Tuplin 2010 All the King’s Horse. in Search of Achaemenid Persian Cavalry

7/24/2019 Tuplin 2010 All the Kings Horse. in Search of Achaemenid Persian Cavalry

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New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare


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History of Warfare

Editors

Kelly DeVriesLoyola College in Maryland

John FranceUniversity of Wales Swansea

Michael S. NeibergUniversity of Southern Mississippi

Frederick SchneidHigh Point University

VOLUME 59


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New Perspectives on

Ancient Warfare

Edited by

Garrett G. Fagan

Matthew rundle

LEIDEN BOSON2010


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Cover illustration: Detail of an Assyian relief depicting the siege of Lachish by KingSennacherib in 701 BCE. British Museum. Photo: G. Fagan, with permission.

Tis book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

New perspectives on ancient warfare / edited by Garrett G. Fagan, Matthew rundle. p. cm. -- (History of warfare, ISSN 1385-7827) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18598-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Military art and science--History--o 500. 2. Military history, Ancient. I. Fagan, Garrett G., 1963- II. rundle,Matthew, 1965- III. itle. IV. Series.

U29.N48 2010 355.0209'01--dc22

2010015188

ISSN 13857827ISBN 978 90 04 18598 2

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Te Netherlands. Koninklijke BrillNV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, MartinusNijhoff Publishers and VSP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, storedin a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani-cal, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from thepublisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by KoninklijkeBrill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to Te Copyright ClearanceCenter, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.Fees are subject to change.


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CONENS

Acknowledgements .....................................................................................viiAbbreviations ................................................................................................ixList of Illustrations .......................................................................................xi

Introduction ................................................................................................... 1

1. Weapons, echnological Determinism, and Ancient Warfare ....... 21Fernando Echeverra Rey

2. Chariotry to Cavalry: Developments in the EarlyFirst Millennium ..................................................................................57Robin Archer

3. I Fell upon Him like a Furious Arrow: owarda Reconstruction of the Assyrian actical System ...........................81

Garrett G. Fagan

4. All the Kings Horse: In Search of AchaemenidPersian Cavalry...................................................................................101Christopher Tuplin

5. A Cup by Douris and the Battle of Marathon ................................183Peter Krentz

6. Tose Who Sail Are to Receive a Wage: Naval Warfareand Finance in Archaic Eretria ........................................................205Hans van Wees

7. Coinage and the ransformation of Greek Warfare ......................227Matthew Trundle

8. Te Carthaginian Navy: Questions and Assumptions ..................253Louis Rawlings

9. Phalanges In Rome? ...........................................................................289Nathan Rosenstein


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vi

10. Caesar and the Helvetians .................................................................305David Potter

Bibliography ...............................................................................................331

Index ...........................................................................................................359


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ABBREVIAIONS

Abbreviations for ancient authors and works follow those of the OCD3;those for journals follow the AJA stylesheet or, where that is failing,LAnne Philologique. Otherwise, the following abbreviations are used.

CHGRW Te Cambridge History o Greek and Roman Warare, 2 vols.Ed. P. Sabin, H. van Wees and M. Whitby. Cambridge:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007.CHW Te Cambridge History o Warare, ed. G. Parker. Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005.

JMH Journal o Military HistorySPW Te Second Punic War: A Reappraisal, eds. . J. Cornell, B.

Rankov and P. Sabin. London: Univ. of London, 1996.

Sigla for Achaemenid royal inscriptions (DB, DNa, DNb, DPd, DSp) fol-low the convention established by R.G.Kent, Old Persian (second ed.,

New Haven 1953). Other abbreviations used include the following:

AD G. R. Driver,Aramaic Documents(Oxford 1957).AHw W. von Soden, Akkadisches Handwrterbuch (Wiesbaden

19651981).ARV2 J. D. Beazley,Attic Red-Figure Vase Painters(Oxford 1963).BMC British Museum Catalogue of Coins.BE Te Babylonian Expedition of the University of

Pennsylvania

BE 9 = H. V. Hiprecht & A. . Clay, Business Documents othe Murashu Sons o Nippur dated in the reign o ArtaxerxesI(Philadelphia 1898).BE 10 = A. . Clay, Business Documents o the MurashuSons o Nippur dated in the reign o Darius II(Philadelphia1904).

CAD Chicago Assyrian DictionaryCANE J. M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations o the Ancient Near East

(New York, 1995).CDA J. Black et al., Concise Dictionary o Akkadian (Wiesbaden

2000).


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C Cuneiform exts in the British Museum.Dar. exts in J. Strassmaier, Inschrifen von Darius, Knig von

Babylon (521485)(Leipzig, 1897).(ranscriptions and summaries of these texts are availableat www.achemenet.com)

DS Siglum for Dascylium sealings: Kaptan 2002.Fort. Prex for numbers of transcribed but unpublished tablets

from the Persepolis Fortication archive currently inehran.

LBA A.Sachs and H.Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Relatedexts rom BabyloniaI Diaries rom 652 to 262 (Vienna1988)

NN Prex for numbers of transcribed but unpublished tabletsfrom the Persepolis Fortication archive currently inChicago.

PBS Publications of the Babylonian Section (University Museum,Pennsylvania).PBS 2/1 = A. . Clay, Business Documents o the MurashuSons o Nippur dated in the reign o Darius II(Philadelphia,

1912).PF Siglum for Persepolis Fortication texts in Hallock 1969.PFa Siglum for Persepolis Fortication texts in Hallock 1978.PFA Siglum for Aramaic texts from the Persepolis Fortication

archive.PS Siglum for Persepolis reasury seals: Schmidt 1957.SNG Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum.ADE B. Porten and A. Yardeni, extbook o Aramaic Documents

rom EgyptIIV (Jerusalem, 19861999).

L ituli Lyciae: E. Kalinka, ituli Asiae Minoris I (Vienna1901). Te texts are reproduced in J. Friedrich, Kleinasia-tische Sprachdenkmler(Berlin 1932): 5289.

VS Vorderasiatische Sprachdenkmler der kniglichen Museenzu Berlin. (German translations are available in M.SanNicol and A.Ungnad, Neubabylonische Rechts- undVerwaltungsurkunden[Leipzig 1935]).


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ALL HE KINGS HORSE: IN SEARCH OF ACHAEMENIDPERSIAN CAVALRY

Christopher uplin

Introduction

Te last three decades have seen an astonishing transormation in

academic study o the Achaemenid Persian Empireindeed they maybe said to have seen the invention o Achaemenid Studies as a distincthistorical discipline. One o the effects that this has not yet had is theproduction o a denitive study o what might be called the empiresmilitary establishment. Tis is perhaps odd, considering that the empirewas born and died in relatively concentrated periods o warare andthat a good deal o such narrative o its history in between as is availa-ble to us is occupied by military activity or by the preparation or conse-quences thereo.

One reason is, no doubt, that an important driver o the agenda onascent Achaemenid Studies was the desire to see beyond that narra-tive. Tis was primarily a matter o trying to nd ways to combat, evadeor eliminate the perceived Helleno-centrism o almost all the writtensources that purport to tell us stories about Achaemenid history, but oneby-product was a relative lack o concern with military, as opposed tobureaucratic or administrative structuresthe sort o things, that is, towhich detailed, i localised, access could be had through documentswritten in languages other than Greek. Insoar as the mood o the time

was a desire to establish that the alpha and omega o Persian history didnot simply consist in the reading o Herodotus and that there was moreto the Achaemenid Empire than the heroic deeat o Xerxes assaultupon Balkan Greece, it is not surprising that the military establishmentlost out.

At least two other actors assisted. One was that the ideological sel-representation o the Great King in texts and iconography was seen to be(by, or example, Assyrian standards) conspicuously unconcerned withthe celebration o war. Few were deceived into taking this entirely at ace

value, but it did mean that while the intricacies o royal inscriptions orthe pictorial programme o Persepolis were being worked out, there was


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3 Duncan Head, Te Achaemenid Persian Army(Stockport: 1992), 62.4 I have not made a systematic collection o non-iconographic and un-inscribed

archaeological evidence. I note in passing that in W. J. Bennet et al., ell el-Hesi: thePersian Period (Stratum V), (Winona Lake: 1989), 322, the excavators o ell el-Hesiiner rom a possible horse-bit, horse bone and ax seed that horses may have beenpresent on the acropolis o this putative military centre in southern Palestine. (Flax is areex either o odder or oil or grooming.) Tis seems very slight evidence. wo Irano-Scythian horse bits rom a Gezer tomb (E. Stern, Te Material Culture o the Land o theBible in the Persian Period [Warminster, 1982], 157) and Schmidts claim that somerather larger-than-usual armor scales ound at Persepolis were rom horse-armor aremarginally better. In P. Calmeyer, Zur Genese altiranischer Motive IX. Die Verbreitungdes westiranischen Zaumzeugs im Achaimenidenreich,AMI18 (1985): 136, Calmeyerpostulated Iranian cavalry in Babylon and Sardis on the basis o nds o characteristi-cally West-Iranian Riemenverteiler. P. R. S. Moorey, Cemeteries o the First Millennium

at Deve Hyk, BAR International Series 87 (Oxord: 1980), 7072, lists horse-bitso Persepolitan aspect rom sites in Georgia, Mesopotamia, Syria-Palestine and Egypt.M. M. Voigt and . C. Young, From Phrygian Capital to Achaemenid Entrepot: Middleand Late Phrygian Gordion, Iranica Antiqua34 (1999): 236 detect Persian inuence onhorse-gear at Gordium. Remains o chariots rom Lydia, Phrygia and HellespontinePhrygia tend to be o local Anatolian character, though an item rom Sardis-Bintepeler89, which has wheels that recall the Apadana chariot and some rom Dascylium andlynch-pins decorated with Persian gures, may come rom the burial o an Iraniannoble: C. H. Greenewalt, Sardis in the Age o Xenophon, in Dans les pas des Dix-Mille,ed. P. Briant (oulouse: 1995): 134 n. 21; H. Kkten-Ersoy, wo Wheeled Vehiclesrom Lydia and Mysia, Istanbuler Mitteilungen 48 (1998); C. H. Greenewalt andM. L. Rautman, Te Sardis Campaigns o 1994 and 1995,AJArch. 102 (1998): 49798

n. 50; D. Kaptan, Te Daskyleion Bullae. Seal Images rom the Western AchaemenidEmpire (Leiden: 2002): 1.84 n. 339; S. Atelier, Pers l gmme geleginde cenaze-harmamaksalari, Olba5 (2002). I more has emerged about the scythed chariots romthe Granicus valley mentioned in Briant, Cyrus(n. 2), 1037, I have missed it.

