Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire

Abstract

My apologies to those I have forgotten.This dissertation was written a twelve-hour flight away from my private library. Any scholar who has travelled will know 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. This research was supported from 2014 to 2018 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada. A number of small grants refunded some of the costs of attending conferences.iii Bibliographic Abbreviations and EditionsThis 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 encyclopaedias and dictionaries (the Encyclopaedia Iranica, EncIr., the Cambridge History of Iran, CHI, and Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, CAD) are abbreviated using the style of the Reallexicon der Assyriologie (RlA).Classical literary sources are cited through convenient editions and translations, often the Loeb Classical Library. My first encounters with Herodotus were through Waterfield 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 criticus 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 Maccedonian infantry called σθέταιροι had been removed from the text of ἀ Arrian by overzealous editors (Bosworth 1973, for later research see Anson 2010), but this dissertation is a work of ancient history more than philology. Conventions for Transcribing CuneiformMy 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, vii