The Achaemenid Persians were Indo-European speakers who migrated with the Medes (also Indo-Europeans) as horse clans into what is now Iran in the ninth century BCE. Medes formed a kingdom around 700 BCE and subjugated Persians as vassals around c.650. In 559 Cyrus II (r.559-529 BCE) became Great King (emperor) of the Persians and began to conquer and add his neighbor’s troops to his own army. He conquered the Medes (550 BCE), the Lydians (547), and the Chaldeans (539), finally dying in 530 on campaign in Sogdiana against steppe people. Cyrus and his successors conquered the largest empire the world had yet seen, including not only the old centers of power in the Near East and Egypt, but also extending into Thrace and Asia Minor in the west and northwest India in the east. At its height in the early fifth century BCE, the Persian Empire consisted of over three million square miles of territory, with fifty million inhabitants. With each successful conquest came additional troops for the Persian war machine. This remarkable military achievement exposed the Persians to regional martial specialization, and the Persians proved very willing to include foreign soldiers, technologies, and tactics into their army. Most of the territory of this “world empire” was conquered in just three decades by one man, Cyrus II, “the Great.”

Historians believe Cyrus II was born around 575 BCE in western Persia in a region called Anshan in what is today southern Iran. Persia was then a minor client kingdom on the southern border of the powerful Median Empire. Both the Persians and Medes were Indo-European peoples who migrated south between 1000 and 800 BCE to settle on the Iranian plateau from the traditional homeland of the Indo-European peoples, the large steppe region north of the Caucus Mountains. By the mid-ninth century, Assyrian records mention the Medes and the Persians by name. Linguistically, these two tribes shared language, culture, mythologies, and military traditions (especially a love of cavalry) with other Indo-European peoples like the Parthians, Bactrians, Scythians, and even the Greeks, but were also heavily influenced by Mesopotamian civilizations, most notably the powerful Assyrians and once powerful Elamites. By 625, these various Iranian tribes were pulled into a union under the Medes, who, in the wake of the destruction of the Assyrian Empire in 605, carved out a large state stretching from the Lydian kingdom in Anatolia in the west and skirting the northern boundaries of the new Babylonian Empire in Mesopotamia southeast to the Persian Gulf. The Medes also nominally controlled areas east corresponding to regions of modern Pakistan and Afghanistan and north to the Oxus River. By the time of Cyrus’ birth, the classical Near East was ruled by four major powers: the Median and the Babylonian empires that had risen against the Assyrians, the kingdom of Egypt who had unsuccessfully come to Assyria’s aid, and the Anatolian Lydian kingdom.

CYRUS II AND THE RISE OF PERSIA AS A REGIONAL POWER

The records are not clear on how Cyrus ascended the throne of Anshan in 559 BCE, but shortly afterward, the young ruler led an army against eastern Persia, uniting the House of Achaemenes again under one rule. For nearly a decade, Cyrus expanded his power base in southern Iran by building alliances with other Indo-European tribes until he finally felt strong enough to refuse his grandfather Astyages’ suzerainty. Recognizing the threat Cyrus now posed to his Median Empire, Astyages raised a large army and met the Persian king at the battle of Murghab (located four hundred miles south of the Median capital of Ecbatana, modern Hamadan in western Iran) around 550. Babylonian sources describe Cyrus of Anshan as a “vassal” of Astyages who “destroyed” the Median army, although the Median nobles, dissatisfied with the Median king’s attempts to centralize his authority, staged a battlefield rebellion, and defected to the Persians. Herodotus indicates that two battles were fought, with Cyrus capturing his grandfather, occupying Ecbatana, and sending the sizable treasury back to Persia. Cyrus’ victory over the Medes at Murgab, and the subsequent allegiance of Astyages’ client kingdoms to the young Persian ruler, should be seen more as a change of administration than the defeat of the Median Empire. In fact, this new Perso-Median state benefitted greatly from Median governmental and military institutions.   

Cyrus II was about twenty-five years old when he defeated Astyages at Murghab.  This victory pushed the new Persian Empire right up against the much smaller Lydian kingdom at the Halys River in central Anatolia. The Lydians were also an Indo-European people who settled in western Asia Minor in the late Bronze Age and created a vibrant and wealthy civilization in the seventh century BCE that controlled lucrative silver and gold mines and overland trade routes to Mesopotamia, as well as access to the Black, Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Thoroughly Hellenized due to their prolonged contact with the Greek world, their king Croesus (r.560-547 BCE) ruled from his capital of Sardis (modern Sart in western Türkiye) and had ambitions of expanding eastward past the lower Halys River Valley into what was now the new Persian frontier of Cappadocia.

