdiger Schmitt (ed.),
Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum (Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag: Wiesbaden, 1989)
§ 2.2.5 pp. 66–70, Otto Skjaervo, An Introduction to Old Persian. Second version (un-
published PDF file, 2002)
Linguistic jargon and notation: Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduc-
tion. Third Edition. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2013.
Most textbooks of Latin or Classical Greek describe the reconstructed phonology
of those languages.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Bibliographic Abbreviations and Editions of Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Philological Abbreviations and Transliteration Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Chapter 1: A History of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.2 Early Classical Scholarship: Delbrück, Meyer, and the Specialists. . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.3 Broad Works 1962–1983: Hignett, Burn, Green, Rahe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
1.4 Alternatives to the Classical Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
1.5 The Achaemenid History Workshops and the Encyclopaedia Iranica . . . . . . . . 33
1.6 Western and Eastern Ways of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.7 Hellenistic Warfare as Cultural Synthesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.8 The First Monographs: Bittner, Head, and Sekunda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
1.9 Scholarship Since 1992 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
1.9.1 The Classicists’ Tradition Since 1992 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
1.9.2 Alternative Approaches Since 1992 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
1.9.3 A Sense of Aporia 2005–2018 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
1.10 Achaemenid Army Studies, Roman Army Studies, and Early Greek Warfare . . 54
1.11 Aims of the Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
1.12 Scope of the Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Chapter 2: The Ancestors of Achaemenid Armies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.2 Setting the Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.2.1 Chronological Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.2.2 Geographical Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.3 Methodology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.4 The Scale of Warfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
2.5 Origin of Soldiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
16 Table of Contents
2.6 Types of Troops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

2.6.1 Dezső’s Model of Assyrian Troop Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
2.6.2 Ratios between Different Troop Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
2.6.3 Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
2.7 Life on Campaign. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
2.8 Combat Mechanics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
2.8.1 Skirmishes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
2.8.2 Sieges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
2.8.3 Success and Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
2.9 Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
2.9.1 Chariots. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
2.9.2 Aramaic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
2.9.3 Iron. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
2.9.4 Hand Weapons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
2.9.5 Armour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
2.9.6 Composite Bows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
2.9.7 Organizational Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
2.9.8 Neither Revolution nor Stability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
2.10 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Chapter 3: Kings at War: The Perspective of the Royal Inscriptions . . . . . . . . . . 115

3.1 The Cyrus Cylinder and Babylonian Royal Inscriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
3.1.1 Who Spoke and Wrote Late Babylonian? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
3.1.2 Who Heard and Read Royal Inscriptions? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
3.1.3 The Relationship between Ideology and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
3.2 Teispid Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
3.2.1 The Cyrus Cylinder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
3.2.2 Other Sources for Teispid Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
3.3 Achaemenid Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
3.3.1 Why Did Darius Become King? His Own Answer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
3.3.2 The Model of People and Land in DB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
3.3.3 The Cause of War at Behistun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

3.3.4 Actors at Behistun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
3.3.5 Organization and Equipment of Armies in Behistun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
3.3.6 The Sinews of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
3.3.7 Initiative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
3.3.8 Decisive Battle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
3.3.9 Lack of Interest in Details of Armies or Fighting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
3.3.10 Capture and Punishment of Ringleaders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Table of Contents 17
3.3.11 Space, Time, and Empire at Behistun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

3.3.12 Palace Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
3.4 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Chapter 4: Commoners at War: the Perspective of Letters and Documents . . 155

4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
4.2 Methodological Problems Posed by Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
4.3 UCP 9/3 269 ff.: The Gadal-Jâma Contract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
4.4 The Ḫaṭru Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
4.5 Soldiers Outside the Ḫaṭru Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.5.1 Temple Dependents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.5.2 Citizen Soldiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
4.5.3 Chaldean Tribes Living Outside the Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
4.5.4 Contingents from the Subject Dominions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.5.5 Mercenaries, Military Colonists, or Wandering Experts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
4.5.6 The Gardu Troops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
4.6 Service and Substitution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
4.7 Ethnicity and Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
4.8 Bowmen, Horsemen, and Charioteers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
4.9 Equipping the Troops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
4.10 The Muster at Uruk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
4.11 Life Ina Madākti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
4.11.1 Activities of Soldiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
4.11.2 Organizing, Feeding, and Paying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
4.11.3 Nostoi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
4.12 Theories of Decline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
4.12.1 Overtaxation and Military Decline: The Rahe/Lane Fox Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . 203
4.12.2 Challenging the Premises of the Rahe/Lane Fox Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
4.12.3 The Feudal Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
4.13 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
Chapter 5: Material Remains: The Perspective of Archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
5.2 Obstacles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
5.3 Notable Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
5.3.1 Persis and the Zagros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
5.3.2 Babylonia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
5.3.3 Syria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
5.3.4 The Levant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
18 Table of Contents
5.3.5 Egypt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

5.3.6 Eastern Iran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
5.3.7 Cyprus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
5.3.8 Anatolia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
5.3.9 Aegean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
5.3.10 Objects Of Unknown Origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
5.4 Classes of Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
5.5 Larger Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
5.6 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Chapter 6: Greek Literature, and the Army in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
6.2 Methodological Challenges. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
6.2.1 The Problem of Writing a ‘Battle Piece’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
6.2.2 Greek Warfare as a Moving Target. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
6.2.3 Synchronic and Diachronic Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
6.2.4 How Greek is the Greek Tradition? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
6.2.5 Conflation of Reliability and Literary Skill. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
6.2.6 Facing Methodological Problems: The Scythed Chariot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
6.3 Methodological Problems in Using the Classical Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
6.3.1 Uncritical Use of Classical Sources as a Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
6.3.2 Rationalizing Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
6.3.3 Confusing Sources with Glosses: Xenoi at The Granicus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
6.4 How Did the Persians Fight? Eduard Meyer’s Answer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
6.4.1 Did Persian Warfare Depend on Superior Numbers? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
6.5 An Alternative Model of Combat Mechanics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
6.5.1 The Problem of Labelling Persian Infantry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
6.5.2 The Equipment of Persian Infantry in Herodotus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
6.5.3 Equipment and Fighting Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
6.5.4 An Analogy for Herodotean Combat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
6.5.5 Combat Mechanics in Later Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
6.5.6 Persian Armies in the Alexander Historians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312

6.5.7 Greeks as a Cause of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
6.6 Three Case Studies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
6.6.1 Calculating The Size of Armies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
6.6.2 The Idea of the Persians Adopting Greek Weapons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
6.6.3 Siege Warfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
6.7 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
Chapter 7: Conclusion and Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
Table of Contents 19
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
Index of Assyriological Sources Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
Index of Biblical Sources Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
Index of Classical Sources Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
Index of Words in Ancient Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
Index of Persons, Places, and Technical Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
Chapter 1
A History of Research
1.1 Introduction
Achaemenid military history has often been studied, but rarely for its own sake. Whereas
Greek military history and Roman Army Studies have developed into their own fields
since the 19th century, Achaemenid military history has usually been studied as part of
research into Greek history, Iranian philology, or Babylonian economic history. This has
several unfortunate effects. One is that work by scholars from all the different disciplines
which touch on the Achaemenid army has not always been addressed in the same study.
Whereas students of the Roman army are expected to combine art, documents, literature,
experiment, comparative evidence, and material remains in making an argument, work
on the Achaemenid army tends to focus on a single kind of evidence. Another is that
there has been little reflection in writing about the general direction of research and the
various methods and assumptions which are used. To my knowledge, the only published
overviews of research on the Achaemenid army, as distinct from overviews of the results
of that research, are chapter II.C of Stefan Bittner’s PhD thesis and some short research
notes in Pierre Briant’s writing.1 When a number of people work on similar problems,
criticizing each other’s work and suggesting their own favourite methods, research tends
to progress. When such a scholarly community is absent, this does not always happen.
This chapter considers some of the most influential studies of the Achaemenid army
published since the end of the 19th century. It does not claim to be comprehensive: for
example, work on the wars in Ionia around 400 BCE and on the Macedonian conquest
and succession struggles is neglected in favour of works on Xerxes’ invasion of Greece.
For the purpose of identifying themes and trends, studies of any one of these wars
would be sufficient, but Herodotus’ description of the Persian army has encouraged
modern scholars to include their own description. Later chapters will discuss sources
1 Bittner 1987: 73–83 and Briant, Cyrus to Alexander, 961 (ad capitulum 13/5 on Xerxes), 979, 980 (ad
capitulum 14/7 on Darius II), 986–989 (ad capitulum 15/2 on Artaxerxes and Cyrus), 1034–1038
(ad capitulum 17/3 on Darius III); remarks on military affairs are scattered throughout Briant,
BHAch I and BHAch II.
22 A History of Research
and scholarship for specific points in more detail. What this chapter does claim to be
is an overview of how previous scholars have approached the Persian army, and what
methods and assumptions they have used.
1.2 Early Classical Scholarship: Delbrück, Meyer, and the Specialists
Hans Delbrück’s comparison of Herodotus on the vast Persian army to Swiss chroni-
clers on the vast Burgundian army has become part of the folklore of ancient military
history.2 He pointed out that Swiss chroniclers said that they had been outnumbered
by the terrible Burgundian invaders, while documents implied that Swiss armies were
larger than Burgundian ones. If the Swiss could distort the facts, then so could the
Greeks. If documents on the size of the armies were not available, he suggested that a
historian should consider the nature of the two armies, whether they were near to or
far from home, and other practical factors to determine the likely size of each. While
his specific points are not often accepted, later writers have accepted that Herodotus’
figures for army size are doubtful, and most have estimated that the Persian army was
much smaller than Herodotus claims. Delbrück had great influence on later research-
ers into military history, introducing methods such as population estimates and prac-
tical criticism (Sachkritik). Unfortunately I am not familiar with any systematic study
of his influence on modern writing about ancient warfare.3
Delbrück chose to begin his Geschichte der Kriegskunst with the Persian Wars. In his
preface he explained that while there were much earlier sources from Egypt and the
neighbouring peoples, nevertheless these were not quite sufficient for a complete pic-
ture, and that while the stories about the Persian Wars preserved by Greek writers con-
tained some legends, it was nevertheless possible to reconstruct the outline of events.4
According to the fashion of his time, Delbrück understood the art of war as some-
thing which was exemplified by great land battles in the open. He also assumed that
he should tell a story which began with the Greeks, progressed through the Romans
and Charlemagne and the medieval kingdoms, and culminated with war in Europe in
his own day. Starting with the 5th century BCE was a reasonable choice when Delbrück
wrote, since the study of ancient Near Eastern texts, art, and archaeology were at an
early stage. Yet this choice cut the Achaemenids off from earlier Near Eastern history,
and Delbrück was not very interested in their possible influence on later armies.
2 Delbrück 1887
3 Keegan 1976: 53, 55 has some casual but worthwhile remarks on Delbrück’s influence on British
and American writing about war. Konijnendijk 2015: ch. 1/2018: 7–12 argues that the standard Eng-
lish language view of Greek warfare into the 1990s was drawn from German, Austrian, and English
theorists before the First World War.
4 Delbrück 1920 I, 1–2
Early Classical Scholarship: Delbrück, Meyer, and the Specialists 23
Delbrück’s vision of the Achaemenid army in the early 5th century BCE accepted the
Greek tradition that Persian and Greek soldiers were equipped very differently, add-
ed the idea that Persian and Greek soldiers were arranged in combat very differently,
and rejected the Greek tradition that Persian armies were tremendously large. For the
first he appealed to Aeschylus’ topos of “the battle of spear against bow” and Herodo-
tus’ descriptions of Persian soldiers and emphasis that the Persians had cavalry and
archers while the Greeks had few or none. He believed that these different armaments
suggested very different deployments on the battlefield, because spearmen are most
effective in a deep, continuous line, while archers are naturally inclined to spread out
and cannot shoot effectively when they are stationed in deep formations. He rejects
the Greek tradition that the Persians recruited soldiers from their “unkriegerische”
subject peoples in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. Instead, he imagines the Per-
sian army as composed of Iranian peoples who followed the teachings of Zoroaster,
and emphasizes that much of Iran was desert or wasteland which could not support a
large population. Garrisons of Iranians were stationed about the empire and supported
by tribute and tax-in-kind. He also compares the Persian army to the Muslim armies
which conquered much of the Roman and Sasanid empires, and suggests that both
were “quality armies” recruited from nomads, and compares the Persians to the small
number of Frankish warriors and German knights who dominated much of the former
Roman empire in the early middle ages. In his view, the Persian army was a profession-
al or knightly army, and such armies are always small relative to the population from
which they come. In contrast, he saw Greek armies as militias and suggested that mili-
tia armies are large relative to the community to which they belong.
Delbrück’s next detailed comments on the Persian army appear in his discussion
of Alexander’s war with Darius III. He repeats that the sizes of Persian armies in the
Greek sources are arbitrary, but sometimes speculates about the relative size of differ-
ent armies based on geography, his knowledge of the Persian army, and the narratives
in the Greek sources. He characterizes Darius’ army as comprised of hoplites, bow-
men, and horsemen and very similar to Alexander’s, except that the ratios between the
different types of soldiers may have been different.5 He is impressed by the tradition
that Darius equipped his army at Gaugamela with new weapons, but thinks that the
Persian soldiers did not have time to learn to use their new weapons effectively; in his
view only Greeks and Macedonians could form a proper phalanx. Although he consi-
dered Arrian his best source, he did not accept Arrian’s picture of Darius as a cowardly
and incompetent leader. With Alexander’s victory at Gaugamela, the Persians vanish
from Delbrück’s book except for a few comments in his chapter on the Parthians.6
5 Delbrück 1920: I, 179

6 Delbrück 1920: I, 475 ff.
Despite his best efforts, Delbrück’s treatment of the Persian army was strongly
shaped by his Greek and Latin sources. He concentrated on the aspects of the Persian
army which they emphasized, ignored earlier armies in the same region, and ended
his story with Darius III. On the other hand, his emphasis on comparative evidence,
especially the practical difficulties of gathering hundreds of thousands of soldiers in
one place, was a promising approach. While Delbrück insisted upon the difference
between Greek and Persian armies, he also mentioned similarities and compared Per-
sian armies to European ones. In principle, scholars could have further developed his
approach, using evidence on other armies and Southwest Asian documents as they
became available.
While Delbrück sought to reinterpret Persian history in light of later evidence, Edu-
ard Meyer was trying to put Greek and Roman history into the long context which
excavations in the Near East were revealing. His great Geschichte des Altertums sought
to bring together Greek, Mesopotamian, Iranian, Jewish, and Egyptian sources to tell
the story of the ancient world up to the 4th century BCE. His study of the Achaemenid
empire includes eleven pages on the army.
Meyer’s interests were broader than Delbrück’s, and his discussion of the army re-
flects this. Where Delbrück is impressionistic, Meyer comments on many different
areas and tries to reconcile his sources. Meyer discusses recruitment, the involvement
of different peoples, musters, parades, pay and provisions, the appointment of leaders,
the relationship between satraps and generals, weaponry and the relative importance
of spear and bow, the role of nations such as the Lydians and Assyrians who fought as
hoplites, cavalry in battle, the size and deployment of armies, and other forces such as
scythed chariots, camel-riders, ships, and marines. Perhaps his boldest speculation is
that the four contingents in Artaxerxes’ army in 401 BCE corresponded to four mili-
tary districts, which with the addition of rebel Egypt and Anatolia might relate to the
six generals in Xerxes’ army (Hdt. 7.82).7 He imagines that the Persian archers would
barrage the enemy with arrows and then the cavalry would charge them, an idea which
has been widely repeated despite a shortage of evidence (see § 6.4).8 He accepts the
Greek tradition that Persian armies were too large to fight effectively while rejecting
the specific numbers in Greek sources.9 He is not interested in the organization of Per-
sian units, ignoring the documentary evidence from Elephantine and Herodotus’ and
Xenophon’s statements about decimal organization and remarking that “the separa-
tion of the horsemen, bowmen, and spear-fighters into special divisions was already
traced back to Cyaxares (Hdt. 1.103); however, as to a further organizational structure
7 Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4.1.I, p. 70

