Could the Persian Empire logistically support an army several million strong?

[Flaminpig0]

There are squatter camps that are comparable - that one example I gave from Nairobi numbering 800 000 to 1 000 000, jammed far closer together than I would conceive for the Persian camp, in a permanent settlement, and it still manages to function more-or-less.

The present-day evidence suggests it is not comparable.

800,000 is a quarter of the size of your Persian camp.
The largest dense slums on the planet today are Dharavi, Kibera etc., nothing much more than a million people.

The slums that exist today which are larger, e.g. the largest - Orangi (2mn people) is much less dense.
This is probably telling us something.

Conceptually a slum/camp is limited by how far you can walk in a day to get food, fresh water and bring it back again, or dispose of your waste.
This limits the maximum size, as observed by... Maurice.

Herodotus' Persian camp is not just unprecedented at the time, but without precedent since.

The main differences between a squatter camp and a Persian military camp is that squatter camps don't all have to be in the same place and are not supported by the machinery of an imperial economy (they're hardly supported by anything). Xerxes' army had to be in one place and was supplied by food dumps and the entire Persian fleet. If 1 000 000 people congregate of themselves into a single area at 1000 people/ha or more, what is the great difficulty in 3,4 million people congregating into an area under the command of the Great King, an area moreover that they don't occupy for more than a few days at a time?

Are you actually claiming that there were food dumps prepared inside Greek territory prior to or during the invasion?

[Justin Swanton]

There are squatter camps that are comparable - that one example I gave from Nairobi numbering 800 000 to 1 000 000, jammed far closer together than I would conceive for the Persian camp, in a permanent settlement, and it still manages to function more-or-less.

The present-day evidence suggests it is not comparable.

800,000 is a quarter of the size of your Persian camp.
The largest dense slums on the planet today are Dharavi, Kibera etc., nothing much more than a million people.

The slums that exist today which are larger, e.g. the largest - Orangi (2mn people) is much less dense.
This is probably telling us something.

Conceptually a slum/camp is limited by how far you can walk in a day to get food, fresh water and bring it back again, or dispose of your waste.
This limits the maximum size, as observed by... Maurice.

Herodotus' Persian camp is not just unprecedented at the time, but without precedent since.

The main differences between a squatter camp and a Persian military camp is that squatter camps don't all have to be in the same place and are not supported by the machinery of an imperial economy (they're hardly supported by anything). Xerxes' army had to be in one place and was supplied by food dumps and the entire Persian fleet. If 1 000 000 people congregate of themselves into a single area at 1000 people/ha or more, what is the great difficulty in 3,4 million people congregating into an area under the command of the Great King, an area moreover that they don't occupy for more than a few days at a time?

Are you actually claiming that there were food dumps prepared inside Greek territory prior to or during the invasion?

The food dumps were laid down from the Thracian coast to Therma in Macedonia, i.e. on most of the route the Persian army would march along. After that the army depended on the fleet and whatever it could strip from the countryside (which would be considerable as the Greeks had just gathered their harvest).

[Patrick Waterson]

2) Young assumes no fodder anywhere along the route, despite the Persians having marched 'at the best season of the year' (Herodotus VII.50).

The best season for marching is not the best season for grass growth
We know they were marching in the dry season.

Do we?  Is this just because Maurice says so?

Herodotus VII.37: "... the host, having wintered at Sardis, began its march towards Abydos, fully equipped, at the first approach of spring."

You are going to have a lot of trouble convincing me that spring was the dry season in Greece.

Study the agriculture of Greece, they didn't rely on Grazing animals because the vast amount of the country was not fit for grazing. (Hence the use of olive oil rather than butter)

But Xerxes was moving through Thrace and northern Greece, places which, unlike Greece south of Boeotia, sustained substantial cavalry forces and had numerous herdsmen.  Objection overruled.

Firstly each unit has to have room to form up as a military formation without having to take down its tents  (should they have any) because the unit might have to leave the camp ready to fight.

Not really: the Achaemenids were marching through non-hostile territory until Thermopylae, and even then do not seem to have paid any attention to this aspect of encamping.  When the Immortals left to use Ephialtes' pass at Thermopylae, they 'left the camp at about the time of the lighting of the lamps' but do not seem to have formed up inside it.  So yes, they need the ability to leave, but no, they do not need the ability to form up inside the camp, only to move if called upon.

