Military history of Iran
The military history of Iran has been relatively well-documented, with thousands of years' worth of recorded history. Largely credited to its historically unchanged geographical and geopolitical condition, the modern-day Islamic Republic of Iran has had a long and checkered military culture and history; ranging from triumphant and unchallenged ancient military supremacy, affording effective superpower status for its time; to a series of near-catastrophic defeats, most notably including the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon as well as the Asiatic nomadic tribes at the northeastern boundary of the lands traditionally home to the Iranian peoples.
Elam (3500–539 BCE)
Medes (678–549 BCE)
Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE)
The Achaemenid Empire was the first of the Persian Empires to rule over significant portions of Greater Iran. The empire possessed a "national army" of roughly 120.000–150.000 troops, plus several tens of thousands of troops from their allies.The Persian army was divided into regiments of a thousand each, called hazarabam.
Ten hazarabams formed a haivarabam, or division. The best known haivarabam were the Immortals, the King's personal guard division. The smallest unit was the ten-man dathaba. Ten dathabas formed the hundred man sataba.
The royal army used a system of color uniforms to identify different units. A large variety of colors were used, some of the most common being yellow, purple, and blue. However, this system was probably limited to native Persian troops and was not used for their numerous allies.
The usual tactic employed by the Persians in the early period of the empire, was to form a shield wall that archers could fire over. These troops were equipped with a large rectangular wicker shield called a spara, and armed with a short spear, measuring around six feet long.
Though equipped and trained to conduct shock action, this was a secondary capability and the Persians preferred to maintain their distance from the enemy in order to defeat him with superior missile-power. The bow was the preferred missile-weapon of the Persians. At maximum rate of fire a sparabara haivarabam of 10,000 men could launch approximately 100,000 arrows in a single minute and maintain this rate for a number of minutes. Typically the Persian cavalry would open the battle by harassing the enemy with hit and run attacks – shooting arrows and throwing small javelins – while the Persian sparabara formed up their battle-array. Then the Persian cavalry would move aside and attempt to harass the flanks of the enemy. Defending against the Persian cavalry required the enemy infantry to congregate in dense static formations, which were ideal targets for the Persian archers. Even heavily armoured infantry like the Greek hoplites would suffer heavy casualties in such conditions. Enemy infantry formations that scattered to reduce casualties from the dense volleys of Persian arrows, were exposed to a close-in shock assault by the Persian cavalry. Torn by the dilemma between exposure to a gradual attrition by the arrows or to being overwhelmed by a cavalry charge on their flanks, most armies faced by the Persians succumbed.
The major weaknesses of the typical Persian tactics were that proper application of these tactics required:
a) A wide battlefield composed of fairly flat and expansive terrain that would not hinder the rapid movement of massed horses and where the cavalry could conduct proper flanking maneuvers.
b) Good coordination between the cavalry, infantry, and missile units.
c) An enemy inferior in mobility.
d) An enemy lacking a combined-arms military.
Most Persian failures can be attributed to one or more of these requirements not being met. Thus, the Scythians evaded the Persian army time and again because they were all mounted and conducted only hit-and-run raids on the Persians; at Marathon the Athenians deployed on a rocky mountainous slope and only descended to the plain after the Persian cavalry had reboarded their transport-ships – charging through the arrow-shower to conduct close-combat with spears and swords – a form of combat for which the Athenians were better equipped and better trained; at Thermopylae the Greek army deliberately deployed in a location that negated the Persians ability to use cavalry and missile-power, again forcing them to fight only head-on in close-combat and was forced to retreat only after the Persians were informed of a bypass that enabled them to circumvent this defensive position to defeat the Spartans; at Plataea the Persian attack was poorly coordinated and defeated piecemeal; Alexander the Great's Macedonian army that invaded the Persian empire was composed of a variety of infantry and cavalry types that enabled it, together with Alexander's superior tactical generalship, to negate the Persian capabilities and, once again, force them to fight close-combat.
Seleucid Empire (312 BCE–63 BCE)
The Seleucid Empire was a Hellenistic successor state of Alexander the Great's dominion, including central Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia, Turkmenistan, Pamir and the Indus valley.Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE)
Parthia was an Iranian civilization situated in the northeastern part of modern Iran, but at the height of its power, the Parthian dynasty covered all of Iran proper, as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Georgia, eastern Turkey, eastern Syria, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, the coast of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and the UAE.The Parthian empire was led by the Arsacid dynasty, led by the Parni, a confederation of Scythians which reunited and ruled over the Iranian plateau, after defeating and disposing the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, beginning in the late 3rd century BCE, and intermittently controlled Mesopotamia between 150 BCE and 224 CE. It was the third native dynasty of ancient Iran. Parthia was the arch-enemy of the Roman Empire for nearly three centuries.
After the Scythian-Parni nomads had settled in Parthia and built a small independent kingdom, they rose to power under king Mithridates the Great. The power of the early Parthian empire seems to have been overestimated by some ancient historians, who could not clearly separate the powerful later empire from its more humble obscure origins. The end of this long-lived empire came in 224 AD, when the empire was loosely organized and the last king was defeated by one of the empire's vassals, the Persians of the Sassanid dynasty.
Sassanid Empire (224–651)
The birth of the Sassanid army dates back to the rise of Ardashir I, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, to the throne. Ardashir aimed at the revival of the Persian Empire, and to further this aim, he reformed the military by forming a standing army which was under his personal command and whose officers were separate from satraps, local princes and nobility. He restored the Achaemenid military organizations, retained the Parthian cavalry model, and employed new types of armour and siege warfare techniques. This was the beginning for a military system which served him and his successors for over 400 years, during which the Sassanid Empire was, along with the Roman Empire and later the East Roman Empire, one of the two superpowers of late antiquity in Western Eurasia. The Sassanid army protected Eranshahr from the East against the incursions of central Asiatic nomads like the Hephthalites, Turks, while in the west it was engaged in a recurrent struggle against its rival, the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine Empire, setting on forth the conflict that had started since the time of their predecessors, the Parthians, and would end after around 720 years, making it the longest conflict in human history.Arab-Muslim conquest (633–654)
The Islamic conquest of Persia led to the end of the Sassanid Empire and the eventual decline of the Zoroastrian religion in Persia. However, the achievements of the previous Persian civilizations were not lost, but were to a great extent absorbed by the new Islamic polity.Most Muslim historians have long offered the idea that Persia, on the verge of the Arab invasion, was a society in decline and decay and thus it embraced the invading Arab armies with open arms. This view is not widely accepted however. Some authors have for example used mostly Arab sources to illustrate that "contrary to the claims, Iranians in fact fought long and hard against the invading Arabs." This view further more holds that once politically conquered, the Persians began engaging in a culture war of resistance and succeeded in forcing their own ways on the victorious Arabs.
Tahirid dynasty (821–873)
Although nominally subject to the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, the Tahirid rulers were effectively independent. The dynasty was founded by Tahir ibn Husayn, a leading general in the service of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun. Tahir's military victories were rewarded with the gift of lands in the east of Persia, which were subsequently extended by his successors as far as the borders of India.The Tahirid dynasty is considered to be the first independent dynasty from the Abbasid Caliphate established in Khorasan. They were overthrown by the Saffarid dynasty, who annexed Khorasan to their own empire in eastern Persia.