8 Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4.1.I, p. 71, 73
9 Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4.1.I, p. 353
Early Classical Scholarship: Delbrück, Meyer, and the Specialists 25
one can say nothing.”10 Despite his knowledge of many ancient languages and monu-
ments, the only sources which he cites are Greek and Latin literature and the Behis-
tun inscription. He mentions the Elephantine papyri in a footnote. J. N. Strassmaier
had already published a few tablets dealing with military matters in his Inschriften von
{Name}, König von Babylon series in the 1890s, and a tablet dealing with the equipment
of a cavalryman was first published a few years before Meyer’s death in 1930.11
Meyer also described particular military operations as part of his general narrative.
He does not devote many words to narrating Cyrus’ war with Lydia or Cambyses’ con-
quest of Egypt, although he does ponder how a king from the hills like Cyrus could
conquer such a great kingdom as Lydia. His description of Marathon, Thermopylae,
Plataea, and Mycale follows Herodotus without many general remarks beyond his
dismissal of the Greek tradition about vast Persian armies. His account of the revolt
of Cyrus the Younger and the Battle of Cunaxa is lengthy but also keeps close to the
Greek sources.12 Why did Cyrus think that his revolt could succeed?
Cyrus had seen the military superiority of the Greeks over the Asiatic troops with his own
eyes: he was convinced for good reason that a reasonably strong Greek mercenary corps
would also defeat the strongest army which his brother could call up.13
Why did Tissaphernes let the Greeks escape into Armenia? “Tissaphernes was too
weak and cowardly to risk a decisive battle.”14 Although Meyer ends his project in the
middle of the 4th century BCE, it is likely that his account of Alexander’s wars would
have also summarized the Greek sources.
Meyer’s approach to the Achaemenid army as an institution was promising, and
his study was thorough and fair-minded. Yet his account was almost entirely written
on the basis of Greek and Latin literature. Despite his encyclopedic knowledge of the
ancient Near East, he does not try to connect or compare the Achaemenid army to
earlier armies in the same region. Given the state of the evidence and the shortage of
secondary literature in his day, this would have been a formidable task, but it is to be
regretted that he did not attempt it. Not all of his generalizations and conclusions are
convincing. Meyer’s study provided a base from which other scholars could build.
In addition to these broad studies, many articles on specific questions were pub-
lished at the beginning of the 20th century. Many of these studies, such as Whatley on
10 Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4.1.I, 72–73 “die Trennung der Reiter, Bogenschützen und Lan-
zenkämpfer in besondere Abteilungen wird bereits auf Kyaxares zurückgeführt (Herod. I 103); zu
einer weiteren organischen Gliederung aber ist man nicht gelangt.”
11 For the other text, UCP 9/3 269 ff., see Lutz 1928 and § 4.3 below
12 Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 5.4.IV pp. 171–179
13 “Die militärische Überlegenheit der Griechen über die asiatischen Truppen hatte Kyros mit eige-
nen Augen kennengelernt; mit Recht war er überzeugt, daß ein hinlänglich starkes griechisches
Söldnerkorps auch die stärkste Armee besiegen werde, die sein Bruder aufbringen könne.”
14 “Tissaphernes war zu schwach und zu mutlos, um einen entscheidenden Kampf zu wagen.”
methodologies for reconstructing ancient battles (first delivered as a lecture in 1920

and circulated before its print publication in 1964), Kromayer and Veith with their
studies of battlefields, W. W. How on arms and tactics in Xerxes’ invasion, and Maurice
on the water supply in the Hellespont, are still useful for understanding the Persian
army. Most of these studies were conceived as part of Greek history, and they were
often successful exegesis of their chosen authors. Yet they rarely used other kinds of
ancient evidence, and tended to assume that their task was either to describe Greek
history or to place it in context with more recent events. Several believed that events in
recent wars and the professional knowledge of soldiers would help clarify the ancient
sources, as when Whatley reminded his readers how difficult it had been to understand
what was happening during the First World War or Major General Maurice used his
training in logistics to decide what size of army the water and roads in the Hellespont
would support.15
By the early 20th century, many studies on the Achaemenid army as presented in
Greek literature had been published. Most were written by classicists and historians
who were most comfortable with Greek and Latin literary evidence. The natural next
step would have been to build on these studies, combining them with other kinds of
evidence and acknowledging the purposes and perspectives of the main Greek sourc-
es. Unfortunately, in the next hundred years few scholars took this step.
1.3 Broad Works 1962–1983: Hignett, Burn, Green, Rahe
Between 1962 and 1970, three ancient historians published very influential books in
English on Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. These books serve as a good example of the
knowledge of the early Achaemenid army amongst specialists in ancient Greek history.
Each book reflects decades of thought about Greek history and Greek writers. These
books both represent the views of classicists and have influenced them, since most
people interested in Greek history read about Xerxes’ invasion early in their education.
Charles Hignett’s book Xerxes’ Invasion of Greece was based upon 45 years of teach-
ing the Persian Wars at Oxford.16 In his view, his basic methodology was fixed when he
encountered the ideas of Whatley in 1919 and Kromayer in 1924, although his opinion
on points of detail did change over time. Hignett strongly insists that comments on
the Persian Wars based on ancient writers later than the 5th century BCE should be
ignored, so his account is based upon Herodotus and ends where Herodotus’ account
15 Whatley 1964: 121; Maurice 1930. Curiously, the 1932 paper by von Fischer, another retired general
who considered the logistics of the whole route and decided that a much smaller army (“nicht viel
über 40 000 Kombattanten”) was plausible, is less often cited than Maurice’s.
16 Hignett 1963 preface
Broad Works 1962–1983: Hignett, Burn, Green, Rahe 27
does.17 His select bibliography is equally focused on the Greeks. He does cite A. T.
Olmstead`s book on the Achaemenid empire, but his short bibliography of about
100 items contains no other works by orientalists. His knowledge of Southwest Asian
sources seems to come through modern writers such as Olmstead, How, and Wells.
A. R. Burn’s book appeared slightly before Hignett’s, but does not claim such an age
for its ideas. Burn begins with the 8th century BCE and the Neo-Assyrians, reminding
readers what a formidable army and organized empire they already had.18 He is more
willing than Hignett to credit sources other than Aeschylus and Herodotus, whom he
describes as a great storyteller and reporter with primitive, personal ideas of causa-
tion.19 Burn frequently compares modern and ancient Greeks.20 He also quotes many
texts from Southwest Asia. Unfortunately his remarks on the army are brief and focused
on criticizing Herodotus’ numbers and relating his “satrapy list” to his “catalogue of
nations.”21 He believes that all of Herodotus’ nations participated, but that the worse-
armed ones may have been brought in token numbers to plunder and burn.22 Burn is
careful to put the Achaemenids in context with Southwest Asia in the 1st millennium
BCE, and even imagines what the battles between Cyrus and Croesus might have been
like. He makes it clear that armies in ancient Southwest Asia were no lightly-armed
mobs of “unkriegerische” peasants. Yet his treatment of the Persian army does not go
beyond a fair reading of Herodotus supplemented with later parallels, technical knowl-
edge about logistics and camping, and experience with the unreliability of figures for
the size of enemy armies. After sternly resisting the temptation to retell the myths of
the Persian wars in the main part of his book, Burn ends his book with a meditation
on what would have happened if the Persians had won, where he describes the later
Achaemenid empire as economically depressed, ruled by a decadent aristocracy, and
reliant on Greek mercenaries to replace the native infantry who had lost the wealth or
moral qualities to be good soldiers.23 This picture obviously owes a great deal to the
moralistic Greek literature of the 4th century BCE, and has been the subject of heavy
criticism since the 1980s.
Peter Green’s book, first published in 1970, was aimed at a large audience, with
enough research behind it to give it some scholarly weight. It is lightly referenced, con-
17 Hignett 1963: v, vi, 25

18 Burn 1962: 24–25.
19 Attitude to sources: Burn 1962: 1–17. Assessment of Herodotus: Burn 1962: 130 (but is Herodotus’
idea that joining Europe and Asia went against the order of things and that great things always
shrink and decline any more primitive than the modern idea that Greece was a bit too far from the
centre of the empire to hold and that no empire lasts forever?) , 193.
20 Greeks ancient and modern: Burn 1962: 132, 426, 552
21 Comments on the army: Burn 1962: 40 (reconstructed battle between Persians and Lydians), 84–
86 (invasion of Egypt), 120–122 (satrapy list and catalogue of nations), 250 (Marathon), 322–332
(Xerxes’ army), 411 (Thermopylae), 519 (Plataea). 548 (Mycale).
22 Burn 1962: 326
23 Burn 1962: 565–567
fident, and full of modern parallels. Green insists that Xerxes’ invasion threatened to
end political and intellectual liberty, not just in classical Greece but everywhere and
for all time, and that defeat in Greece “rocked the empire of Darius and Xerxes to its
very foundation.”24 Since he ends his history shortly after the battles of Plataea and My-
cale, the reader is deprived of the chance to see Green justify this last statement. Like
the other authors in this section, Green relies on Herodotus, although he is willing to
use details from later sources which Hignett rejects. Amongst modern scholars he re-
lies overwhelmingly upon specialists in Greek or military history. His original bibliog-
raphy of about 200 entries has only half a dozen by specialists in Mesopotamia or Iran
or scholars who try to ask questions from a Persian perspective rather than a Greek.25
His book contains no systematic discussion of the Persian army, and his comments on
it paraphrase Herodotus except in the matter of numbers.
Green’s vocabulary reflects two inconsistent models of the Persian army. Some-
times he carefully chooses words with Persian connotations, rendering Greek akinakes
as “scimitar.” Having seen the reliefs at Persepolis, he surely knew that an akinakes is
short, straight, and two-edged while a scimitar is long, curved, and single-edged, but
he chose to suggest that ancient and modern Persians are more or less the same. Other
times he picks words from modern military jargon, such as “commando,” “to infiltrate”
(in the sense “to send soldiers forward quietly in many small groups”) and “pioneer
corps” (soldiers who clear a path for the army to march over). This implies that the
Persian army was something like a 20th century European army, and occasional words
like “commissar” suggest that he has a particular army in mind.26 While each of these
strategies is powerful, they work against each other, for it is difficult to see how Xerxes’
men could at the same time be medieval Persians and the Red Army.
These three books differ in methodology and interpretation, but their approach
to the Persian army is similar. They rely on Herodotus, supplemented with contem-
porary art, later Greek or Latin writers, and commentaries to Herodotus. If they use
other kinds of evidence for the army, it is only to supplement the father of history.
While Burn was scrupulous about reading the most important sources from outside
the Greek world himself and finding experts in other fields for advice, neither Green
nor Hignett made much use of scholarship on Egypt and Southwest Asia, let alone of
sources from those areas.
24 Xerxes’ threat to freedom: Green 1996: 4–5; quote, Green 1996: 10. This idea had of course been
refuted in the famous debate between Max Weber and Eduard Meyer before the First World War.
25 Eleven pages of bibliography at 18 entries per page gives about 198 entries. The original bibliogra-
phy consists of works by classicists on traditional classical-philological topics, plus a 1946 French
dissertation on Iran by Mortéza Ehtécham, four books on pre-Islamic Iran by W. Culican, Roman
Ghirshman, Ernst Herzfeld, and A. T. Olmstead, and a 1946 article by Gisela Richter on the Greek
contribution to Achaemenid sculpture. In 1970, Green recommends 29 studies on a single inscrip-
tion which claims to record a decree of Themistocles, but only six on the whole Persian empire.
26 King’s Eye as commissar: Green 1996: 8
Broad Works 1962–1983: Hignett, Burn, Green, Rahe 29
In 1980 Paul Rahe published an article which has been widely cited since.27 Rahe
proposed that at the end of the 5th century BCE, the Persians lacked good heavy in-
fantry but had plenty of cavalry and light-armed troops. Western governors began to
combine their own troops with Greek hoplites and acquired military power out of
proportion to their wealth. Furthermore, soldier land in Babylonia had become par-
titioned and divided, so that the occupiers could not afford the time and equipment
to practice military skills. Cyrus the Younger therefore realized that if he rushed into
Babylonia with “a Greek hoplite army” and “a corps of barbarian cavalry” he might
force his brother to fight with poorly trained local soldiers, or at least seize control of
Babylonia and raise a larger army there. Cyrus failed, but Spartans and Macedonians
later combined cavalry and hoplites and imitated his march inland.
Rahe’s thesis is not built on the strongest evidence. His Greek literary sources nat-
urally emphasize the deeds and prowess of Greek soldiers, and Persian infantry at the
end of the 5th century BCE usually stood up to Greek hoplites. It is not clear that the
troubles of the debtors of the Murašû meant that all the soldiers in Babylonia were
poorly armed and trained: as we will see in chapter 4, bow estates were only one source
of soldiers. Cyrus had only three thousand cavalry against 13,000 Greeks and a simi-
larly-sized force of infantry from Anatolia, and he told his governors to hire “Pelopon-
nesian men” not “Peloponnesian hoplites.”28 Yet because of the scarcity of other broad
theories, because it calls on both indigenous and classical texts, and because the theory
seemed reasonable to readers raised on the Greek sources, Rahe’s article has been of-
ten cited with approval. Sekunda specifically cites it as an example of recent research at
the beginning of his book, Briant refers readers to it with some warnings about details,
and other writers often refer readers to it as a source of facts.29 The strongest criticism is
by Philip Sabin, who remarks that as Cyrus’ cavalry were few and outmatched, Rahe’s
idea that Cyrus combined powerful infantry and effective cavalry is “perhaps a little
premature.”30
In 1983, most writing on the Achaemenid army by classicists and military historians
was centred on Greek and Latin literary sources and the events, processes, and institu-
tions which they highlighted. Much was by writers who were not mainly interested in
the Achaemenid empire or ancient warfare, but who touched on the subject because of
their interest in classical Greece. Broad statements about the Achaemenid army were
27 Rahe 1980
28 Xen. Anab. 1.1.6 ὁπόσας εἶχε φυλακὰς ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι παρήγγειλε τοῖς φρουράρχοις ἑκάστοις λαμβάνειν
ἄνδρας Πελοποννησίους ὅτι πλείστους καὶ βελτίστους, ὡς ἐπιβουλεύοντος Τισσαφέρνους ταῖς πόλεσι.
On the size of Cyrus’ army see Manning 2013:118–130 with reference to earlier literature and meth-
odological problems. Rey 2012: 297–298 argues that “men” implies “hoplites,” but Cyrus recruited
other kinds of Greek soldiers.
29 Citations: Sekunda 1992: 1; Briant Cyrus to Alexander: 961 “Arms and Tactics”, 980 line 6; Lincoln
2009 n. 1; Christensen 2006: n. 32, 39; Gaebel 2002: 55, 156, 307
30 Sabin 2007: 108
seldom criticized in print, except where they touched on accepted debates such as the
size of Xerxes’ army.31
1.4 Alternatives to the Classical Tradition
In parallel to this classical tradition, at least three families of postwar scholarship

touched on military questions. One was the study of early Iran, with the Swedish poly-
glot Geo Widengren being especially prolific. Widengren worked within the frame-
works of Indogermanistik and the idea of eternal national character, happily citing clas-
sical writers, the Old Testament, and Middle Persian romances next to one another.
In his view, ancient Iranian armies were feudal, and the documents from Achaemenid
Babylonia reflected this:
In principle, one could say that in Iranian society during the Achaemenid period the fiefs
were examples of tribute in exchange for the delivery of soldiers of different types, horse-
men, bowmen, and charioteers … It also seems that the holder of the fief had always pos-
sessed the right to use his fief as collateral … We have here, evidently, a heritage from the
days of Mitanni and for that reason we can find it again in the (Late Bronze Age) docu-
ments from Nuzi (fig. 2-1).32
Widengren’s understanding of “Iran” was obviously a wide one. A review of one of