o soldier but also (and perhaps much more) the prousion o line-drawing reproductions o primary iconographic sources. But the work

is not just a catalogue and the author offers (62) the historical proposi-tion that cavalry was actually more important to the Persians in thelater Achaemenid period than it had been in the conquest era: or thatlater period was when they most plainly tried specically to win battlesby the use o cavalry.3

I do not propose to try and resolve all the issues embedded in thesepropositionspropositions that I have to some extent ripped untimelyrom contexts that are more nuanced than my bald report may makeobvious. What I shall do is present some observations that are in one

way or another relevant to the status and use o cavalry in the Persianmilitary environment and thereore to its contribution to Achaemenidimperial history. Tese observations are at best prolegomena to a historyo Achaemenid cavalry. I shall look in turn at iconography, texts in non-classical languages and texts in Greek and Latin.4Part o my purpose


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5 E. F. Schmidt, Persepolis I (Chicago: 1953), pl. 2749. Horses are provided byArmenians, Cappadocians, Saka tigraxauda, Sagartians, Sogdians and Skudra, chariotsby Lydians (6) and Libyans (22)identications as in M. Roa, Te Subject Peoples onthe Base o the Statue o Darius, Cahiers de la Dlgation archologique ranaise enIran(1974).

6

Te Miho necklace is much the most striking item: P. Bernard, Un torque achm-nide avec une inscription grecque au Muse Miho, CRAI (2000). A bracelet in NewYork (MMA 65.169; J. Boardman, Persia and the West, (London: 2000), pl. 5.77) hassome not obviously military Persians walking beside their horses.

is to give a avour o the scope and character o some bodies o source-material that may be less amiliar to readers o this volume.

Iconography

In the public and monumental iconography at the heart o the empirethe mounted warrior has no currency whatsoever. On the Apadanastaircase we see the kings empty chariot and unridden horse, whilehorses appear with six o the gif-bearing groups, and chariots with twoo them.5But the over one thousand images o soldiers here and else-

where on the walls o Persepolis include no cavalrymen. Te king him-sel is seen enthroned at Persepolis or standing with bow in hand atBehistun and Naq-i Rustam, and he is elevated above ordinary personsby being larger in size or held alof by gures representing his subjects,not by being placed upon a horse. It is the inantrymans spear and thebow that symbolize Persian military power. Te same was true at Susaso ar as we can tell; and the rest o the heartland now has nothing tooffer at all. Te choice involved here is so amiliar that we are in dangero undervaluing its signicance. It might be air to say that artistic tra-

dition offered no peremptory stimulus in avor o the horseback mon-arch; at the same time, the signicance that the horse undoubtedlyhad in the minds o Persians was insufficient to prompt distinctiveinnovation.

Possibly relevant iconographic evidence rom elsewhere within theempire comes rom various carved or painted monuments, seals andbullae, coins, a ew pieces o jewellery6or toreutic, carpets (the designo the Pazyryk carpet includes a rieze o unarmed horsemen and arider approaching an enthroned gure), coroplasty and Greek ceramic

painting. Occasionally an item catches the attention because a horseappears in a somewhat unusual context: or example, the horse andgroom on the top lef side o a Memphite unerary stele whose main


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7 Te horses shorn mane recalls the obsequies or Masistius at Hdt.9.24. 8 L. Legrain, Te Culture o the Babylonians rom their Seals [PBS 14 and 14b]

(Philadelphia: 1925), no. 984. 9 D. Collon, First Impressions (London: 1987), no. 923. For other suckling horses

without additional gures, c. J. Boardman, Pyramidal Stamp Seals in the PersianEmpire, Iran 8 (1970): no. 73; L. Bregstein, Seal Use in Fifh-Century Nippur(Univ. o Pennsylvania: Ph.D. diss., 1993): nos. 35354, 35658. In Bregstein, Seal Use(this note): 355 and J. Spier,Ancient Gems and Finger Rings(Malibu: Getty Publications,

1992), 114, we have mare and oal, but no suckling. On Boardman, Pyramidal StampSeals (this note): nos. 13 (pl. 831), 56 a non-suckling horses stands beneath a wingeddisk.

10 Bregstein, Seal Use (n. 9): no. 209. For Bes, see K. Abdi, Bes in the AchaemenidEmpire, Ars Orientalis 29 (1999); idem, Notes on the Iranianization o Bes in theAchaemenid Empire,Ars Orientalis32 (2002).

11 Tey also appear on coins: L. Meshorer and S. Qedar, Samarian Coinage(Jerusalem:1999), 2429, 4243, 7576, 175, 178; BMC Palestine 17879, pl. 19.1320; CNGSwitzerland 2930 (Celenderis); J. Curtis and N. allis, Forgotten Empire (London:2005), no. 372 (Egypt).

12 Winged: PFS 10, 67, 99, 749, M. J. W. Leith, Wadi DaliyehI: Te Wadi Daliyeh SealImpressions (Oxord: 1997), no. 18, Bregstein, Seal Use (n. 9): nos. 40041. Quasi-

heraldic: Bregstein, Seal Use (n. 9): nos. 202, 312, 32526, 34349, 389, 420. Wingedhorses (and other horse-protomes) also appear occasionally as coin images:O. Casabonne, La Cilicie(Paris: 2004), pl. 2.19, Meshorer and Qedar, Samarian Coinage(n. 12): 125.

scene depicts the laid-out body o a Persian-dressed dignitary;7PS 26where a horse appears at the back o an audience scene and the impres-

sion on a Murau tablet showing an audience scene in which the seatedgure is approached by a horse, not a human dignitary;8PS 18, wheretwo horsemen support a winged-disk and ank a central gure holdingup the encircled gure who may be Ahuramazda; another bulla onwhich a horse suckles its young beneath a winged-disk and next to aneagle,9and yet another on which Bes (an Egyptian deity who achievedsome popularity in other parts o the Achaemenid Empire) leads ahorse by its reins.10

Do such scenes hint at the possibility o the horse having special

symbolic orcea possibility that might, in turn, be linked to theanimals military signicance? It is hard to be sure; and the incidenceo naturalistic riderless horses in the seal(ing) repertoire as a whole is,though not negligible (there are around fy such items readily recov-erable rom published sources) probably insufficient to establish thatthe animal was thought to have special overtones.11 Its appearance,principally on bullaerom Babylonia but also occasionally elsewhere, inthe shape o winged horses or in quasi-heraldic scenes (rampant or inwhirling ligatures with bulls and lions), may be a little more telling.12Even so, it might be telling us about religion rather than warare, to use


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13 Te image o lion attacking bull is ofen thought to have a transcendent signi-cance: does this extend to images o lion attacking horse? A similar question might be

asked about e.g. the occasional appearance o a horse-protome in place o other real ormythical animals on rhyta. It is worth stressing the relative rarity with which horsesappear on the 1400+ distinct seals used on the Persepolis Fortication texts publishedin R. . Hallock, Persepolis Fortication ablets, (Chicago: 1969). Tere is so ar onlycomprehensive publication o part o the corpus, in M. Garrison and M. C. Root, Sealson the Persepolis Fortication abletsI (Chicago: 2001), but Margaret Root has kindlyconrmed that the observation holds true o material still to appear. Seals only used onNN series documents and on uninscribed tabletsc. M. Garrison, Te Uninscribedablets rom the Fortication Archive: a Preliminary Analysis, in Les archives des orti-

cations de Perspolis dans le contexte de lempire achmnide et ses prdcesseurs, ed.P. Briant and W. Henkelman (Paris: 2008)have not been reviewed, but there is noreason to imagine they present a radically different picture. Te corpus o 77 seals used

on Persepolis reasury tablets includes only three non-chariot equine images (PS 18,26, 34).14 L. Mildenberg, ber das Mnzwesen im Reich der Achmeniden, AMI 26

(1993); idem, On the So-called Satrapal Coinage, in Mcanismes et innovationsmontaires dans lAnatolie achmnide, ed. O.Casabonne (Istanbul: 2000).

broad terms.13o get at the horse as weapon o war we really have toocus on images showing human use o the animalequestrian, not

just equine, imagesand determine which o them belong in a speci-cally military sphere. Tis is mostly straightorward, but there is oneparticular category that can immediately be set aside. Hunting isundoubtedly an activity with indirect military resonance and its ico-nography can resemble that or cavalry warare, but there is nothingmore to be said o it in the current context, save that whatever implica-tions the culture o horse-back huntingwell-known also rom non-iconographic sourcesmay have or the military employment omembers o the socio-political elite do not in themselves establish any-

thing about the tactical signicance o cavalry.What we would like to get rom the iconography is inormation

about the armament and tactical use o cavalrymen in warare, and per-haps some hint o their perceived importance. o do this we have toconcentrate on things that certainly or possibly display horsemen at oron their way to war. I comment on ve sets o material.

Coinage

Te military image on royal coinage (darics and sigloi) was the king asarcher or spearman. Mildenberg identied a new royal coinage, intro-duced in the ourth century, in some Rhodian-standard coins on whichan obverse daric / siglosking appears together with a reverse mountedPersian.14 I he was right, the relatively late date o the cavalrymans


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15 K. Konuk, Inuences et lments achmnides dans le monayage de la Carie,in Mcanismes et innovations montaires dans lAnatolie achmnide, ed. O.Casabonne(Istanbul: 2000): 177. Another suggestion is Memnon: see S. Hurter, Te CarianHoard: a Summary, in Studies in Greek Numismatics in Memory o Martin Jessop Price,ed. R. Ashton and S. Hurter (London: 1998).

16 P. Debord, LAsie mineure au IVe sicle(Bordeaux: 1999), pl. I.14; Cilicia (arsus)Cilicie II 913, 2027; C. M. Kraay, Archaic and Classical Greek Coinage, (London:

1974), 1032, 1035; Debord, LAsie mineure(this note): VII.13VIII.3; Samaria: Meshorerand Qedar, Samarian Coinage (n. 11): 15, 40, 41, 123, 178, 197; Palestine: H. Gitlerand O. al, Te Coinage o Philistia (New York: 2006): pl. 93 (XXV.1DD), pl. 94(XXV.2Da, 3O), pl. 65 (XV.30ac).