There have to be lanes through the camp wide enough and clear enough to let the equivalent of the military police move at speed to break up trouble
These same lanes will be used to let the formed up units march out of the camp without having to march through the camping areas of other troops

Yes, this is eminently reasonable.

I think we take the Roman camps as an absolute minimum for the amount of size needed

Disagree, because Roman camps added a 200-yard anti-missile buffer all round.  I would thus take Roman camps (marching, not permanent, as the latter add various facilities and stores) as a maximum, not a minimum.

[Jim Webster]

Study the agriculture of Greece, they didn't rely on Grazing animals because the vast amount of the country was not fit for grazing. (Hence the use of olive oil rather than butter)

But Xerxes was moving through Thrace and northern Greece, places which, unlike Greece south of Boeotia, sustained substantial cavalry forces and had numerous herdsmen.  Objection overruled.

patrick, that is not worthy of you

Just do some homework and read up about Greek agriculture rather than trying to fob evidence off with smug one liners.

The herdsmen were in the very areas where the army didn't go!
A lot of the grazing for cattle was on marshland where the army couldn't pass
Please, actually ready something relevant to the discussion because frankly, if you're going to just make facile remarks like that, then I'm going to give up wasting time, because I've better things to do with it than spit into the wind

[Jim Webster]

Not really: the Achaemenids were marching through non-hostile territory until Thermopylae, and even then do not seem to have paid any attention to this aspect of encamping.  When the Immortals left to use Ephialtes' pass at Thermopylae, they 'left the camp at about the time of the lighting of the lamps' but do not seem to have formed up inside it.  So yes, they need the ability to leave, but no, they do not need the ability to form up inside the camp, only to move if called upon.

Please explain how you draw the conclusion in Green from the statement in red

[Jim Webster]

I think we take the Roman camps as an absolute minimum for the amount of size needed

Disagree, because Roman camps added a 200-yard anti-missile buffer all round.  I would thus take Roman camps (marching, not permanent, as the latter add various facilities and stores) as a maximum, not a minimum.

Given that nobody has ever produced any evidence that the Persians routinely fortified their camps (we know they did a couple of times when they were stopped for a long period,) then it is actually highly likely that there was nobody in the Persian army who know just exactly where the camp perimeter was, if only because of the sheer size.
Remember you're the one trying to convince us that the Persians had camps of about six million people and livestock (and remember, there are properly laid out latrines and everything because the last thing an army this size needs is dysentery) and on a regular basis.
So produce some evidence? Show us something in the literature, what does Xenophon say?
Hell even a few quotes from the Cyropaedia would be nice
You're claiming the an ancient source has primacy over modern experience, so let's see some more quotes from ancient sources to support Herodotus.
Taking persian camps as an example, Xenophon lived in one for some months, go and see what he says about it

[Flaminpig0]

There are squatter camps that are comparable - that one example I gave from Nairobi numbering 800 000 to 1 000 000, jammed far closer together than I would conceive for the Persian camp, in a permanent settlement, and it still manages to function more-or-less.

The present-day evidence suggests it is not comparable.

800,000 is a quarter of the size of your Persian camp.
The largest dense slums on the planet today are Dharavi, Kibera etc., nothing much more than a million people.

The slums that exist today which are larger, e.g. the largest - Orangi (2mn people) is much less dense.
This is probably telling us something.

Conceptually a slum/camp is limited by how far you can walk in a day to get food, fresh water and bring it back again, or dispose of your waste.
This limits the maximum size, as observed by... Maurice.

Herodotus' Persian camp is not just unprecedented at the time, but without precedent since.

The main differences between a squatter camp and a Persian military camp is that squatter camps don't all have to be in the same place and are not supported by the machinery of an imperial economy (they're hardly supported by anything). Xerxes' army had to be in one place and was supplied by food dumps and the entire Persian fleet. If 1 000 000 people congregate of themselves into a single area at 1000 people/ha or more, what is the great difficulty in 3,4 million people congregating into an area under the command of the Great King, an area moreover that they don't occupy for more than a few days at a time?

Are you actually claiming that there were food dumps prepared inside Greek territory prior to or during the invasion?

The food dumps were laid down from the Thracian coast to Therma in Macedonia, i.e. on most of the route the Persian army would march along. After that the army depended on the fleet and whatever it could strip from the countryside (which would be considerable as the Greeks had just gathered their harvest).