THE FALL OF LYDIA

Herodotus relates a famous story from his The Histories concerning King Croesus’ reaction to the capture of Astyages, who was by marriage alliance his brother-in-law. When Croesus learned of Cyrus’ victory, he sent an embassy to Delphi on the Greek mainland to ask the Oracle there if he should wage war against the Persians. The Oracle responded in its usual obscurely prophetic manner that if the Lydian king attacked the Persian army, a great kingdom would fall. Of course, Croesus believed the kingdom that would fall was Persia. He was proved wrong when he invaded Persian-held Cappadocia in 547 BCE with a well-equipped army consisting of armored infantry, including Ionian Greek hoplites, with its centerpiece being Lydian heavy cavalry lancers who, in the words of Herodotus, “were clever in the management of their steeds.” Like all armies of this period, this core was supplemented by large numbers of local militias called to arms for specific campaigns and well-trained mercenary troops that always served wealthy kingdoms. Herodotus tells us that the Lydians sieged the capital of the region, Pteria, and sold its inhabitants into slavery. Provoked into action, Cyrus marched northwest from his capital at Ecbatana (he was building a new capital at Pasargadae in Fars province in modern Iran) towards Anatolia, crossing the Tigris River near the plains of Gaugamela, swelling the ranks of his multinational army along the way (Gaugamela is also where Alexander the Great defeated Darius III two centuries later and won the Persian Empire). Cyrus’ Anatolian campaign may have been born out of fear of an expansion of Lydian hegemony east into Azerbaijan, where Croesus’ could threaten the Iranian heartland. 

The first meeting between the Lydian and Persian hosts on the plains near Pteria was inconclusive, something attributed by Croesus to having too few troops. His army still intact after the battle of Pteria, the Lydian king retreated west back to Sardis the following day, shedding his regional auxiliary militias along the way as was normal when agricultural societies went to war. Once behind the safety of his walls, Croesus disbanded his mercenary troops and sent embassies to enforce treaties with his powerful neighbors, asking his Egyptian, Babylonian, and Spartan allies to come to his aid within five months of receiving his ambassadors. Perhaps knowing that international assistance would be on its way the following campaigning season (spring of 546 BCE), Cyrus acted quickly, shadowing the Lydian army as it returned to its capital and waited for the mercenaries to disband. With the Lydian army now greatly reduced in strength, Cyrus ordered his army into the open to array itself for battle on the plain in front of Sardis.

The Persian army that arrayed was constituted in a manner unfamiliar to the defending Lydians. Here, Herodotus tells us that the experienced Median general and royal counselor Harpagus convinced Cyrus to bring the camels from the supply train forward to serve as cavalry. Both the Medes and Persians, coming from the steppes, understood that the horses needed to be trained around the strange sights, smells, and sounds of camels to be effective (horses need to be trained around elephants for the same reasons). Gambling that the excellent Lydian cavalry had never served around camels, Cyrus arranged his army in three lines with the camels forward, followed by the infantry, and then supported by his own horse cavalry. This gamble worked, as the Lydian riders lost cohesion after encountering the camels and retired back through their own lines to dismount and fight on foot. Herodotus is not forthcoming on specific details of the battle from this point forward, save his statement that “after great slaughter on both sides, the Lydians turned and fled.”  With the Lydian cavalry neutralized, Cyrus relied on Perso-Median battle doctrine and brought up his light infantry archers and slingers to pepper the ranks of the defending Lydians and exploit any gaps with cavalry charges, eventually breaking the resolve of Croesus’ army, whose survivors retreated back to the walls of Sardis. Despite an urgent appeal to the Spartans for military aid, Sardis fell after a fourteen-day siege and the Lydian kingdom was annexed. Defeated, Croesus came before Cyrus, who made the Lydian king an advisor in his court. Croesus would serve Cyrus for the remainder of the Persian king’s life. Over the next few years, Cyrus sent two of his generals, Mazares (who suddenly died of sickness on campaign) and Harpagus, to consolidate their control over the remainder of western Anatolia. These campaigns brought the Phrygians, Carians, Lycians, and Ionian Greeks into the growing Achaemenid Empire and Persian control to the eastern coast of the Aegean Sea and the edge of Europe.

