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 were relatively mobile and ...
mustering of the
Achaemenid
The Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire, also known as the Persian Empire or First Persian Empire (; , , ), was an Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. Based in modern-day Iran, it was the large ...
Persia
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...
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:
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 of all kno ...
mercenaries
A mercenary is a private individual who joins an War, armed conflict for personal profit, is otherwise an outsider to the conflict, and is not a member of any other official military. Mercenaries fight for money or other forms of payment rath ...
and it may have been intended that the Cardaces – as Persian subjects – would complement the mercenaries.
According to Kambouris (2022), ''Kardaka'' may refer to the ethnic Persian draftees who were
sparabara archers initially and later redelegated as armored close-quarter soldiers.
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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