Widengren’s later books expressed respect for Widengren’s knowledge of so many lan-
guages and texts, but serious doubts about his methods and his confident statements
based on very limited sources scattered across a long stretch of time and space.33 While
Widengren’s writing on warfare seems to have had little influence, Pierre Briant cited
one of his lists of sources in 1996, and works with similar methods continue to appear
on the fringes of academe.34
A number of studies on Old Iranian vocabulary as attested in names and loan-words
(Nebenüberlieferungen) appeared in the postwar era. Walther Hinz published a new
vocabulary in 1975 which took advantage of the archives from Persepolis and Akkadian
31 Eg. was Egypt a land whose inhabitants “neither form good military material nor can be trusted to
fight for their masters” (Olmstead 1948: 244) or one which contained “the difficult delta country
with its warlike inhabitants” (Cambridge History of Iran ii.335)?
32 Widengren 1956a: 108 “En principe, on peut dire que dans la société iranienne, pendant l’époque
des Achéménides, les fiefs étaient exemples de tribut en revanche de la livraison des soldats de
différentes catégories, cavaliers, archers et conducteurs de chars … Il semble aussi que l’inféodé ait
toujours possédé le droit d’engager son fief … Nous avons là, évidemment, un héritage des jours
de Mitanni et pour cette raison nous pouvons renvoyer aux documents de Nuzi.”
33 Schlerath 1976
34 eg. Farrokh 2007. Widengren is cited at Briant, Cyrus to Alexander, 979
Alternatives to the Classical Tradition 31
texts from Babylonia.35 This contained a reasonable number of reconstructed military

terms, such as words for commanders of ten, one hundred, one thousand, and ten
thousand men. Most of these terms had been mentioned in earlier books and articles,
but Hinz gathered them in one place. An Iranisches Personennamenbuch meant to cover
onomastics as preserved in all ancient languages was launched in Vienna in the 1970s.
This lead to a number of studies by Rüdiger Schmitt and other scholars on Iranian
names in classical texts. This kind of research had a long history, but beginning in the
1980s it became increasingly widely cited by researchers interested in armies and force.
Another body of scholarship focused on the plentiful documents which survive
from the Neo-Babylonian, Teispid, and Achaemenid periods. In the early 20th century
and into the postwar period, this research was part of a broader Assyriological project
to map Mesopotamian history and culture from the invention of writing to the aban-
donment of cuneiform under the Parthians. Many famous Assyriologists wrote some-
thing on military matters in the 7th, 6th, and 5th centuries, including Guillaume Cardas-
cia, E. Ebeling, and A. Leo Oppenheim. The postwar period saw the publication of
the first comprehensive dictionaries of Akkadian, Wolfram von Soden’s Akkadisches
Handwörterbuch and the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, and the systematic gathering and
analysis of terms for types of soldier, Realien, and military operations. Another popular
area of research was identifying foreigners in Babylonia through onomastics and the
rare use of ethnic terms to describe individuals. Many of these individuals seem to
have served in the army. Ran Zadok and Muhammad Dandamayev were two especial-
ly prolific researchers. Specialists in Jewish history or Egyptology touched on the ar-
chives from Elephantine on the Nile which have been discussed above, as well as other
Aramaic texts from Egypt. The garrison archive contains many details of social history
and community organization but less about equipment or military activity.
However, this kind of research tended to address armies and warfare in brief spe-
cialized studies, rather than writing syntheses or engaging with works in the classi-
cal-ancient historical tradition. Guillaume Cardascia’s series of papers on the Murašû
archive from Nippur brought order to this large body of texts and was framed within a
French tradition of comparative historical research and the idea of feudalism. (He also
published the first reasonably accurate translation of the “Gadal-Jâma contract,” UCP
9/3 269 ff., a text which we will encounter again). Matthew Stolper’s study of the same
archive, first published in 1985, focused on the social and economic aspects.
Archaeologists also made important discoveries. While the Achaemenid period
was difficult to identify at many sites, the excavations at Sardis, Deve Hüyük (not a
controlled excavation), Pasargadae, and Persepolis revealed many remains of weapons.
Sardis was one of several fortified sites where destruction layers seem to correspond
to campaigns described by Herodotus. Tombs in western Anatolia contained many
35 Hinz 1975
spectacular carvings and paintings of soldiers, and cylinder seals or seal impressions
continued to appear in excavations and on the art market. Postwar prosperity and im-
provements in photography and printing made it easier to share artwork. The discov-
ery of two archives at Persepolis, the Persepolis Fortification and Persepolis Treasury
Texts, created a new field specialized in interpreting these mainly Elamite texts, and
suggested to many readers that Widengren’s picture of a feudal, rural empire was insuf-
ficient. However, these archives contained little which was directly relevant to military
matters, and after an initial group of publications in the 1950s and 1960s publication of
the remaining texts slowed.
These traditions of research provided sources and interpretation which were very
relevant to the kinds of questions posed by classicists and military historians, and a few
classicists responded eagerly: David M. Lewis’ study Sparta and Persia (1977) empha-
sizes the importance of the Persepolis texts as a side of the empire which readers of the
classical literary sources would never have imagined.36 Yet as we have seen, in the early
1980s, broad works on Achaemenid warfare kept them on the margins. J. M. Cook was
an archaeologist who worked in Turkey, but his 1983 survey of the Achaemenid empire
relies upon the works of classicists and philologists to describe armies and warfare.37
He apologizes for being unable to read Russian or Akkadian, then brings various kinds
of evidence together on topics such as the organization of the army, the Immortals,
and the relative importance of the spear and the bow. In the last case he notes that the
royal inscriptions do not seem to support Aeschylus and Herodotus’ contrast of the
Greek spear and the Persian bow, but generally he addresses topics covered by Edu-
ard Meyer and aims at synthesis and harmonization of sources. In particular, he does
not question the picture in Herodotus and Aeschylus of 480 BCE as a turning point,
after which the empire transformed from a dangerous menace into a decadent empire
which survived by “intrigue and bribery” rather than “vigour.”38 This kind of language
leaned heavily upon broader ideologies and stereotypes about the east, and after decol-
onization these ideas were becoming harder to justify.
The volumes of the Cambridge History of Iran dealing with the ancient world also ap-
peared between 1983 and 1985. The History was envisioned as a thorough and scholarly
but compact study of Iranian history and culture from the earliest times to the present
(it also brought scholars from both sides of the Iron Curtain together). Each volume
has a special editor and is divided into chapters written by specialists, and the project
resembles the more famous Cambridge Ancient History. Like many edited collections,
the volume on early Iran is uneven. Most of the authors took a conservative approach,
with painstaking studies of topics like weights and measures which assume that an-
cient currencies worked like the “gold standard” of the early 20th century. The narrative
36 Lewis 1977: 4–5; he returns to this theme later in the book

37 Cook 1983: 101–113
38 Cook 1983: 107
The Achaemenid History Workshops and the Encyclopaedia Iranica 33
sections were written by scholars with a classical orientation such as J. M. Cook, A. R.

Burn, and Ernst Badian, while the sections on Egypt and Babylonia pay more attention
to Scythian arrowheads, documents from Memphis and Elephantine, and tablets from
Babylonia.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were the time of the overthrow of Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi (1979) and the establishment of an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini
in Iran. The first volume of the Cambridge History of Iran (1968) contains a fawning ac-
knowledgement of the Shah whose National Iranian Oil Company paid half the costs
of production. Many educated Iranians fled the country after the revolution, and since
then Iranian expats have been important readers and sponsors of work on early Iran.
1.5 The Achaemenid History Workshops and the Encyclopaedia Iranica
Several projects in the 1980s lead to the establishment of Achaemenid history as a dis-
tinct field with its own tools, assumptions, and methods. Scholars in this period greatly
expanded our knowledge of the Achaemenid empire and created an outline for further
work. The study of the Achaemenid army was not unaffected by these changes.
Between 1980 and 1990, a series of annual conferences on Achaemenid history were
held at Groningen, London, and Ann Arbour Michigan.39 Organized by Heleen San-
cisi-Werdenburg, each workshop gathered about thirty scholars to reconsider Achae-
menid history in light of Greek and modern ideology. It is difficult to overstate the
influence of these workshops. They lead to the recognition of Achaemenid studies as
a distinct specialty, to increased contacts between researchers working on different as-
pects of the Achaemenid empire, and to the reconsideration of established verities,
such as the existence of a powerful Median Empire which Cyrus the Great conquered.
It is to be doubted whether Pierre Briant’s very influential and wide-ranging book,
Histoire de l’Empire Perse, would have been written without the workshops. Many of
the papers from the conference were published in the eight volumes of conference
proceedings, which have been followed by seven more volumes on different aspects of
Teispid and Achaemenid history.
Several participants in the Achaemenid history workshops contributed papers on

military matters. The most important include Sekunda’s three articles on evidence
for military settlements in western Anatolia, Tuplin’s very long and thorough study
of evidence for garrisons around the empire, and Wallinga’s analysis of the origins of
the Persian navy.40 Sekunda’s and Tuplin’s articles are built around dense catalogues of
literary, epigraphic, onomastic, documentary, and archaeological evidence. While Se-
39 For a summary see Kuhrt 2009 (note that the third workshop of 1983 was the first to receive a con-
ference proceedings)
40 Sekunda 1985, 1988, 1991, Tuplin 1987, Wallinga 1987 (later expanded as Wallinga 1993)
kunda seems to have found less evidence than he hoped for, and Tuplin was impressed
with the difficulty of reconciling other sources with the literary ones, both accepted
the premise that one should begin by systematically gathering all kinds of evidence
rather than picking and choosing from Greek literary sources. Not all of these articles
were lucky in their publishers; Sekunda’s articles appeared spread across different ven-
ues, and Tuplin’s was printed as a jumble of place names, numbered lists, and abbrevi-
ated references with some paragraphs which stretch across three pages.41 The difficulty
of reading it, and of tracking down the diverse sources and research which it cites,
may have discouraged other scholars from imitating him. In addition to his conference
papers, Sekunda also published other studies, including an analysis of Old Persian mil-
itary jargon and a study of the career of the Persian general Datames. The former seems
to be the only study of specifically military terms in Old Persian, although Sekunda
modestly states that most of the contents of the article are known to specialists.42 Al-
though the works of Sekunda, Tuplin, and Wallinga are important, military topics were
not central to the Achaemenid History workshops. Rather than being the focus of an
article, military events and institutions tended to be mentioned in studies which fo-
cused on cuneiform sources, political history, or the problem of separating facts from
literary conventions and ethnic stereotypes.
In 1986, the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Iranica appeared. The Encyclopaedia
Iranica project meant to provide a comprehensive encyclopedia in many volumes for
all aspects of Iranian history, culture, and languages. An especially important decision
was the creation of the Encyclopaedia Iranica Online in 1996, which hosts all of the
printed articles (and some unprinted ones) and is accessible without a subscription.
Encyclopaedia Iranica is a very valuable resource, with bibliographies which cover
sources in many languages and many specialties. While the quality and scope of indi-
vidual articles naturally varies, they usually have extensive bibliographies which draw
together works published in many languages by scholars in different specialties. Ar-
ticles are also rewritten as the printed volumes are published, and this helps to keep
the content up to date. It is perhaps unfortunate that the entry for “ARMY i. Pre-Is-
lamic Iran” was published in the first volume, before the new approach championed
by the Achaemenid History Workshops had spread. The article, written by A. Shah-
pour Shahbazi, a well known historian of early Iran, was organized into chapters on the
Avestan period, the early 1st millennium BCE, the Achaemenid period, the Parthian
period, and the Sassanian period.43 Alexander and the Seleucids are absent, which im-
plies that Seleucid armies were “Greek” or “Macedonian” but not “Iranian.” Shahbazi
discusses all the topics commonly discussed by classicists with the exception of specif-
41 Eg. Tuplin 1987: 201–203

42 Sekunda 1988a: 69 (Tavernier 2007 has a short section on Iranian military terms attested in lan-
guages other than Greek and Latin)
43 Shahbazi 1986
Western and Eastern Ways of War 35
ic battles and campaigns. He discussed terms in Old Persian, the evidence of Greek art,
sculpture from Iran, remains of weapons, and one cuneiform document. Shahbazi’s
article is a good short overview with a sympathetic approach to the Persian army, and
uses a broader range of evidence than many studies, but because it is a short overview
it closely reflects scholarship by classicists and the Greek and Latin literary sources.
Like many other new and insecure groups, participants in the Achaemenid Histo-
ry Workshops looked for a constitutive other against which to define themselves and
their project. For many participants, this was credulous, Hellenocentric scholarship by
classicists, who supposedly presented a negative view of Persian decadence based on
superficial readings of part of the evidence. In many ways the workshops were a post-
colonial project, but with a twist: since the Achaemenids could not speak for them-
selves, some participants in the workshops took it upon themselves to defend them
(the fact that the Achaemenid empire was itself an imperialistic great power loomed in
the background). Research coming out of the workshops increasingly focused on top-
ics like kingship and ideology, and on thematic studies over chronological narratives.
1.6 Western and Eastern Ways of War
At about the same time as the Achaemenid History Workshops, but quite independent
from them, another perspective on the Achaemenid army was crystallizing. This was
the “Western Way of War” theory, exemplified by Victor Davis Hanson’s book of the
same name.44
At its simplest, the Western Way of War theory states that Greek culture lead to
a unique and effective way of war which later European countries and their colonies
inherited. This way of war was based upon great battles between dense formations of
heavily armed infantry who were politically free. Thus war is important to the study
of ancient Greece because it was central to their culture, and studying ancient Greece
is important to us because we inherited their culture and, in particular, their way of
war. Hanson popularized this idea, and John Keegan, another historian who wrote for
a large audience, enthusiastically accepted it.45 A group of famous military historians
published the Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare: The Triumph of the West which
also accepted this theory as a basic framework. Hints of these ideas can be found much
earlier: Aeschylus and Herodotus contrasted the free Greek with his spear and the
slavish Persian with his bow, W. W. How saw Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, the Roman
44 Hanson 2000 (first edition 1989, and continually in print since; WorldCat lists 885 catalogue en-
tries in July 2019)
45 Eg. Keegan 1994: 244 ff. (Hanson is “the foremost historian of the tactics of the Greek city states”
and knows from experience that it would be hard to permanently damage Greek farmland); com-
pare Keegan 1987 chapter 1 which follows Arrian in portraying Darius as a helpless coward.
invasions of Parthia, and the Crusades to the Levant as examples of struggles between
the cavalry of the East and the infantry of the West, and Paul Rahe’s article contrasts
“the infantry of the West” and “the cavalry of the east.”46 Yet Hanson and Keegan de-
veloped these ideas at length with great rhetorical art, and in the heady atmosphere of
the late Cold War and the following decade of peace their ideas found a large audience
in the United States.
The Achaemenid army appears in two contexts in The Western Way of War. The first
is embroidered, emotive passages full of words like “always” and “never” which con-
trast the Greeks or the West with everyone else. Hanson repeatedly cites the descrip-
tion of how the Greeks fight which Herodotus attributes to Mardonius (Hdt. 7.9β)
as saying something profound about Greek and Persian warfare. Early in the book he
glosses Mardonius’ words as follows:
Herodotus’ account suggests awe, or perhaps fear, in this man’s dismissal of the Greek
manner of battle and the Greek desire to inflict damage whatever the costs. Perhaps he
is suggesting that Mardonius knew well that these men of the West, for all their ordered
squares, careful armament, and deliberate drill, were really quite irrational and therefore
quite dangerous. All the various contingents of the Grand Army of Persia, with their
threatening looks and noise, had a very different and predictable outlook on battle. In Her-
odotus’ view here, the Persians suffered from that most dangerous tendency in war: a wish
to kill but not to die in the process.47
Hanson also agrees with the Greek sources that Greek armies were usually outnum-
bered by foreign enemies, and he sees them sharing this disadvantage with many other
“western” armies. In his view, Greeks, Romans, crusaders, conquistadores, and Europe-
an colonial troops all faced much more numerous enemies. “Outnumbered Western
commanders have never been dismayed by the opportunity to achieve an incredible
victory through the use of superior weapons, tactics, and cohesion amongst men.”48
His discussion of the paradox of a rational, organized Apollonian army which must
commit wild acts of Dionysian violence in combat leads to another contrast of Greeks
and Persians. “To the Persians, who reversed these concepts – their disordered, mo-
blike frightening hordes had no fondness for methodical killing – the approach of a
Greek column was especially unsettling.”49 Hanson’s logic is difficult to follow (which
army is supposed to kill with Dionysiac frenzy, and which with Apollonian coolness?)
but perhaps the real point is that whatever the Greeks did, the Persians must have done
the opposite. He also quotes with approval a story that Antiochus the Arcadian ambas-
sador told the Arcadians that he had not found any men who could stand up to Greeks
46 How 1923: 118, Rahe 1980: 88