THE FALL OF THE BABYLON

With Anatolia under his rule, Cyrus now controlled the northern and eastern flanks of the Babylonian Empire (sometimes called the Chaldean Empire). The Semitic Chaldeans gained ascendancy in southern Mesopotamia in the seventh century as a subject people of the Assyrian Empire. Under their king Nabopolassar (r.626-605 BCE) the Chaldeans rose up against the Assyrians and joined with the Medes to capture the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BCE. Nabopolassar went on to become the first king of the Babylonian Empire. His son, Nebuchadnezzar II (r.605-562 BCE), completed the final defeat of the Assyrians in 605 BCE, pulled the Levant away from the Egyptians, and destroyed Jerusalem, carrying the Jews into their “Babylonian Captivity.”  By Nebuchadnezzar’s death in 562, the Babylonian Empire was the leading power in the Near East. However, the greatness of the Babylonian Empire proved to be short-lived. The Chaldean dynasty’s last king, Nabonidus (r.555-539 BCE), neglected the cult of Marduk, a chief deity and long popular among the Chaldean people, in favor of the Northern Mesopotamian moon goddess of Sin, and by doing so, made a dangerous enemy of the powerful Marduk priesthood. Cyrus was aware of Nabonidus’ unpopularity. Seeing a disillusioned population and weak monarch, Cyrus seized this opportunity to attack the Babylonian Empire a year later in the spring of 539. An adroit diplomat, Cyrus was able to pull a key Babylonian ally to the Achaemenid cause. Gubaru, the governor of the central Zagros Mountain district of Gutium, was an experienced general who served with distinction in the campaigns of Nebuchadnezzar. The defection of this experienced general and his troops would prove decisive in Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon.

A possible Median invasion of Mesopotamia was something feared by Nebuchadnezzar, who constructed a linear defense late in his reign between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to block a northwest invasion route by way of the Akkadian plains. Known as the Median Wall for its strategic purpose, the right end of this fortification was anchored on the Tigris at the walled city of Opis (north of Babylon but whose exact location is still unknown), while the left end was anchored on the Euphrates at the city of Sippar (modern Tell-Abu Habbah, Iraq). One hundred-and-thirty-six years later the Athenian historian and general Xenophon (c.430-354 BCE) remarked in his Anabasis (sometimes referred to as The Persian Expedition) that when his “10,000” Greek mercenaries arrived at the Median Wall in 403 BCE it was still standing (Xenophon and his fellow Greek’s were at the time marching upriver towards friendly territory after serving another royal Achaemenid, Cyrus the Younger, in a Persian civil war that went awry).  Xenophon described the Median Wall as “twenty-five feet broad and a hundred feet high, with a perimeter of six miles.”  It was constructed of fire-hardened bricks laid in bitumen (a naturally occurring asphalt) for added strength. If these dimensions were true, this would have been a formidable obstacle to Cyrus and his Persian forces if they attacked the fortification head on.                   

Cyrus, like other commanders in history faced with a linear defense, chose to outflank the fortification rather than watch his army break against it. Cyrus invaded Mesopotamia from the northeast in the spring of 539 BCE with the intention of outflanking the Median Wall to the southwest of the fortress city of Opis. To accomplish this, the Persian army and its extensive supply and siege trains would have to cross the Tigris without a bridge, a feat impossible under normal circumstances. Herodotus tells us that to solve the issue of crossing the Tigris to the rear of Opis Persian engineers worked throughout the summer months to divert the water at the Gynades tributary (probably the modern Diyalah River) of the Tigris into 360 smaller channels, allowing his army to ford the river and storm the strategically important city of Opis in October, defeating a mixed Babylonian and Akkadian force. With Opis secure, Cyrus marched southwest towards Sippar and secured this city as well, effectively neutralizing the Median Wall. 

