Xerxes' army - infantry Review/Parade

Following on from all my previous posts on building this army, I think it's worth stating the criteria I've used for this army.

It's not designed to be a completely  accurate representation. It's designed to field an Old School Persian army based on Garrison 20mm figures and conversions of Garrison figures. These may or may not be close to the descriptions in Herodotus or 'Armies of the Greek and Persian Wars'. Often not! Equally, it isn't meant to cover every contingent in every Corps - although some Corps may be represented by more than one contingent. The idea is to present all the different Corps.

Must admit I've spent more time on this (figures and post!) than just about any other Review - I've trialled three different layots and 'formally' considered two different force compositions - plus other odd thoughts that didn't get past that!

My final thoughts were this. Herodotus describes 30 Corps of 60,000 men each. Looking at it, I finally settled on representing each Corps by 6 elements so that each element nominally represented 10,000 men on Herodotus' lists. As some elements only included 2 or 3 figures, that merely represents units that sent 'understrength' units!

In terms of numbers, there are 8 24 figure Corps, 14 18 figure Corps and 8 12 figure Corps. This represents 540 figures in total. If each figure represents 2,500 men the whole infantry force represents 1,350,000 men.

Incidentally, I got a bit confused with the numbers - at 10,000 Immortals and 60,000 for the other 29 Corps, 'Armies of the Greek and Persian Wars' got the total to 1,175,000 - I couldn't understand why, even by making the Immortals the same size as the other Corps thus adding 50, 000 to my total, I got a number 175,000 higher than they did - simple answer, the book added the numbers up wrong! The obvious clue - if all their numbers were multiples of 10,000, how can the total have a 5,000 in it? Took me ages to work it out - you always assume the book is right!

Individual Corps are set out from left to right - I to X on the front, XI to XX in the middle, XXI to XXX at the back. The Immortals should only be 10,000 strong rather than the 60,000 nominal strength of the others so they are a bit over represented.

A view down the army from the left flank. Of the 30 Corps only 5 don't include at least some conversions in their ranks.

Xerxes reviewing the army accompanied by Guard cavalry - I'm not including these cavalry as part of the army.

As Mardonius was in charge of the army at Plataea I'm using this to represent him as the 'real' general of the invasion army.

Because I'm sticking to '6 elements per Corps' a couple of Corps are only represented by half units - this is Corps XXV and includes Cabalees and Milyae.

Another 'split' Corps - XVIII with Ethiopians and Arabians. The Libyans of Corps XIX are in the background.

Other people's figures - Corps VI Assyrians using figures bought from Harry Pearson. These are the figures he says he used as Tarbisa infantry in his Apocryphal Well recreation - think he got mixed up with the Tutub infantry though -  Tutubs should have been the Garrison  figures and Tarbisa the Minifigs.

Corps XX Paphlagonians - ex-Charles Grant figures next to those Libyans again!

Which leaves me with a 'what to do next'?

There are actually at least three things here. One would be the cavalry, next would be the Marines, and the last would be the army as constituted for Plataea. Do I do the first two as separate items or do I just add them to the infantry? Still thinking about it....

Talking about the cavalry, considering I'm probably close to reaching the 400 mark on Garrison Persian cavalry, it seems silly to be thinkingabout what else I  'need'. However, if I'm going to make an attempt to match the infantry and cavalry... need Caspian and Paricanian equivalents. As the infantry versions of these are themselves converted from one of my 'new' horse archer figures (by adding a cloak) it makes sense to use those horse archers as the cavalry. It would be awkward to add the cloak, but uncloaked should be fine. I already have one unit painted as late Achaemenids, but the addition of one more will do for now. The other unit is a unit of Indian cavalry. This will simply be the Egyptian horse archer minus plume and different paint job - the same figure I used as the Arab camel rider - so need to sort them out.

Next, marines. To be honest I've got more than enough figures for most purposes. I've got the Carians, Aeolians, Asian Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians and Lycians done already. If I can't find a couple of Greek style units of whatever type for Pontus and Cyprus from my other Greeks I want shooting. This leaves the Cilicians - so could do with another unit of J/Sh infantry in tunic/trousers.