47 Hanson 2000: 10
48 Hanson 2000: 15
49 Hanson 2000: 16
at the Persian court.50 In this context, the Persians serve as a symbol of all foreigners
who dared to stand up to “Westerners” in battle, and their gruesome deaths are used
to glorify the heroes.
The second context where Hanson mentions the Persians is in discussions of spe-
cific problems in Greek battle, where Persian exempla are used alongside Greek, Mac-
edonian, and Roman ones. Thus he wonders why outnumbered Greek armies did
not plant the butts of their spears in the ground to receive a charge as the Persians
at Mycale did; when considering whether or not Greek soldiers literally pushed their
enemies he quotes Xenophon’s description of how Egyptians used their tall shields
to push; he mentions Napoleonic and Persian parallels for the practice of viewing the
bodies of dead enemies after the battle.51 These passages are written in a cool, objective
style and assume that all ancient armies are comparable. Yet Hanson is not interested
in going beyond Greek and Latin sources for ancient armies. The body of his book does
not cite a single text or artifact from the Ancient Near East. His condensed bibliog-
raphy of 120 items cites only three which concentrate on warfare in the ancient Near
East: Yigael Yadin’s The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands, a book by Arthur Ferrill which
will be discussed below, and Jacques Harmand’s La Guerre Antique de Sumer à Rome.52
His bibliographical essay to the 2000 edition adds an article comparing New Kingdom
Egyptian and Hippocratic Greek texts on skull surgery, a report on weapons excavated
at Sardis as proof that Greek equipment was distinctive, an article on greaves in the
ancient world to show that Greek equipment was widely imitated, a book by Gabri-
el and Metz which tries to quantify ancient military history, an edited volume which
contains a single chapter on battle in New Kingdom Egypt, and some works of world
history.53 Almost all of these were published after the first edition of his book, so they
illustrate conclusions which he had reached before he read them. Although he cites
new translations of important Greek texts, he does not cite a single edition of any text
in an ancient language other than Greek or Latin. While Hanson’s comments on the
Greeks are backed by precise citation of sources and a thorough knowledge of modern
research, he relies on loose references to Greek literature and introductory works by
modern scholars to support his views on other cultures.
In his introduction to The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare, Geoffrey Parker
excused the authors’ “Eurocentric approach” on the grounds that there was insufficient
space to cover more cultures properly, and that “over the past two centuries the west-
50 Hanson 2000: 17 (= Xen. Hell. 7.1.38, where the ambassador goes on to make a childish joke that
the King is not rich because his golden plane tree is too small to shade a grasshopper. Xenophon is
reporting abusive rhetoric not sober observation).
51 Hanson 2000: 136 (Mycale), 174 (pushing), 202 (viewing the enemy dead)
52 Size of bibliography: Four pages at thirty items per page
53 Hanson cites general works by Geoffrey Parker, John Keegan, Samuel P. Huntington, and Jared
Diamond. Specific works include three articles, Proreschi 1993, Greenewalt Jr. 1997, and Knauer
1993: 235–254, and two books, Gabriel and Metz 1991 and Lloyd (ed.) 1996.
ern way of war has become dominant all over the world” so “the rise and development
of this dominant tradition, together with the secrets of its success, therefore seem wor-
thy of examination and analysis.”54 Yet unless one studies a range of cultures, how can
one tell what made a particular culture or group of cultures distinct?
The Western Way of War theory is colourful, but has many limitations as a serious
model. In particular, theorists are often vague about which societies are “western” and
on exactly how this Greek military tradition was passed down to them.55 Not all Eu-
ropean warfare in the past three thousand years has the characteristics which Hanson
considers to define western warfare, and some warfare outside of Europe has most
of these characteristics. Antithesis is attractive, but it is much too simple for a rigor-
ous academic model. Because of these weaknesses, most ancient historians had very
little to say about a “Western Way of War” in public.56 They were much more excited
by Hanson’s vision of a new program of research into Greek warfare. Both supporters
and critics of the theory tend to be modern historians.57 For the purpose of this study,
however, it is more important to consider what this theory meant for the study of the
Achaemenid army. Theorists often had occasion to speak about the Achaemenid army,
and they typically used it as an example of un-Western warfare. All whom I have read
seem to rely on Greek literature and the sort of scholarship discussed above. Keegan
had already been entranced by Arrian’s picture of a cowardly, ineffective Darius, and in
A History of Warfare (1994) he paraphrased Hanson’s view of Greek warfare in approv-
ing terms and called Persia “an empire whose style of warmaking contained elements
54 Parker, G. 1995: viii

55 Thus Western Way of War theorists tend to pay little attention to the middle ages, where armies
of free farmers fighting on foot are scarce, and where several distinct civilizations all inherited the
Roman military tradition. Hanson’s Carnage and Culture only includes one battle between Cannae
(216 BCE) and Tenochtitlan (1521), so that Charles Martel’s victory at Tours has to represent 1,700
years of warfare, while the authors of the Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare avoided this
difficulty by working with Bernard Bachrach, who sees early medieval warfare as a continuation of
that described by Ammianus Marcellinus and proscribed by Vegetius.
56 The preface to Sidebottom 2004 is the longest printed response by an ancient historian I have read;
a blog post “A Western Way of War?” by archaeologist Josho Brouwers from 2013 is also worth read-
ing https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/western-way-war/ González García and de
Quiroga 2012 provide more of a political criticism of Hanson’s use of a view of the ancient world to
support a political program today; they study ancient Iberia at the University of Santiago de Com-
postela. Roel Konijnendijk informs me that the introduction to Wheeler (ed.) 2007 also criticizes
the Western Way of War, but I do not have access to this expensive volume.
57 Printed criticisms include Willett 2002, Lynn 2003, and Turchin 2013; Dawson, D. 1996 proposes
his own version (but skips from St. Augustine to 15th century Florence in three pages, 173–176!)
Carman 1999 engages with the idea sed non vidi. Dawson received a PhD in ancient history from
Princeton and had a varied career; Willett is an independent scholar based in Japan (PhD in medi-
eval and renaissance English, University of California San Diego 1972), Lynn is a specialist in 17th
century France who spent most of his career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Turchin is a biologist who thinks he has discovered mathematical laws of history, and Carman is a
specialist in battlefield archaeology and antiquities law at the University of Birmingham. Teachers
and colleagues have been much more willing to criticize the idea orally.
both of primitive ritual and of the horse warrior’s evasiveness” and which relied on
obsolete chariots instead of modern infantry and cavalry.58 Most were specialists in
European history of the last few hundred years, and relied on broad works by other
scholars for their understanding of war in other places and times.
Western Way of War theory popularized a negative view of the Achaemenid army,
and it sparked a lively if narrow-visioned scholarship on Greek military history before
Alexander. As the original example of the barbarian ‘other,’ the Achaemenid army was
used to symbolize the “eastern way of war” rather than being studied independently.
Since the theory depended on Greek warfare being distinctive, it was naturally tempt-
ing to emphasize the contrast between Greek and Achaemenid armies. Believers in the
theory saw the Achaemenids as rhetorical foils rather than an independent object of
study. Skeptics focused their attention on the details of Greek warfare before Alexan-
der, on warfare in India or China or medieval Europe, on almost every imaginable top-
ic except warfare in Thrace or Lydia or Egypt in the time of the Achaemenids. Hanson
stressed the relevance of his work to American politicians and soldiers, and many in
the public agree. T. C. McCaskie put it well:
Pressfield’s best-selling Gates of Fire is a novel about Thermopylae, but the Spartans in it
talk like U. S. Marines. This seems relatively harmless if mindless until one looks at Press-
field’s busy website “Agora.” This used to be called “It’s the Tribes, Stupid” and it was cre-
ated to increase awareness of “the tribal mind-set in Afghanistan.’ These claim that “Agora”
and Gates of Fire furnish insights into the Eastern (and undifferentiated), barbarian (and
now Islamic) enemy.59
Similarly, Peter Green assures his readers that “Modern Europe owes nothing to the
Achaemenids. The civilization … is almost as alien to us as that of the Aztecs … funda-
mentally static … theocratic … hostile (where not blindly indifferent) to original crea-
tivity … the Greek achievement … inexplicable miracle … democratic institutions …
free scientific inquiry, free political debate … all these things ran flat counter to the
whole pattern of thought in any major civilization with which the Greeks had to deal.”60
After reading such things, it should be no surprise that people in the wider culture use
the Persian Wars to rally their countrymen against the latest frightening foreigners who
cover too much of their bodies with clothing. While it is useful to separate the history of
research from the history of reception, some scholars write for both worlds.
58 Already entranced: Keegan 1987 chapter 1 and Keegan 1994: 389 (Alexander’s career is real history
“as narrated by Arrian”); ritual and evasiveness, Keegan 1994: 389; based on chariots, Keegan 1994:
178
59 McCaskie 2012: 167
60 Green 1996: 5 (hopefully most readers of Herodotus can agree that in his world all leaders pay
close attention to the will of the gods if they know what is good for them, and that his despots often
sponsor great works of scientific inquiry such as the circumnavigation of Africa and Psammeti-
chus’ search for the oldest language?)
1.7 Hellenistic Warfare as Cultural Synthesis
In 1985 Arthur Ferrill proposed an alternative to beginning the study of military history
with the Greeks or seeing Greek and Near Eastern warfare as opposed.61 His book was
relatively short, lightly referenced, and based on secondary literature, but its central
idea is worthy of serious thought. Ferrill observed that weapons specifically designed
to kill other humans, fortifications, and pictures of combat between groups appear in
the Neolithic, and that by the 3rd millennium BCE warfare in Egypt and the Near East
was clearly organized and sophisticated. Thus war has a long history before Classical
Greece, but Greece was cut off from this tradition by the collapse at the end of the
Bronze Age. The Greeks perfected armies centred around simple formations of heavily
armed infantry, but these armies had many limitations. In the 4th century some Greek
and Macedonian generals adopted the basic elements of Near Eastern warfare, produc-
ing armies which were about as sophisticated and effective as those of the Napoleonic
Wars. Ferrill concludes that:
Historians have often ironically remarked that the Persian army defending the empire
against Alexander’s invasions in the 4th century BC contained in the centre of its line a
Greek hoplite phalanx, implying that the ancient Near East had learned an important mil-
itary lesson from the Greeks. Much more ironic is the fact that Alexander’s army owed a
vastly greater debt to Persia than the Persian army to Greece.62
In Ferrill’s view, classical Greek armies were like Archilochus’ hedgehog with its one
good trick, but they became most effective when they learned from the Persian fox
with its many tricks. Although other writers had suggested that the Persian invasions
forced the Greeks to develop a more sophisticated way of fighting, Ferrill developed
this idea at length and backed it with knowledge of warfare in the ancient Near East.63
Ferrill’s thesis is subversive to the Western Way of War theory, since it implies that
the split between Greek and Near Eastern warfare was a temporary accident and that
Greek soldiers became more effective when they learned from the Near East. The Or-
igins of War received three approving reviews by American scholars, and a reference
in a literature review on anthropologists’ attitude to war.64 Hanson included Ferrill’s
61 Ferrill 1997
62 Ferrill 1997: 33
63 “Other writers” eg. Adcock 1957: 11, 12 An ‘anthropological’ approach was also part of German schol-
arship before the First World War, eg. Pancritius 1908: 172 suggests that warfare in the time of Gudea
or Sargon of Akkad was “sehr vorgeschritten” in comparison to Greek warfare before Alexander, 178
compares the Semitic migrations into Sumer with Germanic migrations into the Roman empire.
64 See reviews by Charles D. Hamilton in The American Historical Review 92.1 (1987), A. M. Devine in
The Classical World 81.5 (1988), and John Karl Evans in Technology and Culture 29.1 (1988); the liter-
ature review is Otterbein 1999. Three other reviews objected on empirical or ideological grounds
(“marred by numerous errors of fact … it is difficult to imagine that any Greek would be interested
The First Monographs: Bittner, Head, and Sekunda 41
book in the short bibliography of The Western Way of War but did not engage with
it explicitly. He did agree with Ferrill that Xerxes’ invasion confronted simple, spe-
cialized Greek armies with a much more sophisticated and versatile way of war, but
his whole book is opposed to the idea that modern warfare owes more to Alexander
and the Ancient Near East than to Archaic Greece.65 William R. Thompson accepted
Ferrill’s basic ideas in his study of strong military powers in western Eurasia from the
Neolithic to the end of the 20th century.66 In Thompson’s study, “the west” comprises
Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia, classical Greece and Rome, and the Carolingi-
an empire and its successor states, and the basic elements of Keegan’s western way of
war were probably present in the ancient Near East. Gwynne Dyer suggests a similar
idea, that war involving battles between dense formations of soldiers appeared with
the first cities and spread over Eurasia in the Bronze Age, in his book on why there are
competing alliances threatening each other with nuclear weapons.67 Dyer suggests that
the methods and stakes of warfare remained broadly the same from the 3rd millennium
BCE until the combination of mass production and mass recruitment allowed wars to
become much more destructive in nineteenth-century Europe and North America,
culminating in the firebombings of WW II and the nuclear arsenals of the late Cold
War. Ferrill’s book was reprinted with a new introduction in 1997, and Dyer’s received a
new edition in 2005. Nevertheless, Hanson and Keegan were more influential. It would
be difficult to catalogue just the academic works which acknowledge their perspective,
whereas Ferrill and Dyer achieved modest fame but few imitators.
1.8 The First Monographs: Bittner, Head, and Sekunda
The 1980s saw some impressive works within established traditions of Achaemenid
studies, but also a radical challenge to those approaches from within the Achaemenid
History Workshops. Within the classical tradition which dominated studies of Achae-
menid armies and warfare, two programs for future work had appeared: one calling for
researchers to engage more with Near Eastern sources and put Greek warfare in the
context of world history, and the other suggesting that what classicists should really
work on was Greek hoplites and their heritage. The success of each of these approaches
in Persian military doctrine after Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, Eurymedon, etc.”): Marc Cooper in
Journal of the American Oriental Society 107.2 (1987), J.F. Lazenby in Journal of Hellenic Studies 107
(1987), Everett Wheeler in Armed Forces and Society 14.1 (1987).
65 Partial agreement with Ferrill: Hanson 2000: 37; modern armies as heirs to the classical Greeks:
Hanson 2000: xviii, xviii (the idea that “Westerners” (Anglo-Americans) inherited the military
and political values of Greek farmer-hoplites reoccurs again and again in his writings, eg. the intro-
duction and epilogue to Hanson 1995)
66 Thompson, W. 2006
67 Dyer 2006
would depend both on public debates, and on private decisions about where to spend
limited research time. Three books and one chapter published between 1985 and 1992
let us trace how this unfolded.
In 1985 Stefan Bittner published the first book ever dedicated to the Achaemenid
army. Bittner’s book is the longest of these surveys, but also the most specialized, being
an adaptation of his dissertation on Persian clothing and military equipment.68 This
distinguishes it from the many chapters and popular books which have been written on
the Achaemenid army. His bibliography contains almost 600 items, from the 1710 edi-
tion of Barnabas Brissonius’ Latin treatise to an article by A. Greifenhagen published
in 1982.69 Methodologically, his dissertation is purely classical and philological: he re-
lies on the classical literary sources, and supplements them with artwork and surviving
weapons. Bittner complained about a lack of specialized studies and the tendency for
statements about Persian armies and clothing to be offhand assessments rather than
careful and backed with sources: “every possible assessment from ‘Asiatic rabble’ to
‘first-rate elite warriors’ and even an ‘army of heroes’ is represented.”70 Most of his work
comprises a detailed analysis of pieces of clothing and outfits in the sources and specu-
lation about their significance, such as the idea that the two styles of robe in the reliefs
from Susa might distinguish mobile troops and town guards.71 He is particularly inter-
ested in separating “Median” and “Persian” fashions, in understanding the significance
of slight variations on each, and in matching Greek words to paintings and sculptures.
He imagines that when Cyrus conquered the Medes, some sort of army reform such as
Xenophon describes in the Cyropaedia took place, and tries to reconstruct the equip-
ment of particular groups of Persians mentioned in the Greek and Latin sources such
as the homotimoi “peers” and the syngeneis “kinsmen.” Bittner takes a “maximalist” view
of his chosen sources, trying to reconcile as many as possible rather than assume that
some are in error or depict different things. Thus his picture of the Medes and Persians
which Xerxes lead into Greece combines the homotimoi from the Cyropaedia, Greek
vase paintings with barbarians in one-piece garments, the reliefs from Persepolis, and
the famous passage in Herodotus book 7.72 He does not seem to have been aware of the
Achaemenid history workshops, whose first proceedings appeared in 1987.
Bittner’s book assembles and organizes many written and artistic sources, and his
criticism of previous scholarship is fair and precise. However, when he moves on to

present his own theories, his trusting approach to the classical literary sources and
neglect of Near Eastern texts and archaeology make it much harder to use his works.
68 Bittner 1987 (first edition 1985)

