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Good article, but some quibbles: >The Persians were meticulous record keepers; but no Persian source has survived Eh, they weren't particularly big on record
by ummonk 7y ago
Good article, but some quibbles:
>The Persians were meticulous record keepers; but no Persian source has survived
Eh, they weren't particularly big on record keeping. The Babylonians (who were part of the Persian empire) kept decent records, but not the Persians.
>Modern guesstimates by different means arrive at around 200,000.
Those are just people throwing out random figures. In reality it's highly unlikely that the Persians had the logistical capability to field an army that large beyond the fringes of their empire. Tens of thousands would likely be a more realistic number.
- christudor 7y agoIt seems to me that the Persians were just as good at record-keeping as any relatively sophisticated ancient civilization. The Persepolis Fortification Archives, for example, contain about 20,000 records that deal with the movement of several commodities (e.g. cereals, fruit, livestock, etc.) in the region around Persepolis, and dates to exactly this period (c. 510-490 BC): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_Administrative_Archives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_Administrative_Arch...