17 Meshorer and Qedar, Samarian Coinage(n. 11), no. 123.

intrusion onto the kings coins is interesting; but other numismatistscontinue to assign the items in question to a Carian mint producing

coinage or Evagoras II o Cyprus,15

so we must be cautious. In eitherevent the coins can only be paralleled by a small number o other issues,not always Persian, bearing a rider-image rom Lycia (coins withissaphernes name), Cilicia (arsus), southern Palestine and Samaria.16actically speaking, we see riders using both sword and spear. Tearsian riders have a gorytus, but are not shown using a bow or anyweapon. rue combat scenes with visible adversary almost never appear,though one Samarian design shows a Persian riding over the allen bodyo a Greek soldier with a shield.17In several cases the horseman is com-

bined with another military gure on the other side o the coin: vari-ously Persian archers or spearmen, but also a kneeling hoplite and ahead in Greek-style helmet. Such designs might be said to show theequipollent signicance o cavalry and inantry. But i one looks at thewhole data-set o coins with military images, then although it is not anespecially rich source, equestrian ones do not play an especially promi-nent role within it.

Persian riders

Another rather different category o Persian riderthe crude, parthand-made, part moulded, terracotta gures with a sort o Persianhead-dress and occasionally hints o weaponry ound in considera-ble numbers in Cyprus and the Levantpresents a delicate problemo interpretation. Te crucial thing is that these are the latest versiono a type o object with a long pre-Achaemenid history in the sameregions. A recent discussion by Roger Moorey argues that they exist

or the purpose o votive dedication and that, both beore and inthe Achaemenid era, the rider gures represent an idealized male


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18 P. R. S. Moorey, Iran and the West. Te Case o the erracotta Persian Riders in theAchaemenid Empire, in Variatio delectat. Iran und der Westen, ed. R. Dittmann et al.(Mnster: 2000).

19

In A. Ehrlich, Te Persian Period erracotta Figurines rom Maresha in Idumaea,ranseuphratene32 (2006), Ehrlich similarly discusses the exceptionally rich Mareshacache o Persian riders in terms o Idumaean identity and behaviour and its interac-tion with regional traditions.

20 Outside this area but within the Achaemenid era one could add the Athena Nikerieze o Greeks ghting Persians: E. B. Harrison, Te South Frieze o the Nike empleand the Marathon Painting in the Painted Stoa, AJArch. 76 (1972); or the Chertomlykscabbard with a similar subject: M. Prommer, Chronologie und Komposition des

Alexandermosaiks au antiquarischer Grundlage(Mainz: 1998): pl. 2526. Te originalbehind the Alexander Mosaic takes us outside the Achaemenid eraperhaps by a longway i Prommer is rightas does e.g. the Leadia tomb-painting: P. Petsas, Ho aphoston Leadion, (Athens: 1966), Prommer,Alexandermosaik(this note): pl. 28.

21

Tere are, however, somewhat more non-Persian-dress chariot images thanPersian-dress ones, although the only combat chariot image rom the atarli tombinvolves Persians: L. Summerer, Imaging a omb Chamber: the Iconographic Prog-ramme o the atarl Wall Paintings, inAncient Greece and Ancient Iran: Cross-Cultural

warrior.18 Moorey assumes the dedicator will characteristically be ahorseman, but not necessarily or even probably a Persian one.19 Te

signicance o anything distinctively Persian about the Persian asopposed to earlier riders is thus that the pre-eminent rider model isnow a Persian one. Tis is an indirect reection o the status o Persianhorsemen, but not one prompted de novoby Persian pre-eminence inthat eld. Te riders are riders because they have always been riders,not because a distinctively equestrian imperial power has appeared onthe scene. Since people in this region had historically been subject tothe attentions o the Assyrian army, there was o course no good reasonwhy the Persians should be seen as wholly novel in this regard.

Sculpture and Painting in the Western Empire

Even leaving hunting scenes out o account, the corpus o Achaemenid-era carved or painted monuments rom Anatolia, Cyprus and the Levantgives us a lot o pictures o horsemen.20 Manywhether engaged incombat or notdo not (or not certainly) display Persian characteristicso dress or armament and can largely be put to one side or the purposeso this discussion: they illustrate that Persians o course had no monop-oly on cavalry and the number o images involved is indeedgrosso modosimilar to that o Persian ones; but what the monuments can show abouttactical use scarcely allows us to discern interesting differences betweenPersian rom non-Persian in that regard.21


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Encounters, ed. S. M. R. Darbandi and A. Zournatzi (Athens: 2009), g. 6. Nor do othericonographic distinctions lack: or example, the scene on Istanbul 2301 in P. Demargne,Fouilles de XanthosI. Les piliers unraires(Paris: 1958): 34, pl. 4, in which a man holdsor pats the nose o a horse as it stands over the body o a dead adversary is ratherunusual.

22 J. Borchhardt, Die Bauskulptur des Heroons von Limyra: Das Grabmal KnigsPerikles(Berlin: 1976), 4980, gs. 1215, pl. 2026.

23 Te same thing may have appeared on the base o an equestrian statue o Perikle:

J. Borchhardt and P. Ruggendorer, Neuunde zur relierten Basis des Reiterstandbildesvon Zmuri, in Achaemenid Anatolia, ed. .Bakir (Istanbul: 2001). A Persian guremounts a chariot on the Satrap Sarcophagus, but not in a plainly military context:I. Kleeman, Der Satrapensarkophag aus Sidon(Berlin: 1958). Xanthos G (H. Metzger,Fouilles de XanthosII: Lacropole lycienne(Paris: 1963), 4961) gives us a non-Persianchariot-rider, again in a context o not obviously military nature. Te unridden horsesand their grooms recall gures on the essentially non-military Persepolis Apadana icon:Schmidt PersepolisI (n. 5), pl. 52. Te image o Payava mounting a chariot on the mainaces o his sarcophagus is not a Persian scene: P. Demargne, Fouilles de Xanthos V.ombes-maisons, tombes rupestres et sarcophages(Paris: 1974), 6178.

24 Te latter point tends to deect any inclination one might have to wonderwhether the Persian-dressed horsemen are actually Lycians equipped in the Persian

manner, i.e. a much more thorough Persication than Payavas use o paramridia: c.inra, n. 35.25 For Dascylium, M. Noll, Denkmler vom Satrapensitz Daskyleion(Berlin: 1992):

S1, S4, S5, F2, F4: gorytoi are visible on one item, a spear may have been held onanother; Sardis B269 (see text below); Silie Inv.134, Casabonne La Cilicie(n. 12), 147,g. 11b. Te riders on a Halicarnassus block in Vienna are moving in too sprightly aashion to be called a procession: Kleeman, Satrapensarkophag(n. 23), pl. 22e, J. Zahle,Hekatomnid Caria, a Province o Achaemenid Anatolia, in Hecatomnid Caria andthe Ionian Renaissance(Odense: 1994): g. 1. Tese cases should be distinguished rompresumed uneral-ekphorascenes, our at Dascylium and one each at Karaburun, atarland on the Weeping Women sarcophagus: c. Summerer, Imaging (n. 21): 275282.Only at atarl (in an unusually large version o the theme) do we certainly have

participants who are armed (soldiers with reversed spears; riders with gorytoi). Techariot-riders on the Karaburun and atarl ekphora riezes cannot be regarded asmilitary. Tere is no telling what the lost painted rieze in the Harta tomb once showed:I. zgen and J. ztrk, Heritage Recovered. Te Lydian reasure (Ankara: 1996), 38.

Among horsemen with elements o Persian dress or armament, someturn up in processions, but only perhaps in the case o Perikles hron

at Limyra can we be sure we are contemplating a consciously militaryscene.22 What we see is a departure-or-war, with the Lycian dynast,mounting a chariot,23in ront o a orce including Persian-clad horse-men and non-Persian inantry: that is striking evidence about the com-position o one particular local army, and it may seem to encapsulatethe special status o Persian cavalryexcept that we cannot be certainabout the political back-story nor assume that Perikle chose the com-ponents o his orce on purely military grounds, and there are also non-Persian horsemen present.24Te context o other procession images is

mostly opaque:25 perhaps the most interesting is a slab rom Sardis


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Te non-ekphorachariot-procession at atarlsee Summerer, Imaging (n. 21): 2009:

27071 and g. 3is specially tantalising as the chariots resemble the one in the combatscene elsewhere in the tomb. Also tantalising, in a different medium, is the isolatedimage o a horse with Nisaean prole on a sherd rom Masat Hyk, which could alsoonce have been part o a procession: Boardman, Persia(n. 6), g. 5.85.

26 Sardis B269: G. Hanmann, Sculpture rom Sardis(Cambridge, Mass: 1978): 156(no. 231), g. 401. See inra, nn. 50, 259. Outside our basic data-set, some gures on theAlexander Mosaic, including cavalrymen, seem to have a cuirass with neck guard:Prommer,Alexandermosaik(n. 20), 12223, g. 20.

27 Can: N. Sevin, A New Painted Greco-Persian Sarcophagus rom an, Studiaroica11 (2001). J. Ma, Mysians on the Can sorcophagus, Historia57 (2008), identi-es the opponent as Mysian, not Greek. Payava: Demargne, Xanthos V(n. 23), 6178.Karaburun: this has never been the subject o a proper publication. M. Mellink in

Mural Paintings in Lycian ombs, Proceedings o the Xth Congress o ClassicalArchaeology 1973II (Ankara: 1978) provides a summary account which can be supple-mented by the annual reports inAJArch. 19711975. Te iconic central horseman may,o course, have companions (inantry or horseback).

28 An exceptional image has a horseman deeated by an inantryman (los Izraza B:Zahle 1979: 325 no. 9); both seem to wear trousers, but are not notably Persian inappearance.