So you army of  several million men concentrated in one area fed  itself from foraging the Greek countryside

[Patrick Waterson]

Are you actually claiming that there were food dumps prepared inside Greek territory prior to or during the invasion?

It really would help if people contributing this thread were to read Herodotus.

"King Xerxes, then, mourned for the death of Artachaees. But the Greeks who received Xerxes' army and entertained the king himself were brought to such a degree of misery, that they were driven from house and home. Witness the case of the Thasians, who received and feasted Xerxes' army on behalf of their towns on the mainland; Antipatrus son of Orgeus, as notable a man as any of his townsmen, chosen by them for this task, rendered them an account of four hundred silver talents expended on the dinner.

Similar accounts were returned by the officers in the other towns. Now the dinner, about which a great deal of fuss had been made and for the preparation of which orders had been given long ago, proceeded as I will tell. [2] As soon as the townsmen had word from the herald's proclamation, they divided corn among themselves in their cities and all of them for many months ground it to wheat and barley meal; moreover, they fed the finest beasts that money could buy, and kept landfowl and waterfowl in cages and ponds, for the entertaining of the army. They also made gold and silver cups and bowls and all manner of service for the table. [3] These things were provided for the king himself and those that ate with him. For the rest of the army they provided only food. At the coming of the army, there was always a tent ready for Xerxes to take his rest in, while the men camped out in the open air. [4] When the hour came for dinner, the real trouble for the hosts began. When they had eaten their fill and passed the night there, the army tore down the tent on the next day and marched off with all the movables, leaving nothing but carrying all with them." - Herodotus VII.118-119

So not only were 'food dumps' prepared 'inside Greek territory', some of them were prepared by Greeks themselves.  It depended on whose service you were in: if you had sent earth and water to the Persian king, you obeyed his commands.  If there were: 'have food ready for my army', you had food ready for his army.  Is there anything here particularly hard to understand?

The herdsmen were in the very areas where the army didn't go!
A lot of the grazing for cattle was on marshland where the army couldn't pass

At least we agree on the existence of cattle and herdsmen.

What we now need to consider is the effects of the erosion/submergence of the northern Aegean coastline over the past couple of millennia.  The plain of Doriscus, for example, is now underwater, along with a lot of other potential grazing areas.  Erosion around Alexandroupolis is still a major concern.

Suffice to say that the map of Thrace and northern Greece today is not that of 480 BC.

Not really: the Achaemenids were marching through non-hostile territory until Thermopylae, and even then do not seem to have paid any attention to this aspect of encamping.  When the Immortals left to use Ephialtes' pass at Thermopylae, they 'left the camp at about the time of the lighting of the lamps' but do not seem to have formed up inside it.  So yes, they need the ability to leave, but no, they do not need the ability to form up inside the camp, only to move if called upon.

Please explain how you draw the conclusion in Green from the statement in red

I do not.  An Achaemenid unit of 10,000 men formed for battle would be 100 wide and 100 deep.  These men are intended to move out and cross a mountain track which is perhaps a few men wide.  What is the point of forming them up as opposed to simply leading them out of camp a few files wide?  Herodotus uses 'hormeato', setting out, to describe their activity.

[Justin Swanton]

There are squatter camps that are comparable - that one example I gave from Nairobi numbering 800 000 to 1 000 000, jammed far closer together than I would conceive for the Persian camp, in a permanent settlement, and it still manages to function more-or-less.

The present-day evidence suggests it is not comparable.

800,000 is a quarter of the size of your Persian camp.
The largest dense slums on the planet today are Dharavi, Kibera etc., nothing much more than a million people.

The slums that exist today which are larger, e.g. the largest - Orangi (2mn people) is much less dense.
This is probably telling us something.

Conceptually a slum/camp is limited by how far you can walk in a day to get food, fresh water and bring it back again, or dispose of your waste.
This limits the maximum size, as observed by... Maurice.

Herodotus' Persian camp is not just unprecedented at the time, but without precedent since.

The main differences between a squatter camp and a Persian military camp is that squatter camps don't all have to be in the same place and are not supported by the machinery of an imperial economy (they're hardly supported by anything). Xerxes' army had to be in one place and was supplied by food dumps and the entire Persian fleet. If 1 000 000 people congregate of themselves into a single area at 1000 people/ha or more, what is the great difficulty in 3,4 million people congregating into an area under the command of the Great King, an area moreover that they don't occupy for more than a few days at a time?