69 Number of items: 44 pages × 13.5 items per page = 594 items
70 Bittner 1987: 77 “von ‘asiatischem Gesindel’ über ‘Qualitätskrieger ersten Ranges’ bis hin zu einem
‘Heer von Helden’ sind alle Einschätzungen vertreten.”
71 Bittner 1987: 310
72 Bittner 1987: 269–271
Bittner’s model of the Persian army is centred around the homotimoi from the Cyropae-
dia, although he acknowledges that the reforms which Xenophon describes might not
be historical.73 Since the homotimoi may be thinly disguised Spartan homoioi, and the
army reform in Cyropaedia an excuse to discuss the merits of different types of troops
and how one might improve the Spartan army, this is an uncertain choice.74 He is also
harshly critical of Darius III based on the story that he equipped his soldiers with new
kinds of equipment before the battle of Gaugamela.75 In his view, the two years which
Darius had to prepare were not enough time to train infantry as cavalry or skirmishers
to fight in close quarters. As Philip of Macedon and Iphicrates seem to have trans-
formed their own armies in the space of a few years, and the British army which fought
at the Somme had been built from crowds of eager volunteers over a two-year period,
it is not obvious to me that Darius lacked time.
A number of misstatements and careless citations suggest that Bittner did not read
his classical sources as closely as he could have.76 In his conclusion he repeats the theo-
ry that Persian soldiers were traditionally fast-moving, light-armed skirmishers which
seem difficult for any reader of Herodotus to defend.
Duncan Head’s book was published with Montvert, a small press specializing in
works for wargamers.77 Although most Montvert books were under a hundred pag-
es in length, they had a disproportionate influence, for they remain some of the few
studies in English on certain topics. The Achaemenid Persian Army is an overview of the
Persian army with a short military history of the Achaemenid empire attached. Its 72
pages are densely packed with text, line drawings, and art. None of the illustrations is
purely ornamental, and the line drawings can help interpret photos of rock reliefs. The
Achaemenid Persian Army is focused and systematically organized, with sections on the
sources, military institutions, clothing, Iranian troops, non-Iranian troops, the army
on campaign, the army in battle, lists of contingents in specific armies, and an expla-
nation of the eight colour plates. Of the 46 modern works in the bibliography, the vast
majority reproduce or comment on ancient sources, many of them Southwest Asian
ones. Although Head was not trained as an Assyriologist, he made a point of using
cuneiform documents and art from the empire. His book avoids sweeping theories,
but its comments on specific points are always worthy of thought, and its collection
and comparison of all types of evidence is very useful. The Achaemenid Persian Army is
probably the best study of its subject available.
73 Doubts eg. Bittner 1987: 242 n. 1, 253 ( J. K. Anderson’s 1970 book, which sees the military matter in
Cyropaedia as invented for pedagogical purposes, appears in his bibliography)
74 Anderson 1970 and Christensen 2006
75 Bittner 1987: 293, 294, 315
76 Aside from the problems raised in Jacobs 1987b, Walser 1987, and Henkelman 2003: 206 n. 87, see
my comments on his treatment of the Persian gerron in chapter 6.
77 Head 1992
Nicholas Sekunda was a participant in the Achaemenid History Workshops and

published several articles in their conference proceedings and others in journals. The
most important articles included an analysis of Cornelius Nepos’ Life of Datames, an
article on reconstructed Old Persian military jargon, and three chapters on evidence
for Persian settlement in western Anatolia.78 All of these are valuable works, and writ-
ten from the assumption that the Achaemenid army and Near Eastern sources are
worthy of study. While Sekunda’s search of literary, documentary, and archaeological
sources for evidence of Persian soldiers in Anatolia was not as fruitful as he had hoped,
the search was certainly worthwhile and produced a body of evidence which other
scholars can use. His article on jargon introduced another body of scholarship, that on
Iranian philology, into discussions of military history.
Nicholas Sekunda’s book was published by Osprey, a large press aimed at wargam-
ers and enthusiasts. Sekunda faced even more challenging constraints on space than
Head did, since his book is only 64 pages long, twelve of which are devoted to colour
plates. He also decided to devote a significant amount of space to interpreting the col-
ours of ancient Persian clothing. This is obviously important for wargamers wishing
to paint their figures, but less important for military history, and his analysis of the
colours of the “Alexander Sarcophagus” can now be supplemented by the research for
the Bunte Götter exhibition.79 His book cites a wide range of modern scholarship, not
just the works of classicists and military historians, and mentions reconstructed Old
Persian terms. His book is very confident on such points as the existence of units of
10,000 soldiers, the Old Persian word for the soldiers who Herodotus calls Immortals,
the circumstances of the Athenian attack at Marathon, and why Greek artists cease to
depict Persians with large rectangular shields in the middle of the 5th century BCE.80
The references to books and articles rarely read by military historians are valuable, but
few writers interested in military affairs seem to have tracked them down.
A Russian book by M. A. Dandamayev and Vladimir G. Lukonin first appeared
in English in 1989, and its chapter “K. The Army” could also be mentioned in this
context.81 The authors made use of their deep interest in cuneiform texts and Cen-
tral Asian archaeology to address a much wider range of evidence than many other
surveys. They placed the Teispid and Achaemenid periods in context with the spread
of Scythian or Cimmerian weapons and warriors from the 8th century BCE onwards.
78 Datames: Sekunda 1988c, terminology: Sekunda 1988a, colonization: Sekunda 1985, Sekunda
1988b, Sekunda 1991
79 The publication history of this exhibition is complicated, since the catalogue seems to have been
revised for each new museum. Brinkmann 2004, the version available to me, has few photos of the
replica of the sarcophagus from Sidon, but many more appear online.
80 Units: Sekunda 1992: 5 (units), 6 (immortals), 14 (Marathon), 18 (archers)
81 Dandamayev and Lukonin 1989: 222–237 (page xi explains that the research for the first, Russian
edition was completed in 1976 and that it was extensively revised in 1985 and 1986 during the trans-
lation despite the death of the first translator and one of the authors).
Their citation and summary of relevant cuneiform texts is also very important, since
these sources were (and remain) more difficult to access than classical literature. Many
large collections of cuneiform texts contain a handful relevant to military affairs in the
Achaemenid period, so gathering sources requires working through many volumes
and learning about later editions of each. Their book also made the results of Russian
research available to western colleagues. However, they were not particularly interest-
ed in asking whether practices changed over time, and preferred showing how sources
supported one another to exploring contradictions and alternative readings. State-
ments by classical authors, or deductions by modern researchers, tend to be presented
as facts to be trusted and not as claims to be questioned.
This group of publications could have lead to a broader reappraisal, but for various
reasons this did not happen. Bittner published no further works on the Achaemenids,
Head moved on to other projects, and Sekunda shifted his focus to other areas of an-
cient history while writing some summaries of his research for edited volumes and
another popular book for Osprey.82 While M. A. Dandamayev was a prolific and critical
scholar, many of whose works were translated into Romance or Germanic languages,
he did not write another broad study of the military aspects of the Achaemenid em-
pire. Head’s publisher became inactive after 1998, and after that his book became diffi-
cult to obtain.83 Bittner’s book also seems to have been advertised and sold on a small
scale.84 After the initial reviews, scholars tend to cite it but say nothing further.85 Nicho-
las Sekunda’s book is probably the most widely read and influential, especially outside
of specialists in ancient history, but it did not inspire a new program of research. One
problem was that Head and Sekunda published in venues which did not allow full cita-
tions, so it was difficult for readers to use them as a starting point for exploring research
by philologists and Assyriologists.
82 Sekunda 1989, Sekunda 2002, Sekunda 2008b.

83 Duncan Head informed me that to his knowledge Montvert never formally went out of business,
but the couple which owned it had trouble marketing their books, and from the late 1990s other
obligations made it hard for the owners to publish more volumes or experiment with online mar-
keting and sales.
84 According to WorldCat (OCLC 13810947), there are only 72 copies in libraries, 33 of them in Ger-
man, Austrian, and Swiss institutions, as of January 2020, compared to 567 of Anderson’s Military
Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon. I purchased my copy from Bittner directly.
85 Reviews: Jacobs 1987b, Walser 1987 (these may have inspired the “2. erweiterte und verbesserte
Aufgabe” which Bittner released the same year). For a later response, see Henkelman 2003: 206
n. 87. I am told that Pfrommer 1998 relies on Bittner’s analysis of Realien.
1.9 Scholarship Since 1992
By 1992, researchers took a variety of approaches to Achaemenid warfare, and there was
some room for dialogue. Most researchers brought in artwork, artifacts, or Near East-
ern texts to supplement the classical, literary sources, but still relied on those sources
as a framework and did not emphasize the problems of interpreting them. However,
interpretative problems were more visible in some articles: van Driel’s study of the
economy of later Achaemenid Babylonia (1987), Tuplin’s study of garrisons, and Se-
kunda’s three studies of Persian soldiers in Anatolia. Yet for the next 20 years there were
few new contributions. Where the period from 1980 to 1992 was a time of integrating
research on the ancient Near East into studies of the Persian army, after 1992 the fields
went in different directions.
1.9.1 The Classicists’ Tradition Since 1992
Josef Wiesehöfer published an overview of the new approach to Iranian studies in 1994
under the title Das antike Persien. His book covers from the early 1st millennium BCE
to just before the Arab conquest of Iran. Wiesehöfer focused his book on ideas and
institutions rather then events and individuals, and tried to show pre-Islamic Iranian
culture as a whole without succumbing to 20th century propaganda about an eternal
Iran.86 His chapter on the Achaemenid army is only two thousand words long, and
while his sections on the Parthian and Sasanid armies are even shorter.87 His discus-
sion of the Achaemenid army references the philological discussions about Darius’
army as described in his inscriptions, and emphasizes that the army was neither a pure
Iranian organization nor an innumerable mob gathered from all lands. In general his
attitude is confident and positive, as befits an introduction, and he even states that “die
Armee der Achaimenidenkönige ist uns … gut bekannt.”88
Wiesehöfer cites the broad works by Shahbazi and Bittner, but not the books by
Sekunda and Head or Tuplin’s article on garrisons. He was limited by the shortage of
useful secondary material, and by his project of writing a short overview for beginners.
As suggested above, however, it is far from clear that Achaemenid military practices
were essentially Iranian. The western part of the empire, about which we know the
most, had its own military traditions.
In his introduction to the 1996 reprint of his book on the Persian Wars, Peter Green
acknowledged that much had been written on the Achaemenid empire and on Greek
86 For Wiesehöfer’s intent see Wiesehöfer 1994: 10

87 6.5 pages × 33 lines per page × 10 words per line = 2145 words
88 Wiesehöfer 1994: 132
Scholarship Since 1992 47
ideas about Persia since 1970.89 He described this as “probably the most useful work
done in the past twenty-five years.”90 The change is very visible in his supplementary
bibliography, which is dense with books and articles on Persian questions and non-
Greek sources. In a random sample of four pages, about a third of his references deal
with Persian affairs or Greek ideas about Persia, including T. Cuyler Young’s discussion
of the Greek desire to inflate Xerxes’ invasion, Muhammed Dandamayev’s work on
political history, and R. T. Hallock on the Persepolis fortification tablets.91 This is a
dramatic change from the one reference in thirty in his original bibliography. Yet he
predicted that if he ever revised The Greco-Persian Wars, while the academic apparatus
would expand and he would have to address new evidence, his basic opinions would
remain the same.92 It seems to be difficult to maintain both these positions at once, for
much of this new scholarship challenges Green’s basic premises about the nature of
the war. If this scholarship were really important, then it should provoke a fundamen-
tal reconsideration of the relationship between Greece and Persia. He acknowledges
that his supplementary bibliography is not comprehensive, but it is surprising that it
contains none of the books on the Persian army by Head, Bittner, or Sekunda. In any
case, his preface and supplementary bibliography at least direct the inquisitive reader
to sources where they might encounter other perspectives.
When Pierre Briant wrote his synthesis of the results of the Achaemenid history
workshops, he chose to briefly address the army at several points but not to devote a
long section to it.93 In his research notes he complained that writers continued to re-
peat stereotypical ideas about the army based on a casual reading of the Greek sources,
but could point to little work which used a better approach. As he warned in his review
of a classical-philological study of Anatolia:
To speak of regular assemblies of troops in the provinces, without analysis in detail of the
Babylonian and Aramaic sources available [he lists them], is to forbid all access to any pos-
sible understanding of an imperial institution; at the same time, it is to forbid meditation
on the possibility of provincial variations (it is not enough to state, as the author does on
many occasions, that each region is “unique”).94
89 Green 1996: xiv

90 Green 1996: xiv
91 Checked pages 318–321, counted 29 references out of 77 (38 %).
92 Green 1996: xxiv
93 On Xerxes’ invasion of Greece see Briant, Cyrus to Alexander, 961, 962. On the time of Cyrus the
Younger and Artaxerxes II, see 979, 980. On the time of Darius III, see 1034–1038. Briant’s remarks
on the careers of the kings from Cyrus to Darius I contain many interesting remarks but no long
discussion of military institutions; he is most interested in these as they affect the debate whether
or not the late empire was “decadent.”
94 Briant, BHAch II, 122 n. 251 Parler des convocations régulières de troupes dans les provinces sans analys-
er dans le détail les sources babyloniennes et araméennes disponibles, c’est s’interdire tout accès à une
possible compréhension d’une institution impériale; en même temps, c’est s’interdire de réfléchir aux éven-
Bittner’s thesis and the books by Head and Sekunda are cited in his bibliography but
do not appear to have strongly influenced his approach, while he admires Tuplin’s arti-
cle on the garrisons of the Achaemenid empire and refers readers to Paul Rahe’s article
with a few warnings. Briant’s encyclopedic knowledge of scholarship on a whole range
of themes produced some useful ideas, such as that Herodotus’ description of an army
review at Doriscus belongs to a long tradition of displaying the peoples and fighting
powers of an empire. His emphasis on institutions and customs over events also of-
fered the potential for scholarship which did not simply discuss the wars celebrated
by the Greeks, although his longest remarks on the army were part of his analysis of
those wars. He strongly criticized the view that the empire was in political and military
decline from the late 5th century onwards, a view which many writers on military affairs
take as fact. He also emphasized that the Greek sources overstate the role of Greek
mercenaries and Greek generals, although here a number of classicists agree with him.
L’Histoire de l’Empire Perse gathered materials and demonstrated methodologies, and
its remarks on the army deserve serious thought, but it would be difficult to say that
it transformed our knowledge of the Achaemenid army in the same way that it trans-
formed our understanding of the Achaemenid empire in general.
When Nicholas Sekunda returned to Achaemenid warfare with another chapter in
2008, he mentioned the siege of Old Paphos and the possible catapult stones there,
added a few more Old Persian and Elamite nouns, but otherwise added little to his
ideas from 1992.95 Once again, this was written in a venue which allowed a bibliography
but not detailed citations.
1.9.2 Alternative Approaches Since 1992
The lack of a broad reassessment and reintegration after 1992 can be seen in research
outside these three broad works. Most writing about armed force in the Achaemenid
empire since 1992 can be grouped into three traditions of classical, Iranological, and
Assyriological research.
In the 1990s, a new program of research into the “Long Sixth Century” (c. 610–484
BCE) took form.96 A key insight was that Chaldean, Teispid, and early Achaemenid
rule were marked by continuity and trends such as the increased use of silver and the
expansion of the land-for-service system. This program has published or translated
some new texts, and produced a number of specialized studies of military affairs based
tuelles variantes provinciales (il ne suffit pas d’affirmer, comme le fait l’auteur à de nombreuses occasions,
que chaque région est “spécifique.”)
95 Sekunda 2008b: 72, 78, 82
96 Francis Joannès, G. van Driel, Kathleen Abraham, Michael Jursa, Caroline Waerzeggers, and John
MacGinnis are some influential researchers in this area.
Scholarship Since 1992 49
on temple archives rather than the private Murašû archive. MacGinnis’ monograph on
the forces of the Ebabbar at Sippar is especially significant, because it puts its analysis
next to full texts of many of the tablets discussed.97 Some members have resumed the
program of research into material culture in texts which scholars like A. Leo Oppen-
heim and Waldo H. Dubberstein began in the 1930s.98 However, so far this research has
had limited impact outside of its own community. These sources focus on different
things than the classical literary sources, and many of the technical terms are poorly
understood. Also, participants do not always make it easy for newcomers to find the
texts which they cite. Many of the tablets excavated before the First World War are now
available in transcription or even translation, but that is not obvious from a citation
like Dar. 253. At present, it is easier for newcomers to find papers arguing about the
meaning of particular terms than to read the texts upon which these arguments are
based.
In contrast, the Iranological and archaeological traditions were subdued. Research
in Achaemenid studies tended to undermine the idea of the Teispids and Achae-
menids as essentially Indo-European and Iranian, and of pre-Islamic Iranian culture
forming an organic whole.99 Specialists in Elam continued to emphasize that Elam
traditionally consisted of lowland Susiane (modern Khuzestan) and highland Persis
(modern Fars), specialists in Iranian religion stressed the problems with seeing the
Avesta and Achaemenid religion as two stages in a single tradition, while specialists in
Achaemenid Studies came to see Darius’ presentation of himself as Persian and Aryan
as tendentious and part of a process of ethnogenesis and self-definition, not a fact to
be taken for granted. Elspeth Dusinberre’s 2013 book on Achaemenid Anatolia devoted
a chapter to warfare. She leaned on Tuplin’s study of garrisons and Moorey’s report
on Deve Hüyük but also addressed the hilltop fortress with reliefs of spear-bearers at
Meydancıkkale in Rough Cilicia.
In 2005 George Cawkwell published an overview of Greek wars with the Persians
from the foundation of the Achaemenid empire to its overthrow by Alexander. Cawk-
well’s book reflects decades of thought by a very skilful historian, and it was written for
other experts in Persian wars with the Greeks. Yet his choice of questions and evidence
falls into the usual pattern amongst classicists. While he emphasizes Persian folly over
Greek courage, and rejects Greek stories of innumerable Persian ships and soldiers,
he accepts the principle that when writing about the Achaemenids at war one should
focus on their wars with Greeks as described in Greek sources. Cawkwell’s book there-
97 MacGinnis 2012
98 Dubberstein 1939 (Dubberstein eventually left academe for a career in the CIA). The monograph
on Material Culture of the Neo-Babylonian Period mentioned at Oppenheim 1950: 188 n. 4 seems to
have never been printed.
99 eg. Rollinger 1999, Henkelman 2008
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
three-arched bridge at venice, over the canal of st. giobbe. brick and
stone. renaissance
As mediæval towns of importance were encompassed by walls