Historians have long wondered how Cyrus took Babylon. Herodotus maintains that the Persian king marched on the city in late 539, defeating a Babylonian army outside the capital, but was thwarted by the city’s impressive walls and the prospect of a prolonged siege. Herodotus goes on to write that Cyrus put his engineers to work again, this time with orders to divert the Euphrates (which flowed under the city’s walls). Once the river’s flow slowed “to the height of the middle of a man’s thigh,” Persian troops waded into the city at the river’s entrance and exit points on a festival day and opened the gates. It is more likely that Cyrus sent his new ally Gubaru at the head of a combined Persian and Gutium contingent to Babylon, which opened its gates to the invaders. This scenario is supported by the Chaldean’s own Nabonidas Chronicle which describes the fall of the capital as a peaceful and orderly event, with Cyrus assuming the titles "king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four corners of the world" and proclaimed as both liberator and the chosen of Marduk. We can assume that Cyrus’ spies were in contact with the powerful priestly class, who may have arranged for the opening of the city, or perhaps he used the Jews of Mesopotamia as a fifth column, as the Persian king was lauded as a Messiah in Jewish accounts when he released some 40,000 Jews to return to Jerusalem. What is known with more certainty is how Cyrus obtained the favor of the priesthoods of conquered lands by restoring temples and promoting religious toleration, strategic policies that secured the cooperation of powerful elements of these societies at a crucial time when his empire was rapidly expanding. Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon terminated a thousand-year dominance of Mesopotamia by Semitic peoples, ushering in a millennium of Indo-European rule, a dominance that ended with the Islamic conquests in the seventh century.          

With the addition of the Babylonian Empire to his holdings, Cyrus also received the loyalty of the Levantine cities in Syria, Phoenicia and Palestine formerly allied to Nabonidus, extending Persian rule from the Syrian Gates on the edge of Anatolia to Gaza on the border of Egypt. Adding the naval might of the Phoenicians gave the Achaemenid kings access to the eastern Mediterranean and the tools to threaten the Greek world, which would happen in the early fifth century BCE during the Persian Wars (c.499-449 BC) under the reigns of Darius I (r.522-486 BC) and Xerxes I (r.486-465 BC).

THE EASTERN CAMPAIGNS

By the mid-530s BCE Cyrus was in control of all of the Near East minus Egypt. For over two decades the Persian monarch focused on expanding his influence westward to Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean, but in 530, at around the age of forty-five, Cyrus set out at the head of a large expedition to extend his realm northeast across the Jaxartes River into the lands of the barbarian Scythians and Bactrians, a region corresponding to modern Turkistan in Central Asia. Here, a powerful Scythian tribe called the Massagetae refused Cyrus’ overtures for an alliance (Cyrus offered to marry their queen Tomyris, but she refused). In response, Cyrus had his engineers build a bridge across the Jaxartes for an invasion of Massagetaean territory in Sogdiana, a region between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers in Central Asia.  However, before the bridge was completed, Cyrus received a message from Tomyris asking him not to invade but giving the Persian Great King two choices if he decided to make war: either withdrawal his own army three days south of the bridge to allow her to cross into Achaemenid territory or she would withdraw her own army three days distance from the bridge to allow the Persian host to cross into her territory without harassment. Cyrus held a war council, where his generals agreed that the Persians should allow the Massagetaean to cross the bridge and fight in Persian-held lands. Herodotus tells us that one of Cyrus’ counselors, the former Lydian king Croesus, offered different advice, convincing his king that he should “push at once into the heart of their country” and not “yield ground to a woman.” He also suggested a ruse to weaken the Massagetaean army. Sending his son and regent Cambyses II back to Persia in the care of Croesus, Cyrus crossed the Jaxartes in what would be his final campaign.    

One day’s march into Massagetaean territory Cyrus halted his army and hatched Croesus’ plan. He commanded the weakest elements of his army to set up camp featuring an elaborate banquet designed to lure shadowing elements of Queen Tomyris’ army into a trap.  Once the camp was ready, Cyrus withdrew the rest of his forces and watched as the undisciplined Massagetaean forces attacked his camp and killed the camp guards, and then, according to Herodotus “seeing the banquet prepared, they sat down and began to feast.”  History does not record if the attackers set a cordon, but Cyrus’ main force did return to slaughter the inebriated Massagetaeans in their sleep. One third of Tomyris’ army was lost, either killed or taken prisoner.  Significantly, the queen’s son, Spargapises, was captured, but committed suicide while imprisoned.