29 We see this on the Alexander sarcophagusV. von Graeve, Die Alexandersarkophagund seine Werkstatt. Istanbuler Forschungen 28. (Berlin: 1970), pl.25, 26, 31andNereid Monument Frieze 3W. A. P. Childs and P. Demargne, Fouilles de XanthosVIII.Le Monument des Nrides(Paris: 1989), pl. 12023, 46, 87where it occurs in engage-ments also involving inantrymen, and a Clazomenae sarcophagus with a purely eques-

trian clash o Persians and Tracians: R. M. Cook, Clazomenian Sarcophagi (Mainz:1982): G11. But it is absent on other Clazomenae sarcophagi, where there are horsemenonly on one side, and the atarl painting, where there are horsemen on both sides butthey ght only with bows: Summerer, Imaging (n. 21): g. 6.

showing three horsemen, one o whom might be wearing a version othe neck-guard cuirass seen in various other military images.26(It must

be said that there is little else plainly Persian about them.)We are lef, nally, with a little over a dozen monuments that offerpictures o equestrian combat. Some ocus on a single horseman charg-ing down his opponentsmost impressive are the Can and Payava sar-cophagi and the Karaburun resco, but there are lesser examples onstelae as well.27Others have similar scenes but with two or three horse-men acting in close concert. Others again depict battles in which horse-men are but one element in a multi-gure composition. In the rst twocategories the enemy is always on oot (or dead on the ground),28and

the horsemans weapon, when identiable, is spear or sword. In the morecomplex engagements duels between cavalrymen do occur, but cavalry-inantry clashes still predominate.29Horse-archers appear in large num-bers on the atarlpainting, but are absent elsewhere except inasmuchas the presumed Persian horsemen on Clazomenae sarcophagi, whoght with spears and rather prominent long swords, are sometimes


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30 Clazomenae: Cook, Sarcophagi (n. 29). But the gorytus is not peculiar tothese putative Persian gures: at least one hoplite has one in a departing-warrior sceneon G10. Persian inantry archers appear on the Alexander Sarcophagus. Tose on theNereid monument, by contrast, lack Persian eatures, even ones who carry a gorytus.

One o the cavalrymen on the Athena Nike rieze has a very clear gorytus, but is notusing a bow.31 Childs and Demargne,Xanthos VIII(n. 29), pl. 53 (BM 878). Persian hats without

other Persian garb can be ound in other media: the soldier on Athens 1295 seem prettymuch Hellenic except or his bashlyk-like headgear: K. Schauenburg, EURYMEDONEIMI,MDAI1975: pl. 37.1.

32 Childs and Demargne, Xanthos VIII(n. 29), 43181, pl. 939, IXXIX, LXXXILXXXIV (Frieze I); 187201, pl. 115129, XLIVLVI (Frieze III).

33 Architrave rieze: Childs and Demargne,Xanthos VIII(n. 29), pl.120.1, XLVII. Hehas trousers, but appears to be without headgear and is wearing a cuirass withpteryges.Persians are shown with such cuirasses (not least on Attic vases: see inra, n. 262), butthe upper part o this Nereid Monument gure looks rather out o line with his lower

part. Large podium rieze: Childs and Demargne, Xanthos VIII(n. 29), pl. 33.1, XVII.I am unsure about 853 and 857 which Childs and Demargne,Xanthos VIII(n. 29), 259also adjudge to have Persian gures.

34 Childs and Demargne,Xanthos VIII(n. 29), 262.

equipped with a gorytus.30 In none o the images o complex engage-ments (i.e. involving both cavalry and inantry) except atarlis the pro-

portion o horsemen high, and on the various battle-scenes o the NereidMonument it varies quite markedly: on the city-siege rieze (II) the onlyequine presence is a horse or mule led by a gure who wears Persianheadgear but apparently no trousers;31on the larger podium rieze (I)there are eleven horses (nine with riders or other directly associatedhuman gures) out o a total o more than fy gures; on the architravecella rieze (III) eight o the 25 ghters are on horseback.32 It should,moreover, be stressed that thisthe richest surviving collection ocombat scenes on a single sculpted monumentcontains very ew g-

ures who are at all certainly Persian: only two horsemen come into thiscategory, one on the architrave rieze and one in the larger podiumrieze.33Tis part o the architrave rieze is poorly executed and severalo the horsemen are entirely characterless; but that does not apply to thepodium rieze and the difficulty o xing how many o those gures whoare not (as most are) plainly in Hellenic dress might be called Persian isdisturbing. Childs and Demargne label this rieze a quasi-amazonoma-chy, meaning that real-world combat has not merely been renderedgeneric, but in some degree mythologized.34We are some way rom mil-itary reportage, and it may be prudent to say that the uneral monumento Arbinas, i that is what the Nereid Monument is, has much less to tellus about Persian cavalry than the hrono Perikle o Limyra. Another


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35 Xen.An. 1.8.7, Cyr. 6.4.1, 7.1.2. Yeniceky: Noll, Daskyleion(n. 25), F5; Manisa6226: G. Polat, Das Grabdenkmal des Autophradates, in Achaemenid Anatolia, ed.. Bakir (Istanbul: 2001). Seals: see below. Also seen in hunting images, c. n. 54.

36 Tey are perhaps visible on the photograph in . Macridy, Relies grco-perses dela rgion de Dascylion, Bulletin de Correspondence Hllnique37 (1913): g. 6. Nor amI sure about the shield o an equestrian hunter that some discern on a Limyran sceneillustrated in J. Borchhardt, Epichorische, grko-persisch beeinute Relies in

Kilikien, Istanbuler Mitteilungen18 (1968): pl. 55.2.37 Prosternidion (Xen. An. 1.8.7, Cyr.6.4.1, 7.1.2), shown here as a white eatureattached to the saddle: Sevin et al., Can (n. 27): 395. Tis does not recur on monu-ments reviewed here, but seems to have some currency among Levantine Persian ridersin E. Stern, Te Material Culture o the Land o the Bible in the Persian Period(Warminster:2001), 493 and Ehrlich, erracotta Figurines (n. 19): 47, and perhaps at Curium inJ. H. Young and S. H. Young, erracotta Figurines rom Curium, (Philadelphia: 1955),214but most o this may be purely decorative.

38 Karaburun: see n. 27. Limyra: Borchhardt, Bauskulptur(n. 22), g. 12 (no. 22, 26).39 For sea-warare we have two seals showing oared warships (both, remarkably, rom

the imperial heartland): PS 32, c. Curtis & allis, Forgotten Empire(n. 11), no. 440;P. Amiet, La glyptique de la n de llam,Arts Asiatiques28 (1973): pl. 16 (73). Tere

are also many coins rom Levantine sources showing war-galleys.40 Te data result rom a trawl or Achaemenid era seal(ing)s in a great varietyo sources, including the ollowing. Museum and collection catalogues. Tese aretoo numerous to list. HandbooksA. Furtwngler, Die antiken Gemmen (Berlin: 1900),

striking Lycian image is also only partially Persian: when Payava ridesdown his enemies, he does so using armored leg-guards (paramridia)

o a sort that textual evidence, together with the Karaburun paintingand other military iconographic sources,35encourage us to see as typi-cally Persian; but he himsel is denitely dressed in Lyco-Greek, notPersian, ashion. Among horsemen on Anatolo-Levantine monumentswho are unambiguously dressed la perse, we may note that none othem, except perhaps the men on the lost Yeniceky slab, seems to carrya shield,36but we can distinguish those on the Alexander sarcophagus,who simply wear bashlyks, tunics and trousers rom the warrior o theCan sarcophagus, with his elaborate cuirass and his mounts chest-

armor,37the Karaburun dynast, with hisparamridia, or at least one othe Limyra hronriders with his Iranian riding-cape.38Persian ridersare not a homogeneous category.

Seals and Bullae

Next, seals and bullae. I currently have a list o 108 seal-images that cer-tainly (62) or potentially (46) relate to land-warare,39 and involve atleast one Persian participantquite a large body o material, whichhas never been systematically analyzed.40Te seal(ing)s do, o course,


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W. H. Ward, Te Cylinder Seals o Western Asia (Washington: 1910), J. Boardman,

Greek Gems and Finger Rings. 2d ed. (London: 2007), P. Zazoff, Die antiken Gemmen(Munich: 1983). Specic archaeological sources Persepolis: E. F. Schmidt, Persepolis II(Chicago: 1957); A. adjvidi, Danestanihaye Novin darbareye Honar va Bastanshenasieasr-e Hakkamaneshi bar bonyad-e kavoshhaye panjsaleye akht-e Jamshid. (ehran:Ministry o Cultures and Arts, 1976); Garrison and Root, Seals(n. 13). Susa: P. Amiet,Glyptique susienne des origines lepoque des Perses Achmnides (Paris: 1972); idem,La glyptique (n. 39). Dascylium: Kaptan, Daskyleion Bullae (n. 4). Seyitmer:D. Kaptan, Clay ags rom Seyitmer Hyk in Phrygia, in Te World o AchaemenidPersia, ed. J. Curtis and St J. Simpson, (London: orthcoming). Memphis: W. F. Petrie,

Meydum and Memphis (London: 1910): pl. 3436 nos. 2139, 46. Te Oxus reasure:O. M. Dalton, Te reasure o the Oxus (London: 1964). Artaat: Z. Khachatrian, TeArchives o Sealings Found at Artashat (Artaxata), in Archives et sceaux du monde

hellnistique, ed. M. F. Boussac and A. Invernizzi (Athens-Paris: 1996). Documentaryarchives Te Aram archive: Boardman, Persia and the West (n. 6): g. 5.21.Te Murauarchive: Bregstein, Seal Use (n. 9); V. Donbaz and M. Stolper, Istanbul MurauDocuments (Istanbul: 1997). Other Babylonian material: J. McGinnis, Letter Orders

rom Sippar and the Administration o the Ebabbara in the Late Babylonian Period(Poznan: 1995); E. Ehrenberg, A Corpus o Early Fifh-Century Seal Impressions inthe Yale Babylonian Collection, Baghdader Mitteilungen 31 (2000). Tere are also pub-lications o individual items (e.g. H.P. Francort, Un cachet achmnide dAghanistan,

JA 263 (1975)) or particular sets or classes o material (e.g. Boardman, PyramidalStamp Seals (n. 9)). I grateully acknowledge help with various items rom MargaretRoot, Shahrokh Razmjou and an important unpublished University o Pennsylvaniadissertation on Eastern Iran by Wu Xin. Te main categories o land-warare material

are as ollows: (1) Combat images (50 items): here actual ghting is going on. I haveincluded two items where it is possible that we have gures co-operating in hunting notghting one another, viz. P. Merrillees, Catalogue o West Asian Seals in the British

