Re: Ancient army numbers

[Sean Manning]

As for Persian army numbers well...trying to constitute them from Greek historiographic texts rather than all the wonderful little NE tablets, texts and material evidence we have seems very odd. See the upcoming monograph by Morgan on the Edinburgh press for such things (though not military, more general Greek views)

The trouble is that we have almost no Achaemenid evidence for army strengths, save for the records of the garrison at Elephantine, the propaganda figures in the Akkadian version of the Behistun inscription, and a few scattered records from Mesopotamia most of which are unpublished and most of which published ones are untranslated. John MacGinnis is working on a book about military service at Uruk which may shed light on things (a fourth book on the Achaemenid army would be a good thing!), but even then that is just one tiny part of the empire. So we are mostly left with Greek narratives and comparative evidence for Achaemenid army strengths.