and defended by castles, there was little free space; hence the
building of a new bridge was always a great event; it enlarged the
civic life and prepared a foundation for a new street or for a fresh
line of defensive works. Thus the Bridge of Saintes was a long line of
fortifications (p. 300), while the bridges of Paris were housed and
populous, unlike many a village where poor Jacques, in the midst of
unceasing war, lived the life of a hunted wolf. Unfortunately, the
tenants of Paris bridges wanted to thrive at their landlords’ expense,
and at last they ruined the landlords, who were bridges, not men, I
am sorry to say. The great corbels that supported the houses
pressed too heavily on the spandrils; caves and hiding-places were
dug into the piers; and when the houses were removed from the
Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont Saint-Michel, it was found that every
tenant had misused his home, even to the extent of excavating
secret chambers behind the haunches of an arch. For human nature
has ever claimed the privilege of doing justice to itself in actions of
foolish violence.
For instance, it is disgusting to read about the desecration thrust
upon English bridge chapels after the reign of Henry the Eighth. As
an example we can take the Chapel of St. Mary on Wakefield Bridge,
Yorkshire, a beautiful piece of Decorated Gothic dating from the
fourteenth century. After the Reformation it became many profane
things, including an old clothes shop, a warehouse, a den of flax-
dressers, a newsroom, a cheesecake house, a tailor’s shop, and I
know not what else; so “we think upon her stones, and it pitieth us
to see her in the dust.” At last—it was in 1847—an effort was made
to rescue her from further degradation: quite a big effort, for it cost
£3000, yet the cause had nothing to do with sport or with self-
advertisement. To raise so much money in the service of history was
a great achievement. But the chosen architect was less fortunate
than he might have been; he was one of those Victorian “restorers”
whose zeal at times was excessive. In a few months the Chapel of
St. Mary was rebuilt, almost, so thorough was the renovation. Even
the original front was torn off and carted to the grounds of
Kettlethorpe Park, where it still remains, I believe; and not enough
care was shown in the choice of building materials, for the new work
was carried out in Bath stone and Caen stone, which were much too
soft for the Wakefield atmosphere. Indeed, the new front perished
so quickly that in less than forty-five years a part of its detail looked
more friable than the ancient work at Kettlethorpe; and a second
renovation became necessary.
The subscriptions raised for these remodellings and repairs call to
mind the fact that in much earlier times Wakefield Bridge and its
chapel were objects of charity. For example, in 1391, the fourteenth
year of Richard II, William de Bayley, of Mitton in Craven, left C sol
ad confirmacionem cantarie in Capella Sce Mariæ sup Pont de
Wakefield; and a deed dated the 27th of September, 1454, the
thirty-second year of Henry VI, mentions a yearly dole of three
shillings to be paid to the bridge chapel at Wakefield. At an earlier
date, in 1398, two chantries were ordained in St. Mary’s Chapel,
thanks to the generosity of William Terry and Robert Heth, who
obtained licences from Richard II “to give and assign to two
chaplains celebrating divine service in the chapel of St. Mary, on
Wakefield Bridge, lately built, ten pounds rent in Wakefield, Stanley,
Ossett, Pontefract, Horbury, Heckmondwike, Shafton, Darfield,
Preston, Jackling, and Frystone by the water.” Norrison Scatcherd
gives this quotation from a document in the archives of the Hatfield
family, but I know not what to say of it; for a charter of an earlier
date mentions a sum of £10 and two chaplains (p. 230).
However, the chapel is built on a little island in the river Calder,
and the plan is arranged below so as to offer the least resistance to
the river. “The extra width required for the chapel above is obtained
by corbelling out on each side, which gives a total external width of
about twenty feet. The total length is about forty-five feet. The front
towards the bridge is very elaborate, and is divided into five ogee-
headed compartments, with buttresses between. Three of these, the
centre and two ends, are doorways, the other two being panelled.
Over this is a series of five panels filled with sculpture representing
the Annunciation, the Birth of Jesus, the Resurrection, the
Ascension, and the Descent of the Holy Ghost on the Disciples.
Surmounting the whole are battlements; and a bold group of
pinnacles at each end of the front over the buttresses. Each side has
three three-light windows, and the east end has a large window of
five lights; all have rich Decorated tracery. A well-designed turret
stands at the north-east angle, and contains the staircase which
communicates with the roof and crypt. On the north, south, and east
fronts is a panelled parapet, and there is a canopied niche over the
east windows. There was formerly a priest’s house adjoining, but the
last vestiges of it were removed in 1866.... The windows on the
south and east are filled with stained glass. The interior is in good
repair, and is fitted up for service.”[92] And service also is held
there.[93]
Leland, who returned from his antiquarian tour in 1542, collected
in Wakefield a good many suppositions about the origin of St. Mary’s
Chapel. He was happy there, because a right honest man fared well
for “2 pens a meale.” On the east side of a fair bridge of stone,
under whose nine arches the Calder flowed, Leland was charmed to
see a right goodly chapel of Our Lady, with two cantuary priests
founded in it, by the townsmen, as some say; but, on the other
hand, the Dukes of York were taken as founders because they had
obtained the mortmain. He heard someone say that Edward IV’s
father, or else the Earl of Rutland, brother to Edward IV, “was a
great doer of it,” for “a sore batell was fought in the south feeldes of
this bridge,” and in the flight of the Duke of York’s party, either the
duke himself, or his son the Earl of Rutland, was slain a little above
the bars, beyond the bridge, going up into the town of Wakefield.
“At this place is set up a cross in rei memoriam.”
Very often to-day, as in Leland’s time, the Chapel of St. Mary is
supposed to have been founded later than 1460, partly to
commemorate the battle of Sandal Castle Field, now called the battle
of Wakefield, and partly as a monument to a boy of eighteen, poor
Edmund Earl of Rutland, second son of the Duke of York, who was
murdered by the “black Lord Clifford,” called the Butcher. Then a
royal chantry seems to have been founded in St. Mary’s Chapel, and
endowed; but chantries were founded often in bridge chapels, as we
have seen in the case of London Bridge (p. 217); and so we must
not suppose that “chantry” and “chapel” mean always the same
thing. Moreover, in architectural character the chapel belongs to
about the time of Edward II, who died in 1327. This was proved by
Buckler, and in a charter of about 1358, dated at Wakefield, Edward
III settled “£10 per annum on William Kaye and William Bull and
their successors for ever to perform Divine Service in a chapel of St.
Mary newly built on the bridge at Wakefield.”[94]
Still, the precise date of the foundation is unimportant. Scatcherd
ascribes it to a time earlier than 1357, and dwells upon a
resemblance between St. Mary’s Chapel at Wakefield and Prior
Crawden’s Chapel at Ely, 1321-40; he is “almost persuaded” that
they were built by the same great architect, Alan de Walsingham.[95]
I chose the story of this bridge chapel as an instance of the
desecration thrust upon old English shrines after the Reformation
had let loose the creed of self into sect-making zealotry. In the
presence of fine art Puritans were often like starving dogs in the
presence of raw meat. Though every mediæval bridge without
exception was united to the Church by a Christian symbol, a cross or
a crucifix, yet the Puritans were so thorough in their fanaticism that
only a bridge here and there was allowed to keep even the stump of
a smashed cross. Some broken crosses were handed on to Victoria’s
time, but highway boards and their parapet repairs destroyed the
stumps one by one, as in the case of Ashford Bridge, Derbyshire. A
few years ago the stump of a cross had not yet been stripped from
one Derbyshire bridge, the Derwent packhorse bridge, but I dare not
say that it still remains. At any moment the vandalism of a
“restoration” may remind us that our highway boards ought to be
guided and disciplined by independent committees of architects and
artists. Their work is far less intelligent than that of the Ponts et
Chaussées in France. And so, what with the ravaging hands of our
roadway officials, and what with the destructive sanctity of Puritans,
our old bridges and their religious adjuncts have suffered long and
much and continually. Many bridge chapels have been destroyed, as
at Cromford, Doncaster, Ludlow, Bideford, Richmond (Yorks), Leeds,
Newcastle, Barnard Castle, Durham (on the Elvet Bridge), Catterick,
Bridgenorth, Bristol, Wallingford, Bedford (St. Thomas’s Chapel,
Bunyan’s gaol), and Droitwich, where the high road passed through
the chapel, and separated the congregation from the reading-desk
and from the pulpit! What a relic of old wayfaring life! Yet it was
cleared away as hateful to progress.
A small oratory remains on the bridge at Bradford-on-Avon,
Wiltshire. It is not quite on the same lines as the original structure,
for in the seventeenth century its roofing was altered into a sort of
dome built with stone. It is a “housing,” a tiny place for a passing
prayer, not a chapel; and this class of bridge oratory has become so
uncommon that I doubt whether another exists. As Mr. Emanuel
Green has said, it “is now perhaps unique,” and “should be carefully
preserved.”[96] In recent times neither reverence nor care has been
bestowed on this oratory. After the Reformation it was profaned, as
a matter of course. For a long time it was used as a “lock-up,” and in
1887 it was a powder magazine!
Its pyramidal roof is crowned with a tall finial, which in its turn
carries a pretty wind vane; and in the wind vane we find the emblem
of St. Nicholas—a gudgeon. The townsfolk used to be known as
Bradford gudgeon, and those of them who had been shut up in the
little prison on the bridge were said to have been “under the fish and
over the water.”[97]
At St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, called Slepe in “Domesday Book,”
and Asleep to-day, there is another degraded oratory, a bigger one,
with an apsidal termination eastward. Its original parapet has been
torn down, and a brick house of two storeys adds greatly to its
height. Derby also has a bridge chapel, whose history may be
studied in the works of the Rev. Dr. Cox; but I am more interested in
the oratory on Rotherham Bridge, Yorkshire. Here, as at Wakefield,
the chapel stands on a small island, the upper part is corbelled out
on each side, and the end against the bridge is carried by a half-
arch. The plan is a rectangle about 30 ft. by 14 ft., while at
Wakefield the external width is 20 ft. and the total length about 45
ft. During many years Rotherham Chapel was almost as beautiful as
the masterpiece at Wakefield; and even now, after infinite ill-usage,
there is charm in the embattled parapet graced with pinnacles.
gothic bridge at barnard castle, yorkshire
We hear of this chapel for the first time in the will of one John
Bokyns, who in 1483 left three and fourpence “to the fabric of the
chapel to be built on Rotherham Bridge.” There seems to have been
no endowment, as this chapel was unnamed by the Commissioners
of Henry VIII. In 1681 she was turned into an almshouse, she was a
prison in 1778, and also in 1831; but at last she became more
reputable as a warehouse. May we hope that her lost window
tracery will be renewed, and will she ever be restored to the service
of the Church? Her degradation has lasted far too long, certainly, but
it is not easy to collect money for church restoration. If our golf
fanatics took the matter in hand and made an appeal to the public,
their popularity would bring in subscriptions.
From a standpoint of historic social life this irreverence to ancient
bridge chapels cannot be anything less than horrible, because the
earlier England owed all her best qualities to that faith which
preceded Protestantism, and which passed without much injury
through the terrible alembics of mediæval war and of social egotism.
In Shakespeare himself we find a product of the spectacular display
which the old Church had encouraged by her festivals; and it is
certain also that Shakespeare could not have been a dramatic poet if
the Puritanism of his time had been a leading motive-power of public
life, and not merely a writer of unpopular books. No pontist should
fail to read the early Puritan scribblers, who give in a frenzy of
caricature much valuable social history, without a knowledge of
which the sixteenth century cannot be understood. Their language is
graphic, and so violent that it takes one’s breath away; but in all
reprints, as in those of the New Shakespeare Society, it is kept away
from the general reader by the dismal pedantry which copies the
freakish spelling of sixteenth-century books.
Let me give, with modernised spelling, an abridged extract from
an Elizabethan Puritan, Phillip Stubbes, whose “Anatomy of Abuses”
has come at last into the history of historians. My aim is to show
three things: a spirit of fierce intolerance not yet popular enough to
close the theatres of London, but foolish enough to wreck shrines
and to take pride in a very bad system of supposed moral teaching.
It was the earlier Cromwell who appointed Sir William Bassett,
Knight, to the holy office of shrine destroyer and image breaker; and
Bassett, whose humour was killed by zealotry, regarded as sinful
things even the baths at Buxton, for he locked them up and sealed
them, “that none shall enter to wash ... until your lordship’s pleasure
be further known.” Into this novel sanctity Phillip Stubbes poured his
abundant venom. Being at heart a thorough Puritan, it never
occurred to him that it would be better to educate human nature
than to take away from it the discipline of temptation. As in earlier
times the better minds and characters had sneaked away from life
into nunneries and monasteries, so Phillip Stubbes wished mankind
to be a recluse, a hermit, separated by stern laws from everything
that folly could abuse. Because minstrels and mimics sang many a
lewd song, as do fools to-day, Stubbes raged against all itinerant
clowns, buffoons, and singers, and demanded that they should be
put down; by no other means could men be taught to value a little
decency and self-respect. His language runs thus:—
“Such drunken sockets and bawdy parasites range the
country, rhyming and singing unclean, corrupt and filthy
songs, in taverns, ale-houses, inns, and other public
assemblies.... Every town, city, and country is full of these
minstrels to pipe up a dance to the devil.... But some of them
will reply, and say, ‘What, sir! we have licences from justices
of the peace to pipe and use our minstrelsy to our best
commodity.’ Cursed be those licences which license any man
to get his living with the destruction of many thousands! But
have you a licence from the archjustice of peace, Christ
Jesus? If you have not ... then may you, as rogues,
extravagants, and stragglers from the heavenly country, be
arrested of the high justice of peace, Christ Jesus, and be
punished with eternal death, notwithstanding your pretended
licences from earthly men....”
Briefly, the people had degraded their singers, just as to-day they
degrade those Sunday newspapers which have the widest
circulation; yet Stubbes believed that the people could be saved
from themselves if their victims were condemned to everlasting
punishment by “the high justice of peace, Christ Jesus.” In like
manner the people were to be improved somehow by the
destruction of old votive shrines, or by the desecration of the bridge
chapels in which for ages the pilgrims of England had solaced their
long journeys. Henry VIII himself, in 1510, is said to have made a
pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham, barefooted, and carrying a
rich necklace—a light but expensive gift that did not add to his
fatigue. Erasmus visited the same great shrine and kissed the relics,
and all at once the Virgin nodded at him, owing to the indiscretion of
a priest who pulled some strings. In the fourteenth century thirty-
eight shrines drew pilgrims to Norfolk; for illness rambled from place
to place, feeding a superstitious piety, and praying for that relief
which doctors in their wild ignorance could not give. The shrines of
Europe were the only physicians that the sick dared to trust.
gothic bridge with shrines at elche in spain
Many a pilgrim visited the Pont St. Bénézet at Avignon, and