Museum VI: Pre-Achaemenid and Achaemenid Periods (London: 2005): no. 38;E. Porada, Corpis o Near Eastern Seals in North American Collections I: Pierpont

Morgan Library (Washington: 1948): no. 830. For other arguable items c. n. 58. (2)Prisoner parade scenes (12): a Persian gure leads roped prisoners; he may sometimesalso spear or stab an adversary, but I do not count that as combat or present purposes.(3) Ambiguous military images (17): cases where an armed gure is engaged in aggres-sive activity but either by design or accident we do not see his adversary and cannotexclude the possibility that it was an animal. (4) Other military (28): cases in which wesee an armed gure at rest or not engaged in clearly aggressive action. Excluded rom

any o these categories are ewer than 20 images o horse-riders in which no weaponsare carried and no other parties are involved, animal or human. I have also excludedthree Babylonian sealings on which a riderless horse appears to trample upon a body,though I suppose they might be said to symbolize the power o cavalry.

come rom diverse sources and represent what art historians see as anumber o different styles. o treat the 108 items as a single data-set is a

rough-and-ready approach, especially as the various geographic ori-gins or seal(ing)s are not represented by equal numbers o survivingitems. Te act that the proportion o seals displaying military subjectsis, or example, smaller in material rom Babylonia than rom Dascylium,in one sense redresses the balance, but also shows that sub-sectionswithin the putative single data-set do have distinct characters. Still, the


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41 Tere are two inantry combats in which a riderless horse is also presentBoardman, Persia and the West(n. 6): g. 5.21; PS 30so one could choose to see thesplit as 27 equestrian against 23 non-equestrian.

42 Te horsemen on Boardman, Gems(n. 40): 72 (pl. 864) and G. Richter, Catalogueo Engraved Gems: Greek, Etruscan, Roman(Rome: 1956): no. 135 have swords, but theyremain sheathed while they wield spears.

43

Combat: Bregstein, Seal Use (n. 9): no. 194, Richter, Engraved Gems (n. 42):no. 135. Te presumed dismounted cavalryman on the Aram seal, Boardman, Persiaand the West(n. 6): g. 21, has a gorytus. Other: MMA 93.17.17, N. V. Sekunda, TePersian Army, 560330 (London: 1992): 25; L. Legrain, Seal Impressions(London:1951): 772 = 773; Bregstein, Seal Use (n. 9): 167. Te same occurs with equestrianhuntsmen: Bregstein, Seal Use (n. 9): no. 147, no. 156; A. U. Pope,A Survey o Persian

Art(Oxord: 1938/9), pl. 123R (dismounted horseman); G. A. Eisen,Ancient OrientalCylinder and Other Seals(Chicage: 1940), no. 104; H. Frankort, Cylinder Seals(London:1939), pl. XVIIi; Boardman, Gems(n. 40), no. 134; Louvre A788, L. J. Delaporte, Cata-logue des cylindres, cachets et pierres graves de style oriental au Louvre(Paris: 1920/23).

44 DS 71; R. L. Zettler, On the Chronological Range o Neo-Babylonian andAchaemenid Seals, JNES 38 (1979): 260; Francort, Un cachet achmnide, (n. 40):

g. 5; Boardman, Gems(n. 40), pl. 904. (Note also two camel-riding archers.) Te onlybow in use in a combat scene is in the hands o an enemy cavalryman (DS 91). Tere is,however, an image o horseback archery on the Miho pectoralBernard, Un torqueachmnide (n. 6).

corpus o seal(ing)s as a whole is homogeneous to the extent that itreects the requirements o the seal-using class, and the widespread

popularity o royal hero contest scenes and the like shows that this isnot a purely arbitrary homogeneity. So I think one is entitled to use thespecically military material as a source or representations o the worldo Achaemenid warare without having to draw ne artistic or regionaldistinctions. In that spirit I offer the ollowing observations:

(a) O the 108 images 40 are equestrian and 68 non-equestrian, mak-ing the latter more than hal as common again as the ormer. It is truethat, i one looks just at the 50 actual combat-scenes, the division is moreevenin act into two equal groups o 25.41Even so, one cannot claim

that there is any preponderance o equestrian military images or thatthis material reveals a perception that cavalry was the dominant arm othe Persian military machine.

(b) Tere is inormation to be derived about the appearance andequipment o Persian horsemen. Te horsemans weapon is almost with-out exception the spear.42Very occasionally one can see that he has agorytus,43 but none o the combat scenes and only a ew o the otheritems show a Persian cavalryman with a bow in his hand.44 Tere issomething o a contrast here with hunting scenes, where the equestrianarcher is a gure with some currency, although the equestrian spearman


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45 Te proportion between archer and spearman among hunters on oot is less heavilyskewed towards the latter. But spearmen are still in a decided majority. Equestrian hunt-ers with bows turn up in other media: Dalton, Oxus(n. 40), no. 24 (WA 12395); Aksakalin Noll, Daskyleion(n. 25), S3; Dereky (ibid., S4).

46

Boardman, Gems(n. 40), pl. 928.47 Boardman, Gems(n. 40), no. 72 (pl. 864).48 A similar phenomenon applies to the sculptural and painted monuments dis-

cussed above. Chariots are absent in explicit combat scenes except at atarl, where thesingle chariot is a platorm or archery, like the horses that accompany it. Tey arerarely associated with Persian gures in other contexts (twice at Limyra; once on theSatrap Sarcophagus: c. n. 23). But they appear well over a dozen times in non-Persiancontexts (both in battle on the rysa heroon and Clazomenae sarcophagi, and in vari-ous explicitly hunting scenes). extual evidence about Persian use o war-chariotsit-sel airly patchyis simply not matched by the iconographic record. (But I have notattempted a systematic treatment o chariots in this chapter.)

49 Francort, Un cachet achmnide (n. 40): g. 2; Boardman, Gems(n. 40), pl. 883;

Furtwngler, Gemmen(n. 40), pl. xi/9. Boardman, Gems(n. 40), g. 291 is another pos-sibility, not dissimilar to the rst three. DS 72 is a very arguable case.50 Boardman, Gems (n. 40), no. 119 (g. 291), no. 120 [= Furtwngler, Gemmen

(n. 40): pl. xi/9], no. 122 [= M. E. Maximova, Griechisch-persische Kleinkunst,Arch.Anz. (1928): g. 2]. Combined with what look like pteryges: Boardman, Gems(n. 40),no. 117 (pl. 881), no. 121 (pl. 882), no. 123 (pl. 883); Francort, Un cachet achmnide(n. 40): g. 2; and c. the Miho pectoral: Bernard, Un torque achmnide (n. 6).Pterygesalso appear on DS 86. A plain cuirass may appear on the seal illustrated inHead, Persian Army(n. 3), g. 24b.

51 Head, Persian Army (n. 3), g. 23b; Richter, Engraved Gems (n. 42), no. 135;Boardman, Gems(n. 40), pl. 1062.

52 Te warrior on Boardman, Gems (n. 40), g. 291, has a pointed helmet with

crest. (Headgear with similar prole, but no crest, appears on an ambiguous item:DS 71). Te photograph o Boardman, Gems (n. 40), no. 371 [Porada, Near EasternSeals(n. 40), 834] makes thepilos-like helmet look as though it has a barred visor, per-haps misleadingly.

is still more than three times as common, and is indeed the commonestorm o hunter.45In light o this one may, o course, suspect that some

or all o the items listed above in note 44none rom an explicit sceneo human combatactually belonged, in the mind o the seal-cutter orseal-user, to the world o hunting. Te same may be true o a chariotrom which a gure res at an unseen target.46Certainly the only chariotin a combat scene belongs to the enemy,47whereas chariots appear inseveral hunting scenes.48 Returning to putative soldiers, two notabletypes o deensive equipment amiliar rom other sources duly appear,i.e. leg-guards or paramridia49and the cuirass with neck-guard,50butno one uses a shield. In non-combat scenes headgear is generally some

variant o the sof-material bashlyk. Tis occasionally appears in combatscenes too,51as does a pilos-like item,52but what we see more ofen issomething with a rather angular prole, in some cases very reminiscent


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53 Boardman, Gems(n. 40), pl. 881 and Francort, Un cachet achmnide (n. 40):g. 2 are particularly like Can, Boardman, Gems(n. 40), pl. 864, 882, 883 rather less so.Maximova, Griechisch-persische Kleinkunst (n. 50): g. 2, DS 65 and Richter, EngravedGems(n. 42), no. 134 deviate urther because, although still compact and angular thereare more pronounced projections at top ront or back (c. the headgear o the rider onthe putative late imperial royal coins: see p. 106). Tis headgear is strongly correlatedwith the neck-guard cuirass. It is thereore worth stressing that when a version o thatcuirass is worn by inantry on seal-images, they have a quite different, close-tting androunded orm o headgear: e.g. PS 30; Newell 453; BN 403 = Collon, First Impressions(n. 9), no. 744; BM 89333 = Merrillees, West Asian Seals(n. 40), no. 64; Porada, NearEastern Seals (n. 40): no. 833. I think it possible that Meshorer and Qedar, SamarianCoinage(n. 11), no. 49 and DS 64 may be meant to show an inantry neck guard cuirass;i so, the headgear conorms in each case.

54 It has been claimed on a hunting image rom el Mazar: Collon, First Impressions(n. 9), no. 741. For theprosternidionwe have to look to terracotta Persian riders or toimages rom outside our data-set: Prommer,Alexandermosaik(n. 20), pl. 8, 20.2, 22.2,27.2. Meanwhile Kaptan, Daskyleion Bullae (n. 4), 78 discerns paramridiaon otherequestrian hunting scenes (DS 89; Sultaniyeky: Noll, Daskyleion[n. 25], S3]; Vezirhan:N. Asgari,Anatolian Civilisations II: Greek, Roman, Byzantine[Istanbul: 1983], B.146)and an otherwise non-Persian context on the Amathus sarcophagus. O. Casabonne,Notes ciliciennes, 34, Anatolia Antiqua5 (1997), sees them on a hunter on a stelerom Usak, where G. Polat, Ein Neuerwerbung des Uak Museums: eine anatolisch-persische Grabstele,Arkeoloji Dergisi presented to M.AnaboluII (Izmir: 1994), only dis-cerned trousers. Te el Mazar hunter may also have special protective leggings (asdistinct rom a paramridion): so O. Casabonne, Notes ciliciennes, 79, Anatolia

Antiqua8 (2000): 100, comparing the trousers on certain arkumuwa coins. He envis-ages padded leather, whereas Sekunda, Persian Army(n. 43), 27 sees scale-armor. Head,Persian Army(n. 3), g. 25, thinks the coins at least just show heavily creased clothing.Scale-armored trousers appear on an Amazon on the early classical Bologna 289 (CVABologna IV pl.7274).