Despite having lost one-third of her army, Tomyris assembled the remainder of her host and attacked the Persian army. Herodotus does not provide very much information on the Massagetaean order of battle for this engagement, but he does state that:

“In their dress and mode of living the Massagetae resemble the Scythians. They fight both on horseback and on foot, neither method is strange to them: they use bows and lances, but their favorite weapon was the battle axe.”        

Herodotus also makes a special note of the Massagetaean’s sophisticated horse bridle and brass barding for their horses.  It is possible the Massagetaeans deployed an early form of heavy cavalry against the Persians with riders protected by scale armor, helmets and using lance or bow or perhaps both in combat. Interestingly, this kind of specialized knight would become the signature heavy cavalry for later Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sassanian armies.

The two armies that met on this still undiscovered battlefield on the Central Asia steppes mirrored one another in composition, consisting of light missile troops (infantry and mounted archers), heavy infantry, and cavalry. Herodotus describes the beginning of the battle as an archery duel, explaining that the “two armies stood apart and shot their arrows at each other, then, when the quivers were empty, they closed and fought hand-to-hand with lances and daggers….” These daggers were akinakas or large, straight, double-edged daggers, fourteen to eighteen inches in length, essentially very short swords that were used as a primary arm in the Near East for much of the first millennium BCE. This phase of combat opened with both infantry and mounted archers exchanging shafts to break the enemy’s ranks until both sides were out of arrows.  The melee that followed continued “for a length of time” until the Massagetaeans “prevailed,” the Persian army was “destroyed”, and “Cyrus himself fell, after reigning nine and twenty years.”  Although the exact details of how Cyrus was killed are lost to history, Herodotus describes in gory detail how Tomyris took the Great King’s head and dipped it into a container of human blood on the battlefield and lamented about the loss of her son. Cyrus’ body was eventually recovered by his remaining troops and laid to rest in a simple stone mausoleum in his new capital of Pasargadae.

LEGACY

Another ethnic Greek historian, Arrian (c.86-c.160 CE), wrote in his history of the campaigns of Alexander the Great (the Anabasis of Alexander) that Cyrus’ body interred in a solid gold sarcophagus wearing new royal garments described as the Achaemenid robe (replacing the Elamite royal dress worn by previous Persian kings). Draped across the coffin were sacred objects from all corners of his vast empire to accompany him in the afterlife, including Persian daggers, Babylonian tunics from Mesopotamia, Median cloaks, and trousers (illustrating the high importance of equestrianism in this culture) from the Iranian plateau, Phoenician purple garments from the Levant, neck torques, and two powerful steppe bows from the subject barbarian peoples of the Iranian plateau and Central Asia. These items were discovered two centuries later in Cyrus’ tomb when Alexander the Great (r.336-323 BCE) ordered his tomb to be opened in the winter of 331-330 BCE during his conquest of the Near East that ended the Achaemenid dynasty forever.

Few leaders in world history distinguish themselves equally as both statesman and military commander, and even fewer create an empire that endures long after their passing.  Cyrus II of Persia excelled at both. He was the greatest ruler of his age, earning the epithet “the Great” by creating in less than thirty years the largest empire the world had yet seen, an empire that stretched from the Aegean Sea to Central Asia. It should be remembered that the lands conquered by Cyrus and his immediate successors had never been ruled together as one empire, and the reorganization of these territories into Satrapies tied together by the most impressive road system yet devised (the Persian Royal Road) facilitated a long and successful Achaemenid reign. A pragmatist, Cyrus recognized he could not rule over a large multinational empire successfully if he mimicked the failed policies of the Assyrians, Medes, and Babylonians. Balancing strength and compassion, Cyrus was not afraid to bring the vanquished into his court (Croesus of Lydia served him for years), value the teachings of foreign religions, or offer mercy and then opportunity to defeated armies. These actions made Cyrus the first “one-world hero” in history, a warrior-ruler whose legend both bridged and transcended culture.

Suggested Readings:

Primary sources

Strassler, Robert B. ed. The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander. Anchor, 2012.

_____. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Anchor, 2009.

Secondary sources

Carey, Brian Todd, Joshua B. Allfree, and John Cairns. Warfare in the Ancient World. Pen and Sword, 2006.

Cook, J.M. The Persian Empire. Schocken Books, 1983.

Farrokh, Kaveh. Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War. Osprey, 2009.

Wiesehofer, Josef. Ancient Persia. I.B. Tauris, 2011.