legend speaks also of miracles; the good friar was buried in his
bridge chapel, and during his life he healed the sick and the
maimed. I know not why legend should say these things, since
Bénézet did quite enough good work by building his noble structure
over the Rhône, a terrible river. A Roman bridge had occupied the
same spot, so that Bénézet may have used some of the Roman
foundations. His work, in any case, was done with unusual rapidity,
being finished in eight years (1177-1185).[98] In Brangwyn’s glorious
picture of the Pont St. Bénézet one romantic feature is the friar-
architect’s tomb, the venerable Chapel of St. Nicholas; and historians
dwell upon the fact that never once has the chapel been injured by
floods or by wars. All has been wrecked except the four arches
dominated by the shrine of St. Bénézet. Pope Clement VI (1342-
1352) had to rebuild four arches; in 1395, during a fierce attack on
the palace of the Popes, the bridge was cut by the Catalans and
Aragonese, who destroyed an arch; and this breach was not repaired
with stone till the year 1418. The masonry was not good, for in 1602
the arch gave way and caused the loss of three others. Disaster
followed disaster, two arches falling in 1633 and two in the winter of
1670. Turn to the Sieur Tassin’s “Plans et Profils des principales Villes
et Lieux considérables de France,” issued in 1652, and you will find a
view of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge, with two arches missing on
Barthelasse Island, and three on the great arm of the Rhône. As a
rule such gaps were bridged with timber, because a French bridge
cut in war could not be repaired until permission had been gained
from the foe who had done the damage. This curious fact in
mediæval history I take from Viollet-le-Duc; and it may help to
explain why the masterpiece of St. Bénézet was allowed to perish.
Bénézet constructed twenty-one[99] arches, and the line of his
bridge made an elbow pointing upstream, beyond Barthelasse
Island, on the Villeneuve branch of the Rhône. Two ideas governed
this angular disposition: first, to thrust into the river a tremendous
wedge of arcaded stonework to resist floods; next to thwart an
attack by cavalry and infantry; since a bridge with a bend in it would
be more difficult to storm than a level and straight footway. In Spain
there are several bridges of this angular sort, notably a very long
one over the Pisuerga at Torquemada; and in Corsica also there is a
fine example, but in caricature, the bridge over the Tavignano being
shaped like a Z. Bénézet made another concession to tactical
defence: his bridge was only 4 metres 90 wide, including the
thickness of the parapets, so it was very narrow in proportion to the
nine hundred metres of its length. Just a few soldiers in a line could
have walked along it from end to end; and wheeled traffic must have
been hindered, for at one point—face to face with the chapel—the
roadway dwindled to half its breadth. Even in times when carts and
chariots were long and narrow, a journey across this bridge on a
market day must have been an adventure.
This cramped road over the Rhône was the only permanent way
connecting the Papal territory of Avignon and the French territory of
Languedoc. Many troubles arose on this account, and France never
rested till she had gained control over the Pont Saint-Bénézet and
Avignon. A century after Bénézet’s death the King of France put up a
bullying fortress on the right bank, and closed the Villeneuve
entrance whenever he liked. For about fifty years Avignon took no
steps to counterbalance this attack on her liberties; then a Bastille
was built on her side of the river, and now the Pont Saint-Bénézet
was nearly as martial as the Bridge of Saintes (p. 300) or as the
Pont d’Orléans, which from October 12, 1428, to the arrival of
Jeanne d’Arc on April 29, 1429, aided Gaucour to baffle the earls of
Salisbury and Suffolk. In the eighth year of the fifteenth century the
contention between France and Avignon reached a crisis, not at all
an infrequent thing in their history; but this crisis of 1408 unseated
the Papacy at Avignon, and expelled Benedict XIII, bringing to an
end a religious domination which had lasted in the city for ninety-
nine years.
It is clear from this brief record of events that the Pont St.
Bénézet, like many another great bridge of the Middle Ages, had but
a poor chance of becoming social and useful. Instead of being an
open road to the democratic spirit and the growth of trade, she kept
watch and ward incessantly, and aided the misruling class to nourish
their egotisms without any care at all for the common weal. It said
very little for the half-sense of ordinary men that they in their
millions were unable to defend themselves against a tiny class of
despots. The people were like leaves on forest trees, that fluttered
ineffectually as soon as a gale began to blow. For the ounces of
brain in each human skull have never been of any real worth until
genius has taken control of them, for good or for ill. More than one
insect has had a brain more fertile than that of the average man.
Thus the cerebral ganglia of the ant, though not so large as a
quarter of a small pin’s head, have evolved a marvellous routine of
life, which includes the making of bridges and the boring of tunnels
under running water. Ants were civil engineers long before men had
constructed their first tunnels and drains. Have you ever tried to
imagine what would have happened in the world of primitive men if
every atom in every ounce of human brain had been as fertile as the
cerebral ganglia of the ant? A civilization no worse than our own
might have been evolved by the year 100,000 b.c., if not earlier.
From time to time, however, amid the congealed blood that lay so
thick over the mediæval history of France, some true social justice
did shine out, here and there. A few French nobles built communal
bridges, and set the Law to keep them for ever from the tyrannies of
a superior class that found in ordinary men neither the intelligence
of ants nor the discipline that united wolves into formidable packs.
The people being too silly to defend their own rights, these few good
nobles tried to foresee all dangers, but their legal documents were
rarely strong enough to resist their incessant foes, the stupidity of
the mob and the gradual encroachments of military leaders. When
Eudes, Count of Chartres, built a bridge at Tours, as an act of piety
that would benefit his soul, he decreed that its public value for all
time was to be as free from all restraints as a church. At an earlier
time, in a deed of 998, William the Great, Duke of Aquitaine, went
so far as to forbid pour toujours a collection of tolls on the Pont
Royal. He did not realise that his populace would cease to value the
bridge as soon as they got the freedom of it for nothing. Again, in
France during the Middle Ages no bridge could be fortified without
permission from its founder or founders. This was a rule or law, and
yet it must have been broken hundreds of times, for what bridge of
any importance did not become a fortified work, a genuine
stronghold?
old bridge over the borne at espaly, near le puy in france; behind the
croix de la paille, a rock of volcanic breccia, with houses, and with ruins
of a thirteenth-century castle
One form or custom of the Middle Ages tried to encompass

bloodshed with the glamour of religious fervour. After the battle of
Towton, for example, a chapel was built on the stricken field by the
Yorkists as a memorial to the souls of their dead. And a famous
chapel on the Ouse Bridge at York is said to have been erected after
a stiff fight between the citizens and a Scotchman named John
Comyn. The fray happened on the bridge itself, in 1168, or
thereabouts, and John Comyn lost several of his followers. Then
came some negotiations, in the course of which it was agreed that
the city should erect a chapel on the spot, and find priests to
celebrate mass for the souls of the dead. Another story relates that
in 1153, when Saint William was restored to the See of York, a vast
crowd assembled on a timber bridge that crossed the Ouse, so eager
were the citizens to welcome their prelate, who in 1147 had been
deprived of office after a reign of three years. In the hustle and
excitement of the home-coming, the bridge gave way, and many
persons fell into the river, but no one perished because William
prayed and his prayer was answered. To commemorate this miracle
a chapel was built on the new bridge. This legend may have some
truth in it, for the chapel was dedicated to Saint William; and
perhaps the other legend about John Comyn is not entirely mythical.
One thing is certain: that in Norman times a stone bridge was
built at York and graced with a fine chapel. Between 1215 and 1256
it was reconstructed by Archbishop Walter de Gray, who preserved
some portions of the Norman chapel. More than three centuries
later, in 1564, two arches were destroyed by a flood, with twelve
houses that stood upon them; and for nearly two years the bridge
remained in a ruined state. Then the broken arches were rebuilt in
the thirteenth-century style. Among the contributors to this work
was Lady Jane Hall, whose donation was recorded on a brass plate
on the north side of the bridge. The inscription was quaint:—
William Watson, Lord Mayor, An. Dom. 1566.

Lady Jane Hall to: here the works of faith doth shew;
By giving a hundred pounds this bridge to renew.
On the west side of Ouse Bridge there were several houses,

which flanked the Chapel of Saint William. At the Reformation the
chapel contained several chantries, the original grants of which are
still among the records of the city. After the Reformation, of course,
these pious endowments were confiscated, and the beautiful little
building was turned into an exchange where the York Society of
Hamburg Merchants assembled every morning to transact business.
At last, in 1810, the chapel was removed. Some parts of it were
excellent work in the Early English style, while the porch and a stone
screen were enriched with cable and chevron ornaments,
characteristic of Norman work. A few etchings of these charming
details were published in Cave’s “Antiquities of York” (1813).
At the east side of Ouse Bridge stood the old gaol for debtors,
built in the sixteenth century. It lasted till 1724, when it was
purchased by the city and the ainstey, and a better place was built,
by assessment, as a free prison. The old bridge was condemned as
dangerous in 1808, and on December 10, 1810, the foundation-
stone of a new bridge was laid.[100]
Among my thousands of notes and papers I have a good article
on ancient bridge chapels written in 1882 by the late S. Wayland
Kershaw, f.s.a., of Lambeth Palace Library. Mr. Kershaw made a
study of old Rochester Bridge and its chapel, which stood on the
main road to the Continent, close to the great cathedral, whose main
architects were Bishops Ernulph and Gundulph. These bishops
favoured the bridge, partly because it brought pilgrims to the shrine
at Rochester, and partly because it was a kindness to all wayfarers.
“The Crusader on his way to the East, the stately cardinal and
foreign prince, the wayworn pilgrim, and the merchant-voyager
would form but a few of the passengers ... who would say a passing
prayer at the Bridge Chapel of All Souls.”[101] Rochester Bridge in
mediæval times was closely linked to the history of the cathedral.
The first bridge was constructed of wood, and, according to Prior
Ernulph’s testimony, it existed before 1215. In Vol. VII of
“Archæologia,” the Society of Antiquaries published a plan of this
ancient timber bridge, with a most valuable description. At the east
end there was a tower of wood, with strong defensive gates, which
may have resembled the timber fortifications with which the Romans
barred their wooden bridges. In 1281, according to Kilburne’s
“Survey of Kent,” the earliest bridge at Rochester was borne down
by the Medway after a severe winter; and there is no mention of
another bridge till the year 1387, when Sir John Cobham and Sir R.
Knolles put up “a fair bridge of stone.” Such was the slack and
lethargic citizenship of Rochester. About 1800 years after the Pons
Sublicius was thrown across the Tiber, a common timber bridge was
carried over the Medway in an effort of progress. As for the belated
stone bridge, the charter of its foundation is preserved in the
Bishops’ Registers, and a transcript of it is given in Thorpe’s
“Custumale Roffense.” Philipott, in his “Kent Surveyed,” 1659, says
that the chapel on Rochester Bridge was founded in 1399 by John de
Cobham, and dedicated to the Holy Trinity, but called at its first
institution All Souls’ Chapel, because prayers and orisons were to be
offered up there for the health of all Christian souls. Two earlier
writers—Fabyan in 1406, and Grafton in 1409—attribute the finishing
of the chapel to Sir R. Knolles, Knight.[102] Another chapel, a small
one, was built on the stone quay at the Strood end of the bridge, its
founder being Gilbert de Glanville, Bishop of Rochester (1185-1215).
“We learn that Queen Isabella, when she came to Strood in 1357,
entered the Chapel of St. Mary, and offered an oblation of six and
eightpence in honour of the eleven thousand virgins.” Gracious! This
army of fair saints inspired a very wee act of devotional charity.
There is reason to believe that the larger chapel was not closed by
legal dissolution, but passed out of use when pilgrims became afraid
to anger their Protestant neighbours; for in the nineteenth year of
Elizabeth’s reign Thorpe wrote as follows in his “Custumale
Roffense”:—
“The Queen’s Attorney-General sued the wardens of the
bridge for £513, being the amount of £18 per annum for
twenty-eight years and a half, the last past, which sum was at
that time presumed to be forfeited and due to the Queen by
virtue of the Act 1, Ed. VI, for dissolving charities. It not
appearing to the jury that any service had been performed
here, nor a stipend paid to any chaplain or chantry priest for
officiating here, for five years next before the passing that
Act, a verdict was given for the Wardens.”
In 1882, when Mr. Kershaw wrote his paper, the Chapel of All
Souls was roofless, and nearly hidden by new buildings. Its width
was about fifteen feet, and its length about forty feet. Windows
were pierced in the north and south walls, and two of them were
filled with brickwork or with masonry. In the south wall were traces
of a piscina, and some ornamental details had been saved from the
general wreckage.
Much more might be written on bridge chapels and crosses, but
this monograph is only a brief introduction to a vast subject, and we
must pass on to the other topics after noting two points more. Both
concern the sanctification of bridges by means of religious emblems.
It seems quite certain that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
were most favourable to wayside crosses. By then very popular
saints had been added to the old shrines, and the custom of making
pilgrimages was tormented by fewer dangers, as a rule. Many a
cross was a simple thing of wood fixed in a stone base, and
sometimes it carried at top a small wind vane or weathercock. Many
crosses were raised to commemorate historical events, while others
were put up by sinners who wished to announce their repentance.
Here and there a beautiful cross became celebrated. For example,
the Belle Croix on the old bridge at Orléans was a nobly modelled
crucifix of bronze that stood up high from the buttress of the middle
pier; its pedestal was ornamented with low-reliefs representing the
Holy Virgin, St. Peter, St. Paul, St. James, St. Stephen, and the
bishops St. Aignan and St. Euverte. As we have seen (p. 230), the
centre of a mediæval bridge was marked invariably by a cross. To-
day, on the Continent, this old religious custom gives grace to a few
bridges, and I value a large photograph of Trier Bridge over the
Moselle, where the Virgin is enniched above the middle buttress, and
where a crucifix, flanked by two columns, rises above the parapet.
Yet we must not rush to the conclusion that this old sacred
custom had its original source in the Christian religion. At first it may
have belonged to a faith in evil spirits, whose power for mischief
may have seemed to be increased by every roadway that enabled
them to pass over running water. I have by my side the photograph
of a steep bridge in Western China, at Shih-Chuan, and here below
the middle of the parapet is a small image of stone representing a
tutelary god! To me it is a curious little bit of rude sculpture, all head
and stomach and truncated thighs. Its position on the bridge
corresponds with that of the cross on mediæval parapets—a fact of
great interest.[103] Brangwyn depicts, in a very brilliant pen-drawing,
a Chinese bridge larger and finer than the one at Shih-Chuan, but
there is no image, so I set great store by the evidence of idolatry in
the smaller bridge.
staircase bridge in china
Again, the province of Sichuan (pronounced Sit-you-on), in