55 Francort Un cachet achmnide (n. 40): g. 2.56 Boardman, Gems(n. 40), pl. 883; DS 65.

o the headgear worn by the Can cavalryman.53On the other hand I seelittle sign o horse-armor (as distinct rom horseman-armor).54On one

seal there is a visual contrast with the lighter orm o cavalry, using adifferent breed o horse and represented by a presumed Greek adversary,but the general absence o images showing ghts between cavalryseebelowprovides ew chances or us to observe this sort o distinction,and some o our Persian cavalrymen appear no more protected againstharm than horsemen on hunting seals.55

(c) Given constraint o space, equestrian combat scenes on sealsunsurprisingly ocus on a single cavalryman pitted against a singleadversary. Tis is the norm with Greek adversaries, only varied inas-

much as an additional dead enemy soldier appears a couple o times.56Where non-Greek adversaries are concerned things are more varied,


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57 Boardman, Gems(n. 40), pl. 864; DS 91 and ibid., pl. 882; Bregstein, Seal Use(n. 9): no. 194.

58 Scythian is shorthand or adversaries wearing headgear and riding costume link-ing them with accredited images o Saka or other East Iranians. Not all cases are equallysecure (e.g. PS 3031), but we are surely dealing with people whose dress links themwith horse-riding. Te our combat scenes not included here are three where the natureo the adversary is uncertain and the Persian status o the attacker might also be ques-tioned, and one where they are oriental but lack Scythian eatures and moreover use achariot.

59 One may also note the Miho pectoral image in Bernard, Un torque achmnide(n. 6), the central part o which gures two horse-archers (each accompanied by inan-trymen). Te narrative / tactical status o the repeated pairs o horsemen (one archer,one not) on the main body o the Miho necklace is less clear.

60 Bregstein Seal Use (n. 9): no. 194. Bregstein sees it as a prisoner-image, thoughnot o the sort represented by the twelve items mentioned supra, n. 40. I have preerredWu Xins view (c. supra, n. 40) that it is a scene o combat.

61 Interestingly, in the multi-gure inantry and cavalry picture on the atarl beam,the centre o a largely equestrian composition is a conrontation on oot between a qua-si-royal gure and three inantry Scythians: Summerer, Imaging (n. 21): g. 6.

since we nd the single horseman pitted against a chariot or twohorsemen or ghting, against one enemy oot-soldier, with the assist-

ance o a spearman.57

But or more complex images we have to look toinantry scenes, only about hal o which conne themselves to one-on-one combat and which can occasionally run to compositions with sevenor eight gures (in one case including two dismounted horses). Doesthis mean that there is not much to be learned rom seals about the tacti-cal use o cavalry? Perhaps not entirely.

In 46 o the 50 combat images Persian warriors are pitted againsteither Scythian (14) or Greek (32) adversaries.58 Tose who designedimages o Perso-Greek combat very largely chose to pit Greek inantry

against either a quasi-royal gure (nine cases) ormost characteristicallyagainst a Persian horseman (18 cases). But those who designed Perso-Scythian combat images went a different way. wo purely equestrianones survive, though they appear so mutually similar that they mightreasonably be regarded as two realisations o a single icon;59and there isone seal impression that may show a Persian horseman pursuing aninantry Scythian.60Otherwise we have purely non-equestrian combat.61Tis may seem mildly surprising: surely Scythians characteristicallylived and ought on horseback. I the Persians were also notable cavalry-men, should not their victory over such an opponent primarily be rep-resented in equestrian icons? I suggest that what this situation discloses


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62

In two casesBoardman, Persia and the West(n. 6), g. 5.21; PS 30the inan-try combat occurs in the presence o riderless horses: that almost seems to underlinethe point.

63 I have these gures rom Margaret Miller, who is engaged on a ull-scale study othis material.

64 Istanbul 7501: Asgari, Anatolian Civilisations (n. 54), B151. I thank MargaretMiller or showing me a photograph o this item.

65 London BM E233 (ARV2 1471(3)) = W. Raeck, Zum Barbarenbild in der KunstAthens im 6. und 5. Jahrhundert v. Christ (Bonn: 1981), P569; Paris Louvre MN13(ARV21471(1)). Similar ourth-century studies o non-Greek horsemen ghting Greekinantry, such as those on London BM E247 (ARV21471(4)) or Brussels A3452 = Head,Persian Army(n. 3), g. 23c, in which the horsemen are beardless, might also have been

intended as depictions o Persians, but the reciprocal iconographic intererence betweenPersian and Amazon at work since the mid-fh century makes categorization diffi-cult. We should certainly be wary o assuming that any or all beardless riders, evenones not encountered in what are plainly Amazonomachies, are valid evidence about

is a sense that, to win true victory, one has to bring the enemyeven aScythian oneto a proper ormal battle and deeat his inantry. Te

conquest o the Persian empire was not encompassed by overwhelmingadversaries with hordes o Iranian cavalry; it was achieved by mixed-orce armies in which the inantry was o at least equipollent signi-cance. For iconographical purposes whether ghting Greeks, who wererelatively weak in horsemen, or Scythians who were relatively strong inthem, the signicant thing was superiority over the enemy inantry: inthe Greek case this could be symbolized by having a horseman ridingdown an inantryman but in the Scythian case that would not be satis-actoryeveryone knew Scythian horsemen were too good to be side-

lined in that way and it was necessary to select the inantry arm o thePersian military to encapsulate superiority.62

Attic Vase-painting

When Attic ceramic painters depicted war with Persia, they too treatedthe choice between equestrian and non-equestrian in a distinctive ash-ion. Tere are rather over one hundred items that may airly be seen aspictures o Persians, o which about hal have some connection withwarare.63 But only a handul show military riders. An early ourth-century vase in Istanbul appears to shows a version o the warrior-departure scene, in which the warrior is mounted;64 the same gureappears on the other side o the vase as a sort o enthroned ruler, so ourmounted warrior is presumably imagined as relatively high status. woother ourth-century items show horsemen ghting Greek inantry,65


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Persian cavalry: the willingness o Sekunda, Persian Army(n. 43), 22, to assignpeltaitothe latter on the basis o Wrzburg K1814 is a case in point.

66 Boston 21.2286 = Raeck, Barbarenbild(n. 65), P558.67 An item rom c. 440, Raeck, Barbarenbild(n. 65), P576, has a mounted gure with

two spears, in a context that need not be military.68 Raeck, Barbarenbild (n. 65), P578. Te Marathon suggestion comes rom

D. Williams, A Cup by the Antiphon Painter and the Battle o Marathon, in Studienzur Mythologie und Vasenmalerei: Konrad Schauenburg zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. E. Bohrand W. Martini, (Mainz: 1986).

69 Raeck, Barbarenbild(n. 65), P560. Tey also appear alongside a strange scene inwhich two ully armed hoplites ght a naked Greek inantryman in a scene ramed by

two oriental (inantry) archers. It is not easy to make any coherent narrative sense othe vase as a whole.70 Pot-painters in other traditions did not address the topic at all until we get to cer-

tain late ourth-century south Italian representations o Alexanders deeat o Darius.

as does a mid-fh-century Sotades vase which was evidently producedor a non-Greek market, since in this case the Persian rider is deeating

his Greek opponent.66

On all o these the horsemen are unarmored andght with a spear.67wo nal items come rom ca. 480 i.e. veryearly in the series o Attic depictions o the Persian military. Te rstshows a single oriental rider: he carries a bow and wears a cuirass, andappears unaccompanied and without narrative context. Williams hasclaimed the image once bore the superscription khrisand alluded tothe battle o Marathon.68Tis venturesome conjecture underlines theact that what we see is not a combat scene. Te other item is indeedsuch a scene, but the two unarmored horse-archers ghting a hoplite

appear on the outer surace o a cup whose dominant image on theinside is o inantry combat.69Te act that it is only these earliest itemsthat put bows into the hands o Persian riders is notable: the densestimage o horse-archers in any o the material surveyed hereviz. theatarl paintingis also o a similar early date. Perhaps there is a signi-icant pattern here. But what one can certainly say is that, i seal-cuttersliked to symbolize Persian victory over Greek by showing horsemenbearing down upon inantry, Athenians celebrating Greek victory overthe Persians did not eel much o a need to gure this as the hopliteachieving victory over the Persian horseman. Tey were more governedby a real actthat the war on land was actually a matter o inantryagainst inantrythan a symbolic ideathat the conict representedthe victory o heavy inantry over a horse-borne invaderand indeed itis doubtul that such a symbolic idea occurred to them. Te Perses imag-inaireso fh-century pot painters were not distinctively horsemen.70One may perhaps add that, among less proessional decorators o


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71 Brenne 1992: g. 1, O2359: Megacles; g. 7, O849: Callias.72 N. Cau, La spedizione di Melesandro in Licia nel racconto della Stele di Xanthos

(L 44a, 34 ss.): un tentativo di interpretazione, Studi ellenistici12 (1999): 28.73 H. C. Melchert,A Dictionary o the Lycian Language(Ann Arbor: 2004), 48, how-ever, offers no support or the interpretation as oot-soldier, contra Cau, Stele diXanthos (n. 72), and takes a similar view o her discovery o schiera in the precedingLycian word izredi, which or him means hand.

ceramic suraces, the anonymous Athenian voting or the ostracism oCallias who decided to adorn his ostracon with a picture chose the gure

o a Persian archer, not a Persian horseman. Tis is not because the latterwould have been impossible because o constraints o space: anotherartistic voter evoked his target, Megacles, with a drawing o a shield-carrying horsemanand one without discernible oriental eatures.71

Non-Greek exts

I turn now to texts (documentary and literary) rom the lands o the

empire written in languages other than Greek and Latin.

Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant and Bactria

Western Anatolia produces one extremely tantalising item. In the rstpart o the Lycian A text o the Xanthos Pillar Inscription (L 44) occursa passage which has been translated as reerring to an inantry orcetogether with the cavalry, Achaemenid, Lycian and Median.72 Tiscomes a ew lines beore the section that reers successively to Melesander,

Iasus and Amorges and has been linked with events in Tucydides(2.69, 8.28), but little more can be said o its context save that it is ocourse part o the sel-celebration o the tomb-owner and that it comesshortly afer a reerence to a sacrice. Tat horses are present seemscertain, and the occurrence o the word oot in the previous linemakes it initially tempting to conjecture that a military orce consistingo inantry and cavalry is involvedthough only, perhaps, initially.73Te alleged use o Achaemenid is, on the other hand, startling: it isnot (I believe) otherwise attested in the non-Greek languages o sub-

jects o the Great King except in translations o royal inscriptions, andin Archaic and Classical Greek usage it is not used as a casual metonymor Persians, but only in contexts where it can be taken as reerringspecically to the (royal) Achaemenid amily. Melchert derives therelevant Lycian word hmenedi rom hmen(e)and translates it as


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74

Melchert, Lycian(n. 73), 23.75 Words signiying erect, monument, write and decree (at least in Melchertsunderstanding o the vocabulary) can be made out.

76 Te words king, (military) camp / ort, court / precinct, Xanthos and warare visible, again according to Melchert.

77 Te word or horse recurs in L 128 in a damaged context.78 J. Naveh, Te Aramaic Ostraka rom ell-Arad, in Y.Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions

(Jerusalem: 1981). Horses: 1, 14, 15, 16, 26, 32; donkeys: 1, 2, 12,14, 21, 23, 24, 31,37;horsemen: 7, 8, 11.

79 exts have appeared in at least eleven publications since 1996. For an overview(with bibliography), see P. Briant, Te Empire o Darius III in Perspective, in

Alexander the Great: A New History, ed. W. Heckel and L. ritle (Oxord, 2009):

15255.80 A. Lemaire, Nouvelles inscriptions aramennes au Muse dIsrael (Paris: 1996),no. 67. A horse ranch [rkh] o Garpa also appears in an ostracon o early Hellenisticdate: I. Ephal and J. Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca o the Fourth Century rom Idumaea(Jerusalem: 1996), no. 97. Te editors make no comment on this unique term.

combined.74I am not competent to judge the linguistics, but i this isan available possibility, it has to be better than Achaemenid. Tat said,

Lycian and Median are certainly present and, whatever we thinkabout the inantry, we have got horses and Persians in tantalisinglyclose conjunction (and in the same grammatical case). A somewhatsimilar, i less intimate, conjunction occurs later in the same document.Here horseman or esbt(i) is immediately preceded by what lookslike a reerence to the erection o an inscribed monument,75 and ol-lowed not only by several reerences to issaphernes, perhaps qualiedonce as Persian, but also by a passage that may have had military sub-

ject matter.76Further advances in the understanding o Lycian may one

day give us a coherent narrative here, though it is surely unlikely that itwill turn out to contain much in the way o tactical detail.77

Moving east and south, supplies or horses, donkeys and horsemenappear in some o the ostraca rom Arad.78Te military or potentiallymilitary term degelappears twice (12,18) and the storehouse rom whichthe documents derive might have been at a site that served as a base orguarding routes across the Negev; so perhaps the horsemen are soldiers,not just message-carriers. Onomastically speaking the environment isentirely Semitic and one text (7) reers to the horsemen o Eliashib, sowe are not in any event dealing with Iranian cavalry. More than 900Achaemenid and early-Hellenistic ostraca rom a site in Idumaea havebeen published in the last decade,79but I know o just one, rather conjec-tural, reerence to horsemen (perhaps a royal horsemen) among them.80It has been suggested that the riders sent by Yahweh to inspect the worldin Zechariah1.715 are a reex o an Achaemenid world o mounted


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81 H.-P.Matthys, Der Achmenidenho imAlten estament, in Der Achmenidenho,ed. B. Jacobs et al. (Stuttgart: orthcoming).

82

Udjahorresnet: O. Perdu, Le directeur des scribes du conseil , Revue dgyptologie49 (1998): 179. Hyrcanian cavalryman: H.S. Smith and C.J. Martin, Demotic papyrirom the Sacred Animal Enclosure o North Saqqar, in Organisations des pouvoirs etcontacts culturels dans les pays de lEmpire achmnideed. P. Briant and M. Chauveau(Paris: 2009), 60 (text 17). He has an Egyptian name (Wenneer) and matronymic(aweret); his ather's name (Merega) maybe Iranian.

83 J. . Milik, Lettre aramenne dEl-Hibeh, Aegyptus (1960): in this version thewriter reports that he has recently ound some team-horses (chevaux dattelage),6 Elamite, (2) Cilician and (2) Median, and that the Elamite ones will be brought tothe recipient o the letter. ADE A3.11 still has horses and Elamites (although the wordcould also mean lilies), but the rest has gone.

84 J. B. Segal,Aramaic exts rom North Saqqar(London: 1983), no. 62.85

Boardman, Persia and the West(n. 6): g. 5.21.86 A1: S. Shaked, Le satrape de Bactriane et son gouverneur: documents aramensdu IVe s. avant notre re provenant de Bactriane (Paris: 2004), 3233. In C3 camelsreceive our and odder; and they are mentioned in another unspecied document(ibid., 39).

spies.81Since this is apparently the rst passage in the Hebrew bible inwhich the horse-and-rider gure plays a signicant role, the conjecture

is not merely whimsical. Rather more concretely, passages in Ezra(8.22)and Nehemiah(2.9) show armed men and cavalry as the components oa travelling dignitarys escort.

In Egypt, the titles o Udjahorresnet, son o Hor (not the amousone) include scribe o the cavalry and a Hyrcanian cavalryman hasturned up in a non-military context in a demotic legal document romSaqqar82, but Egyptian documentation (including, most pertinently,that about members o the Elephantine garrison) is otherwise depress-ingly silent. An old interpretation o a Hibeh papyrus with an implied

narrative about horses has disappeared in ADE, thanks to a more con-servative view o the ragmentary remains o the text.83A possible allu-sion to charioteers and horsemen in a Saqqar text may be to do withhunting.84Te amous reerence in AD 9 = ADE A6.12 to someonemaking the image (? sealstone) o a horse and rider is merely tantalis-ingespecially since the archive owner (Aram) had an unusual sealon which inantry combat occurs in the presence o two riderlesshorses.85

At the other end o the empire, but still through the medium oAramaic, the still only partially published late-Achaemenid documentsrom the archive o the satrap o Bactria give us the story o a localofficials mistreatment o a group o camel-riders, and indeed a certainamount o other militarily relevant inormation, but almost nothingabout horses.86 Tere is a possible reerence to horse-harnessing in


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87 C7.5: c. Shaked, Le satrape(n. 86), 35.88 S. Shaked, De Khulmi Nikhapaya: les donnes des nouveaux documents ara-

mens de Bactres sur la toponymie de la rgion (IVe sicle av. n. .), CRAI4, (2003);idem, Le satrape(n. 86) insisted that this was during the period when Bessus was styl-ing himsel King Artaxerxes (V). But the document is dated to the ninth month o the

rst year o King Artaxerxes, and I do not think that any such date ever existed orArtaxerxes V. In any case it makes no sense or the document to be dated by Artaxerxesbut to reer to the king as Bessus. Te real date must be 358/7 (Artaxerxes III)soBriant, Darius III (n. 79)or 338/7 (Artaxerxes IV).

89 Shaked, La toponymie (n. 88), acknowledges this. Hippophagy was detected byM. Gabrielli, Le cheval dans lempire achmnide(Istanbul: 2006), in the description osome horses in the Persepolis Fortication archive as W.IN.lg-na giINme. W. F. M.Henkelman, Consumed beore the King, in Der Achmenidenho, ed. B. Jacobs et al.(Stuttgart: orthcoming): 60, translates the term on straw, but (61) allows that the ideao attening or consumption could apply to horses.

90 Donkeys also seem to appear in documents A1, B4 and B6.91 Further reerences to this are reported without details in A10 and C3.92

One other tantalizing detail: C1.33 mentions distribution o our or the inhabit-ants o Asparastaa toponym whose etymological meaning is hippodrome.93 Note that the military narratives (such as they are) about Cyrus conquest o

Babylonia in the Nabonidus Chronicle and Cyrus Cylinder mention no horses; and thatvarious broken allusions to military events in LBA are similarly unhelpul.

C7,87and a single horse certainly appears in C1. Te latter documentitemizes at some length the *daua-xwar(a)interpreted by Shaked as

viaticumo one Bessus (*Bayaa), perhaps the uture regicide, whoreceives it at Maithanka while on his way rom Bactra to Varnu-Aornos.88Te horse and a single donkey appear alongside our cattle, 166 sheep,ve geese and thirty chickens as well as a long list o our, other ood-stuffs and wine. It is at least possible, thereore, that they are there tobe eaten,89 and the only reasonable alternative is that they are draf-animals.90 Later in the list in C1 come two allusions to quite largeamounts o odder.91Te animals that consumed this odder might, ocourse, include the mounts o cavalrymen accompanying Bessus, but

there is no way o proving it. It is quite tempting to see this documentwhich not only deals in quite substantial quantities but also lists provi-sions or religious ceremonies and reers to sub-distributions o ourto other recipientsin terms o the inormation in the PersepolisFortication archive about the eeding o traveling courts, normallyroyal but in one case at least satrapal. Tere too horses receive suste-nance, and there too their unctional identity is opaque.92

Babylonia

Back in the middle o the empire Babylonia also has material to offer,but it too is not without its problems.93


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94 Dar.154: K. Abraham, Business and Politics under the Persian Empire (Bethesda:2004), no. 92.

95 C 22.74: F. Joanns, extes conomiques de la Babylonie rcente (Paris: 1982),2425; Abrahams, Business and Politics(n. 94), no. 88. He is attested as kin tmio

Babylon rom 497/6494/3. C. Wunsch, Neubabylonische Geschfsleute und ihreBeziehungen zu Palast- und empelverwaltungen: Das Beispiel der Familie Egibi, inInterdependency o Institutions and Private Entrepreneurs, ed. A. C. V. M. Bongenaar,(Istanbul: 1998): 144, thinks he was in office at the time o the letter. Te alternative isthat he was anguo Sippar, an office he held in 509/8495/4: M. Jursa, Das Archiv desBl-Rmanni(Istanbul: 1999): 108 n. 456.

