The Cardaces (or Kardakes, meaning "foreign mercenary"
) were a professional
heavy infantry
Heavy infantry consisted of heavily armed and armoured infantrymen who were trained to mount frontal assaults and/or anchor the defensive center of a battle line. This differentiated them from light infantry who are relatively mobile and l ...
mustering
Muster may refer to:
Military terminology
* Muster (military), a process or event for the accounting for members in a military unit
* Muster list, list of the functions for team members
* A mustering, in military terminology, is a specialised for ...
of the
Achaemenid
The Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire (; peo, wikt:𐎧𐏁𐏂𐎶, 𐎧𐏁𐏂, , ), also called the First Persian Empire, was an History of Iran#Classical antiquity, ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC. Bas ...
Persia
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
n army. They were formed some time before the
Macedonian invasion (334 BCE).
There are debates among historians about the armament and tactics used by the Cardaces. The Persian army had earlier become heavily dependent upon
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
mercenaries
A mercenary, sometimes Pseudonym, also known as a soldier of fortune or hired gun, is a private individual, particularly a soldier, that joins a military conflict for personal profit, is otherwise an outsider to the conflict, and is not a memb ...
and it may have been intended that the Cardaces – as Persian subjects – would complement the mercenaries.
References
Sources
* Pierre Briant
From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire Especially pages 1036–1037.
* Jeff Jonas
(Contains a letter by Duncan Head).
* Duncan Head, The Achaemenid Persian Army. Montvert Publications, 1992. pp. 42–43.
Military units and formations of the Achaemenid Empire
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