Western China, preserves another ancient custom. When a flood
threatens to overwhelm a bridge, and particularly a bamboo
suspension bridge, which is a common thing in the mountains, “the
local official and the people throw a living pig into the river, to stay
the rising water: the pig disappears, and the flood goes on.”[104]
This dire superstition is far more primitive than the idol fastened
below the parapet of a Chinese bridge; and so, perhaps, we find in
these things a parent emotion and its improved offspring. Perhaps:
for Superstition rests on dark foundations; we know not precisely
where it fades into a belief that is genuinely kinder.
III
We pass on to some important topics that worry a writer because
they cannot be arranged in a neat scheme. Some of them are
technical, but everybody will be able to understand their bearing on
the main subject. We have seen that fords gave place to bridges
very slowly, even in some neighbourhoods where the Church was
exceedingly active, as at Rochester.[105] Can you explain why? There
were a good many reasons, and among them is the fact that it was a
long time before bridges won a good reputation among the people.
Wood being abundant everywhere, they were timber bridges at first,
and rudely built; many of them were carried away by storms, as
Matthew Paris related in the thirteenth century. So people set their
hearts on the greater safety of stone bridges; but money was
difficult to collect, and stonework cost a great deal more than
timber; and no bridge could be built until permission had been
gained from the King, often after tedious negotiations. Further, the
lands through which rivers flowed were owned at times by rival
noblemen, who put a veto on the project, either in a spirit of
perverse antagonism or because a stone bridge might benefit one
landlord more than another. And it was easy for the stronger man to
explain his antagonism in a reasonable manner, for he could say that
the cofferdams used in grounding piers diverted rivers from their
channels, causing inundations. This objection seems to have been
raised pretty often, as many piers were grounded in a very primitive
fashion, just by throwing down stones and cement till a bed of
masonry rose above water-level.
In the Ballad of Abingdon Bridge, written by Richard Fannande
Iremonger in the thirty-sixth year of Henry VI (1458), we find most
of the difficulties that attended mediæval bridge-building. Till the
fourth year of Henry V (1417) the townsfolk of Abingdon and
Culham had nothing but a ford, which could not be passed after a
storm of rain or after a thaw. Yet Abingdon lived under the shadow
of a great monastery, and roads were constructed from her streets
to the ancient or Roman highways. Not even a timber bridge
preceded the charming stone one that charity built in 1417, the very
year in which Henry V sailed from England with 16,000 men and
ravaged Normandy. But in the Middle Ages most people regarded
bridges as we in our ignorance regard hospitals, as useful and
necessary things to be supported by charitable doles, and not by
district rates. To beg is a degradation, no matter what the cause
may be, and many a small town could have built for itself a bridge
but for the ruling custom that taught it to be a mendicant. Culham
and Abingdon waited a very long time before almsgiving got rid of
their dangerous ford. The Abbot gave his aid, and Geoffrey Barber
paid a thousand marks to the workmen, and Sir Peris Besillis, Knight,
provided the stone, and “the gode lorde of Abendon left of his londe,
for the breed [breadth] of the bridge, twenty-four fote large”:—
It was a greet socour of erthe and of sonde,
And yet he abated the rent of the barge.
An C. Pownde, and xvˡⁱ was truly payed
By the hondes of John Huchyns and Banbery also,
For the waye and the barge, thus it must be sayed.
But I am happy to add that “the Commons of Abendon” had to do
something for themselves. It was “set all in one assent that all the
brekynges of the brige the town bere schulde.” In other words,
charity had produced a free town bridge, leaving the inhabitants to
pay for its upkeep.
During the building of this pretty structure an unsuccessful
attempt was made to ground the piers while eleven men baled water
from the river. Then a dam was built, and trenches were dug to
prevent the water from overflowing the dam. This I gather from the
ballad, but the wording is not at all graphic in any technical matter.
[106] We are not told why cofferdams[107] were not tried. In the
Middle Ages cofferdams were known as brandryths or brandereths;
by this name they are mentioned in the Contract Deed for the
building of Catterick Bridge over the Swale, a.d. 1421; and they were
large enough to obstruct most rivers, for they had to surround
enormous piers, and the thickness of their sides was never less than
from four to six feet. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that
during the construction of Old London Bridge, between 1176 and
1209, the Thames “was turned another way about by a trench,”
which, according to Stow, began east near “Rotherhithe, as is
supposed, and ended in the west about Patricksey, now termed
Battersea.” In those days no embankments controlled the Thames at
London; wide shores, littered with the odds and ends of a waterside
life, were playgrounds for the ebb and flow of the tidal waters; and
the main purpose of the “trench” or canal was to lessen the risk of
floods while the huge piers were being founded. Stow’s words give
us to understand that all the water in the Thames “was turned
another way about”; a very important feat of civil engineering.
Perhaps the purpose of the canal was not so thorough; perhaps it
drew from the river sufficient water to lower its normal level by
several feet and to diminish the force of the tidal current. In any
case, however, Stow’s evidence has great interest.
One of Brangwyn’s animated drawings, the Pont des Consuls at
Montauban, comes in here to illustrate the many troubles of
mediæval bridge-building. In 1144, when Montauban passed from
an unknown village into a known town, its patron or founder,
Alphonse Jourdain, Count of Toulouse, commanded that a bridge
should be made at once, and that the little township should keep it
in repair; but, somehow, for many generations, nothing was done.
Sometimes poverty was pleaded as an excuse, and sometimes the
Albigeois wars were blamed; but at last, in 1264, the good men of
Montauban ventured on a little action. Indeed, they stretched
themselves yawningly, and said that a bridge over the Tarn would be
a boon indeed. Their ferry was a slow nuisance, we may presume,
and their trade ought to be increased by better communications. For
twenty-seven years they repeated these truisms; then, in 1291, they
bought the island of Castillons or of Pissotte to serve as a foundation
for several piers. Tired by this unwonted exertion, Montauban
wished to take a long holiday, but Philip the Fair came forward and
asserted himself as a king. A bridge over the Tarn must be built! It
should have three fortified towers, one at each end, the other in the
middle; and these towers were to be garrisoned by royal troops, so
that no harm should happen to the king’s authority. In order to
collect money for the bridge-building a tax was to be levied on all
visitors to Montauban, and two consuls were to overseer the work.
His Majesty chose Mathieu de Verdun, a citizen, and Étienne de
Ferrières, who was keeper of the town. They seemed to be honest
men, but funds collected for the bridge were used for other
purposes, and I know not if this action was justified. It was in 1304
that Philip the Fair gave his instructions, and the bridge was not
finished till 1335. Still, the dilatory township had achieved a very fine
work of art, noble in design and very well constructed.
It is a brick bridge, 250 m.[108] 50 cm. in length. The bricks are
excellent in quality, and measure 50 centimetres in thickness, 40
centimetres in length, and 28 centimetres in width. The roadway is
nearly flat, and its height above the level of the Tarn is 18 metres.
There are seven pointed arches with an average span of 22 metres;
and the six piers armed with cutwaters at both sides are 8 m. 55 cm.
in thickness. Note how the spandrils are pierced with high arched
bays to facilitate the passage of water during floods. These relief
arches were copied from Roman models. As for the defensive towers
they exist no longer, but the strongest one kept watch and ward
over the entrance across the river; it was square in shape, and its
summit was a crenellated platform fringed with machicolations. The
other end tower—the one on the town side—was also square in
form, while the central defence was triangular. It stood on the
middle buttress on the side looking downstream, and the lower part
of it was used as a chapel dedicated to St. Catherine. A flight of
winding steps went down to a postern, cut through the buttress a
little above water-level; and at the other side of the pier, just below
the arched bay, was an instrument of torture, a see-saw that carried
an iron cage in which blasphemers were ducked in the river.
The Pont des Consuls has one quality that Englishmen ought to
study with the greatest care; it is in scale with a great river. To build
a vast bridge for a little township was in part a just tribute to the
beauty of a noble site, and in part a prophetic compliment paid to
the future history of Montauban. How differently we have acted in
our London bridges! We have disgraced the Thames with the
Railway Viaduct from Charing Cross, for instance, and neither
Waterloo nor London Bridge does justice to the size of our Nation-
City. There are three or four good bridges on the Thames, notably
those at Maidenhead and Richmond, but they are nothing more than
delicate works of refined engineering. Not one is inspired by awe,
the only feeling that can bring home to our minds the wondrous
grey antiquity of the Thames and the immensity of London. So we
have feared to be great in the historic symbolism of bridge-building,
unlike the citizens of Montauban, who were lifted far above their
indolence by a brave inspiration as ample as was the Tarn after a
flood.
le pont des consuls over the tarn at montauban in france, fourteenth
century
In 1823-4, when George Rennie designed New London Bridge,

London was probably two hundred times as big as was Montauban
in the fourteenth century; and certainly the Thames was not inferior
to the Tarn as a historic inspiration. Yet Rennie failed to understand
the importance of being large in scale. In less than fifty years his
work was “insufficiently wide for the traffic”;[109] and since then, on
a good many occasions, we have been asked to disfigure London
Bridge with overhanging footpaths. “London can well afford to pay
for new bridges, but can by no means afford to part with a single
object of real beauty.”[109] For Rennie’s bridge, despite all errors of
scale, has points of charming interest. Her roadway has a graceful
curvature that delights the eye, her arches have an excellent shape,
and the variation in their size could not well be bettered.[110] Later
we shall see (p. 325) that much money was ill-spent on hammer-
dressing the whole external face of the masonry; but an engineer
with a very weak feeling for scale was afraid to use either scabbled
stone or stone with a rough-axed facing. Rennie learnt all that he
could learn by studying fine models of style, such as the Roman
bridge at Rimini, but his own equipment as an artist was terrene.
Would that we had in England an old bridge equal to the Pont des
Consuls! Would that old London Bridge had been delivered down to
our sixpences and shillings! Yet I suppose we must consider
ourselves lucky in the fact that historic bridges in Great Britain,
though much inferior to those on the Continent, are fairly numerous
in districts where there has been but little increase of traffic. We
possess three bridges with defensive gateways (Stirling, Warkworth,
and the Monnow Bridge at Monmouth); five with chapels, or with
relics of chapels (St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, Derby, Bradford-on-
Avon in Wiltshire, Wakefield, Rotherham); and many good
specimens exist of bridges with angular recesses built out from
parapets and forming part of the piers.[111] These recesses were
designed not only as shelter places for wayfarers, but because they
lessened the cost of production, inasmuch as they gave width to
narrow footways; and so their value in an old bridge is very similar
to that of bay-windows in cottage rooms.
Very often the modern engineer has misunderstood their origin,
and, regarding them as decorations, he has used safety recesses to
ornament his wide bridges, just as he has put battlements on iron
parapets and stuck machicolations on defenceless gateways.
Brangwyn has drawn for us three or four big Gothic bridges with
safety recesses. Among them is a fine structure over the Main at
Würzburg, in Bavaria; there are eight arches, and the length is 650
ft. This bridge dates from the year 1474, but his adornment with
statues of saints belongs to later times. Indeed, the architecture and
decoration take us from the end of the Middle Ages to the year
1607, when the spirit of the Renaissance was active and generative.
the bridge over the main at würzburg in bavaria (1474-1607)
Here is an old defensive bridge that does not resemble a common

man-at-arms: in him there is a fine courtesy, as of a knight long
used to the etiquette of tournaments; but yet the technical
inspiration is rather inferior to that in his great rival, the Moselle
Bridge at Coblentz, built in 1344, by the Elector Baudouin, and
charmed with a mellow grace that imparts a rare distinction to the
vigour of fourteen bold arches. The Moselle Bridge is 1100 ft. long,
or ninety-five longer than London Bridge. There is but one fault, and
this one fault belongs to the Middle Ages: the ten piers obstruct the
river too much, and two or three of them might have been omitted
without harm to any strategic consideration.
In the Middle Ages almost everything was looked at from the
standpoints of attack and defence. Bridges as well as soldiers
needed armour, so their gateways and towers were built in a military
fashion, and at times curious traps were devised along the footways.
For example, consult the “Pacata Hibernia,” and you will find an
engraving of Askeaton Bridge, [112] with a sort of hangman’s
trapdoor at each end of the footway. In 1586, or thereabouts,
Askeaton Bridge had another peculiarity: a castle stood close to it on
an island in the river; and between the castle and the bridge was a
fortified platform with two gateways.
It happened often, in mediæval times, that one arch was a
drawbridge. Take Old London Bridge as an example. One of her
twenty arches—the thirteenth from the City end—was a toll-gate for
merchant shipping, and a drawbridge to gap off enemies from the
town. It served this latter purpose in 1553, when Sir Thomas Wyatt
and his insurgents tried to enter London. Everybody knew which was
the movable arch, because it was connected in all popular talk with
the tower that rose beside it, a terrible and gruesome tower, for on
its summit executioners displayed the heads of decapitated persons,
who ranged from common bandits to the great Sir Thomas More.
Some defensive bridges in Old England had an important look as
late as the reign of George III. This applies to the Welsh Bridge at
Shrewsbury, which had a noble tower at the entrance that looked
towards Wales. Perhaps it belonged to the reign of Edward I, as a
statue of Llewellyn was placed over one of the arches. At the
present time our fortified bridges are minor specimens. The “auld
brig” over the Forth at Stirling, once “the key of the Highlands,” is
the most interesting architecturally. He still retains a defensive
gateway at each end, and his four arches, now closed to traffic, have
a bold and pleasant rhythm. They date from the last years of the
fourteenth century. From this century also Warkworth Bridge comes
to us; it is a smaller structure, with a triangular recess at each side,
projecting from the parapet into the central pier. The gate-tower is
at some little distance from the abutment; it has a low and narrow
archway under which carters swear unhopefully, believing that their
wagons will stick fast. A person who was present on the occasion
told M. J. J. Jusserand that a gipsy’s caravan, not long ago, was
stopped at the tower on Warkworth Bridge, and waited there while
the pavement was being hollowed out to make the passage deep
enough for a safe journey.
The pier midstream is triangular, and almost as sharp as an
arrow-head. This shape is very common in mediæval cutwaters, but
it belongs to a technical routine which cannot be regarded as
practical. Floods cannot eddy around the flat surfaces of a triangle;
they are cut into waves that soon break with an increasing force
against the piers and spandrils. On the other hand, when a cutwater
is shaped like a Gothic drop arch, or like a tierce-point arch, it meets
the current with a much bolder wedge of stone, whose curved sides
are better playgrounds for water in spate. Cutwaters of this
improved sort are uncommon in mediæval bridges, but some are to
be found in French work of the Limousin.
Viollet-le-Duc was the first critic who called attention to this
technical matter, and no pontist should fail to note how cutwaters
are designed. For example, in a bird’s-eye view of the bridge at
Avignon the buttressed piers jut out on each side beyond the narrow
footway, looking like boats that support a long line of planks; and I
have no doubt that Saint Bénézet had in mind this figure of boats
when he planned his roadway over “the arrowy Rhône.” It is far from
my wish to compare the little Warkworth Bridge with this French
masterpiece, but let us note in its cutwaters a similar character.
Again, when you remember that Warkworth Bridge belongs to the
fourteenth century, do you not expect to find in it the pointed vault,
whose lighter grace is among the most beautiful things both in
Eastern and in mediæval architecture? Yet the two ribbed arches are
segments of circles. For many a generation Northern England has
been famed for three things—a long-headed thrift, a discontent that
is said to be a Radical in politics, and a stubborn hatred for any new
knowledge that attacks the dull mimicry of customs. It is to

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Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Schizophrenic Psychoses

Metalloids in Plants Advances and Future Prospects 1st

Legitimacy and the Use of Armed Force Stability

Dalits Past present and future 1st Edition Anand

The Future Without A Past The Humanities In A

Reading Hosea in Achaemenid Yehud James M. Trotter

Climate Present Past and Future Volume 2 Climatic

Plant Derived Antimycotics Current Trends and Future

Armed Force in the

Franz Steiner Verlag

Franz Steiner Verlag

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek:

Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt.

Cuneiform tablets are published in three stages: a sketch or transcription, a trans-

Table 1 Abbreviations (Language Names)

Table 2 Notation from Historical Linguistics

+ reconstructed form [] phonetic form

Table 3 Special Characters Used for Transcribing Ancient Languages

H with breve German ich

Transcription Name Approximate Pronunciation IPA

Conventions for Transcribing Cuneiform

My transcriptions of cuneiform follow the conventions of the Oracc Akkadian Stylesheet

Phonetics and transcription of Aramaic: Takamitsu Muraoka and Bezalel Porten, A

Chapter 1: A History of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Chapter 2: The Ancestors of Achaemenid Armies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

2.6 Types of Troops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Chapter 3: Kings at War: The Perspective of the Royal Inscriptions . . . . . . . . . . 115

3.3.3 The Cause of War at Behistun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

3.3.11 Space, Time, and Empire at Behistun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

Chapter 4: Commoners at War: the Perspective of Letters and Documents . . 155

Chapter 5: Material Remains: The Perspective of Archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

5.3.5 Egypt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

Chapter 6: Greek Literature, and the Army in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

6.5.6 Persian Armies in the Alexander Historians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312

Chapter 7: Conclusion and Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349

1.2 Early Classical Scholarship: Delbrück, Meyer, and the Specialists

5 Delbrück 1920: I, 179

7 Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4.1.I, p. 70

methodologies for reconstructing ancient battles (first delivered as a lecture in 1920

1.3 Broad Works 1962–1983: Hignett, Burn, Green, Rahe

17 Hignett 1963: v, vi, 25

sources from those areas.

1.4 Alternatives to the Classical Tradition

In parallel to this classical tradition, at least three families of postwar scholarship

Widengren’s understanding of “Iran” was obviously a wide one. A review of one of

texts from Babylonia.35 This contained a reasonable number of reconstructed military

36 Lewis 1977: 4–5; he returns to this theme later in the book

sections were written by scholars with a classical orientation such as J. M. Cook, A. R.

1.5 The Achaemenid History Workshops and the Encyclopaedia Iranica

Several participants in the Achaemenid history workshops contributed papers on

41 Eg. Tuplin 1987: 201–203

1.6 Western and Eastern Ways of War

46 How 1923: 118, Rahe 1980: 88

54 Parker, G. 1995: viii

1.7 Hellenistic Warfare as Cultural Synthesis

1.8 The First Monographs: Bittner, Head, and Sekunda