Finally, Plataea... take away some of the current Corps, add some of the Marines (ie Egypians), then add Thebans that already exist...

Grant Hinchliffe Persian army Review

'My' Grant collection doesn't include all his figures, it just includes Hinchliffe Persians and some Byzantines plus Garrison Persians and Greeks - quite a  lot I don't have, mainly the Assyrians, obviously Byzatines and (I assume) Sassanids - but includes enough so that  over the next few days I should be able to include a few more Grant 'Reviews'.

In all, these are quite a substantial force in their own right.

This out-of-place shot is because a unit was left off the original photo shoot - so I've added this one to update things!

Right wing cavalry - the heavy cavalry in the middle of the back row are actually Sassanids rather than Achaemenids, so good job I just put the title as 'Persian'. And also, together with having some Byzantines, the reason I feel he must have had a full Sassanid army...

Chariots and infantry - nothing else to say that hasn't already been said about these.

And finally20 left wing light cavalry.

'Ancient Battles for Wargamers' figures.

Apart from a lot of the figures in The Ancient Wargame I also have some of the figures that 'inspired' some of the artwork in Ancient Battles for Wargamers. In this post I'm just going to concentrate on that aspect - I'll go over the bulk of the figures later.

This is the 'official' list I've got of the figures and what they represent - from a list provided by Harry.

This one seems to be a pretty close match to the illustrations.

Again, you can see the resemblance between the two.

Can't say that I'm as certain about the resemblances between any of the Immortal figures and illustrations, but these seem to be the closest!

I don't usually  post illustrations direct from books, and note that the book is copyright 1977 to Argus Books Ltd. Less than 5% of the book is published here under fair useage for purposes of Education/Research

'The Ancient War Game' cover figures.

Although most of the figures in the book are Garrison, the cover features a load of 'new' Hinchliffe figures. Happily, those figures have been part of my own collection for a number of years...

The cover includes 3 units: chariots, open order Immortal archers and close order Immortals.

There are 3 chariots on the cover - no idea which ones from the photo.

Well, apart from this one, which is pretty obvious...

Frontal view of 3 of the others...

Back view of the other 3.

There are 30 Immortal archers on open order bases - though these were based by Harry, not Grant.

30 close order Immortals - I'll do other units as this series continues.

(Posted before but probably still best to include a picture of the cover):

I've started more units of Xerxes army; that series will intersperse with these over the next ??? or so.

Corps I-V - The Immortals and Sparabara

The bread and butter units of Persian armies from the beginning to about 410-420BCE.

Nothing needed to add to these as they've been around for quite a while already. In some cases they just exist as rump/test units - though of course they are also useful for DBA armies anyway.

200 plus sparabara is pretty impressive - but when it comes to a final Review of Xerxes army would be a bit overpowering.

So will almost certainly finish up as representative elements - here from front to back Corps I to V.

There is one full Immortal regiment plus three single element rump units. These are Corps I

I normally use these as Medes to conform to the Minifigs S Range figures. However, here they are conforming to the Armies book (and Persian sources) so they are correctly acting as Persians in Corps II.

Which means that Corps III has two full regiments of Medes to choose from.

Each regiment has  three elements totalling 24 figures each.  Originally I had intended to make every regiment up to 48 figures.

Corps IV the Kashshites (Cissians) is the odd one out. Apart from officers and standard bearers, all of the other Corps use converted figures. This one is based on PE5, archer firing, unarmoured. On the other hand, the sparas themselves are conversions... This is a 48 strong regiment.

Corps V, the Hyrkanians, is represented by my 'Universal Archer' figure. 48 of them.

Note these are only 6 figures to a double base - Irregular figures rather than Regular. Some of the others should probably been 6 to a base as well.

In reality I would have expected this lot to represent over half the infantry in invasion army - assuming that many of the others would probably be token Corps whereas these would probably be full strength. I know I've got more than enough Spara units (including Minifigs...) but don't think I've finished with them yet.

'How can you have too many of something you didn't need in the first place'.