96 His title is rab dri, literally wall-commander. Briant, Cyrus(n. 2), 342, wronglyreports the title as ortress-commander (rab birti), but it may be that rab drican legiti-mately be taken to have that meaning.

97 H. F. Lutz, An Agreement between a Babylonian Feudal Lord and his Retainer inthe Reign o Darius II, UCP9/3 (1928), rom the Murau archive; Dar.253: Joanns,extes conomiques (n. 95), 18; idem, Guerre et conomie dans lempire neo-babylonien, in La guerre dans les conomies antiques, ed. J. Andreau et al. (Saint-Bertrand de-Comminges: 2000): 68; M. A. Dandamaev, Te Old Iranian pasadu,inArchaeologia Iranica et Orientalis: Miscellanea in honorem Louis Vanden BergheI, ed.L. de Meyer and E. Haerinck (Ghent: 1989): 564.

wo documents conrm that equestrian military resources inAchaemenid Babylonia included chariots. One is a document rom

517 that reers to the chariots o Bel-appla-Iddina, the city-governor(kin tmi) o Babylon, going to Elam.94 Te purpose o the trip isunstated; all one can say is that it is possible that the soldiers tour oduty will last six months and that the king might have been in Susa whenthe document was written. Te other is an undated letter written by oneGuzanu, who was governor o Babylon during the rst decade o thefh century (but need not have held that office at the time o the let-ter).95Tis appears to reveal that soldiers who should have been assignedto Guzanu had been taken by an unnamed military official.96Te sol-

diers involved include charioteers, but the details o the situation areobscure (modern editors provide differing translations), and, slightlydisconcertingly, the only specic inormation about the charioteers isthat one o them, Liblutu, is in charge o a group o boats about to sail tothe (unknown) town o Danipinu.

urning to cavalry, a well-known Babylonian document itemizes theequipment o a cavalryman in 421 and a less amous one provides simi-lar inormation nearly a century earlier in 513.97 An uncontentiousunderstanding o both is hampered by linguistic uncertainties.

Te earlier text simply mentions headgear (karballatu) and two itemsalso ofen attributed to inantry archers, viz. G KUR.RA (whichappears to be a cloak or blanket or even poncho) and G iram. Te


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103 Ebeling, Rstung (n. 100) Te determinative KU indicates an item made oleather, so strictly speaking we have a copper-covered leather shield.

104 A variant on the latter reading was to suggest that an iron boss was attached tothe shield, so Joanns, extes conomiques(n. 95), 18. But I cannot understand why theboss would be listed separately.

105 Oddly, the description o a Persian soldiers weaponry in Strabo 15.3.19 mentions

quiver but not bow. Perhaps in both cases the quiver (pharetrain Strabo) is really agorytus(combined quiver and bow-case) and the presence o the bow is simply takenor granted.

106 C 22.74, Dar.9, VS 6.155.

Te remaining two elements in the description (kusaltu a erand depu AN.BAR akusaltu) also have a shared word, altu. Ebeling

translated it as shield and identied the two items as a copper shield103

and an iron club that was o the shield in that it was carried attachedto the shield.104But it now seems agreed that altuis a word or quiverand might also apply to other orms o container, while depu desig-nates a stabbing-weapon, in which case the soldier actually had a leatherquiver with copper (attachments?) and an iron sword in a leatherscabbard.

Tere is one nal conundrum. Changes to linguistic understanding othe text have not altered the act that the horseman is not said to have a

bow with which to re his 120 arrows. Ebeling has inerred that thearrows were not part o the cavalrymans equipment but intended or theuse o an inantry archerthe presumption being that the e-holderwhose service obligation is in question here was actually required tosupport an archer as well as a cavalryman, even though the e is calleda horse-e. But the suggestion is not logically watertightthe putativearcher would also need a bow and, i that bow can be not mentioned, sopresumably can a cavalrymans bowand is certainly made no easier bythe discovery that the text mentions a quiver as well as the arrows.105Weare, thereore, entitled to conclude that the document rom 421 evokes acavalryman at least moderately armored, equipped to ght with sword,spear or bow. He may represent a different type rom the man in thedocument rom 513; we simply cannot tell.

As has already been noted in passing, the Guzanu letter and Gadal-Iama contract relate respectively to a chariot- and a horse-estate.Compared with so-called bow-estates, these are not very commonlyattested categories. Tere are just three reerences to the ormer rom the

reign o Darius,106

and ewer than twenty to the latter rom the secondhal o the Achaemenid era, most relating to the affairs o individuals


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107 Tat shows that horse-estates were (as units) larger than bow-estateswhich is

not surprising since in any part o the world horses are expensive in upkeep.108 Te other two chariot-estate texts relate to obligations or non-military labor all-ing upon the estate-holders.

109 Dar.141 and 234 reer to men o the herder o horses. Joanns (www.achemenet.com) sees them as soldats-palreniers, i.e. military grooms, but A. C. V. M. Bongenaar,Te Neo-Babylonian Ebabbar emple o Sippar(Istanbul: 1997), 131, as men who caredor the personal horses o the god; and in any event we are within a temple environ-ment. Te Ebabbar temple in Sippar did not lack horsemen; the problem (as ever) isdeciding when / i they are used as part o the army o the state.

110 BE 10.80, PBS 2/1 95, 189. Te term corresponds to OP *aspasva, so avernier,Iranica (n. 102), 416. As the Iranian term aspastu or lucerne was known in eighth-century Babylonia, one cannot be sure that the title reects the Achaemenid presence,

but it would perhaps be hypercritical to deny it. H

at

ru titles rarely involve Iranianterms, but one may note ustaribarra[ustabar-officials] and atebarrinu[spear-bearers]:M. W. Stolper, Entrepreneurs and Empire(Leiden: 1985), 78.

111 Stolper, Entrepreneurs(n. 110), 96.

holding ractionsofen rather small oneso such an estate.107urningdata about apparently military estatesbow- as well as horse- or chariot-

estatesinto evidence about the army is a ticklish business in any case,but, despite the Gadal-Iama text and Liblutu texts discussed above, thedisjunction between people linked with horse- or chariot-estates andactual military activity is, on the ace o it, quite as great as in othercases,108and by any reckoning Babylonian documentation pictures sol-diersespecially ones that may in some sense be in use by the state,and not merely within a temple domainas archers or just as men(sab) very much more ofen than as cavalry.109Tere is some tensionbetween this act and Herodotus picture o Babylon as a place where

the satrap privately owns 16,800 horses as well as having polemistrioihippoiat his disposal (1.192). Can this tension be entirely dissipated bynoting that Babylonian cuneiorm documentation includes no statearchives and is no more than indirectly related to the public or privatedomain o the countrys Iranian satraps and other elite members?

Indirect evidence o this sort in Murau documents does allow us toglimpse a hatruo the horse-eeders, whose name (aspataor aspattu)is linguistically Iranian,110and the equerrys [rab urtu] estate, eshedout by Stolper (1985: 96) as a ortied central acility or war or drafanimals with links to the Iranian prince Arbareme (aliasSecundianushippen arkhn in Ctesias 688 F15[5]).111 A century or so earlier weencounter in a Sippar temple-document amas-iddina and the horse-men who came back rom Egypt in 518/7 (C 57.82)a unique pieceo evidence or the participation o horsemen rom Babylonia in apolitico-military event (Darius visit to Egypt in the ourth year o his


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112

And indeed the Babylonian horsemen among the welcoming party whenAlexander entered Babylon in 331 (Curt. 5.1.23).113 R. Schmitt, Choaspes, in Encyclopaedia Iranica 5.496, ed. Ehsan Yarshater,

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992). DSp adds chariots to horses and men.

reign) that can be conjectured, though with no military detail, romquite independent sources. Perhaps stray data o this sortrare as they

aredo suffice to provide Herodotus with some validation. One cancertainly say that the remark in 1.192 about polemistrioi hippoionlyan aside to the primary interest there, viz. the satraps private wealth inhorse-eshcarries more evidential weight than the absence oBabylonian horsemen in the Army List in VII and that it deserves someexplanation. At the same time, it should be clearly understood that thehorsemen who went to Egypt in 518/7 were not just sent rom Babyloniabut actually Babylonian, and that the same applies to any other actualcavalryman we can discern in the cuneiorm record.112 What we see

here is nothing to do with the model primarily suggested by post-Hero-dotean Greek sources in which Iranians who settled in other parts othe empire served in person as cavalrymenand presumably as dis-tinctively Iranian ones. Te cuneiorm documentation thus has nothingto say on the question o whether a particular character or quality wasattached to the Achaemenid military machine by virtue o its Iranianorigin and equestrian heritage. Te act that Herodotus speaks o

polemistrioi hippoi(and not o hippeis) might in theory mean that he isdistinguishing between the origin o the horses contingently bred andmaintained in Babylonia and the Iranian identity o their eventual users:but there is nothing in the cuneiorm record that positively justies sucha supposition.

Te Imperial Heartland

Coming at last to the heart o the empire, the name o the River Choaspes,which owed past Susa and was the source o royal drinking water,

means rich in horses, and DPd describes Persia as a land o good horsesand good men, praying that Ahuramazda will protect it rom attack,amine and the Lie.113In his unerary inscription Darius describes him-sel as a good horseman and as a good archer and lancer, both on ootand horseback (DNb9). All o this corresponds, o course, to the per-ception o Greek sources that the middle zone o Persis was rich in pas-ture or cattle and horses and that Persian education privileged riding


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114 Middle zone: Arr. Ind. 40.3 (Nearchus), Strabo 15.3.1 (Eratosthenes): a plateauzone, with rivers and lakes, ull o grassy meadows, pasture or animals and horses, ara-ble land or everything except olives, paradeisoi. Curt. 5.4.6 is similar (but does notmention animals), as is Diod. 19.21.2 (which does). Education: Hdt. 1.136; Xen. An.1.9.5, CEG 2.888, Strabo 15.3.18.

115 Yasht 5.130131 and W. Malandra, Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion(Minneapolis: 1983), 130, where neighing horses