Are you actually claiming that there were food dumps prepared inside Greek territory prior to or during the invasion?

The food dumps were laid down from the Thracian coast to Therma in Macedonia, i.e. on most of the route the Persian army would march along. After that the army depended on the fleet and whatever it could strip from the countryside (which would be considerable as the Greeks had just gathered their harvest).

So you army of  several million men concentrated in one area fed  itself from foraging the Greek countryside

My take is that it would spread out, like Sherman's army in Georgia in 1864, and help itself to the harvest - a harvest meant to keep the entire local population and livestock fed for 12 months until the next harvest.

Here's a street view of the Thessalian countryside. Doesn't look too bad for grazing to me. The texan herd drivers would have liked it. 

[Prufrock]

Are you actually claiming that there were food dumps prepared inside Greek territory prior to or during the invasion?

It really would help if people contributing this thread were to read Herodotus.

To be fair, it was Justin who mentioned the food dumps. Ian was simply asking if Justin was claiming that there were food dumps in Greece itself.

[Erpingham]

Lawrence is not trying to perform logistical calculations for Herodotus but for troops under his care.  We can therefore take his figures as applicable to his situation; whether they also apply to 5th century BC Achaemenids is a moot point: their importance is to show that Maurice's staff figures are not universal and in particular seem overstated in a non-European Near Eastern context.

The communist Chinese are invoked not to advocate an inapplicable supply system but to demonstrate that we English-speakers tend to be too wedded to communications routes when considering what an army could or could not do, and this despite some very recent examples of our getting it wrong because other cultures do things differently.

Ok, so Lawrence was three times more efficient than the contemporary British army and the Chinese could move four times the number of men.  So we should expect the real force is three or four times the size of Maurice as a "thinking outside the box "?

How the mighty have fallen.  We've gone from one of the most highly organised armies in pre-modern history to a migrating squatter camp of gigantic proportions.  Perhaps time for some reflection on the difference? I don't think the highly ordered supply and march routine and the mobile squatter camp are easy bedfellows.

I know it is hard to resist a drift into sarcasm, but you must resist.  

That was me being wry - do we have a wry emoji?

Although previous Achamenid armies, or at least those for which we have source numbers, did not exceed 700,000 men, this one represented a full mobilisation of the Empire, or as full as could be managed without leaving everything defenceless, and was the first and last time this was done for the purpose of expanding the Empire.  There would be later mass mobilisations for defensive purposes, threatened Achaemenid monarchs massing armies recorded as being around the 1 million mark in Mesopotamia (Artaxerxes II in 401 BC; Darius III in 331 BC) but never again for a conquest or reconquest.  This was a unique event, and like all unique events, does not fit comfortably into a standard pattern.

Are these sources describing the 700,000 armies better documented than Herodotus?  If not, all we can say is Xerxes army was big by comparison with other Persian armies. 

[Justin Swanton]

That was me being wry - do we have a wry emoji?

How about this one?  (my favourite)

Or this one if you like. 

[Flaminpig0]

Are you actually claiming that there were food dumps prepared inside Greek territory prior to or during the invasion?

It really would help if people contributing this thread were to read Herodotus.

To be fair, it was Justin who mentioned the food dumps. Ian was simply asking if Justin was claiming that there were food dumps in Greece itself.

Thats Ok I have been condescended to before;)


I did mean hostile Greek territory

[Erpingham]

On George Crook and his double loaded mules, I looked up whether we had an estimate of their load.  This paper states

When promoted to the Commander of the Department of Arizona in 1871, Crook finally had the resources to work on the problem. He had his quartermaster purchase 15,000 mules and recruited civilian packers. Crook hired Thomas Moore as his chief packer and Dave Mears as his assistant to recruit, train, equip, organize and supervise the pack trains. Crook then treated the study of the pack trains as a science. He learned that if they custom fitted the aparejo pack to each mule, they could increase the weight carried to four hundred pounds


So modern US army mules seem to have benefitted from Crook's expertise and no longer carry half his load. 

[Flaminpig0]

There are squatter camps that are comparable - that one example I gave from Nairobi numbering 800 000 to 1 000 000, jammed far closer together than I would conceive for the Persian camp, in a permanent settlement, and it still manages to function more-or-less.

The present-day evidence suggests it is not comparable.

800,000 is a quarter of the size of your Persian camp.
The largest dense slums on the planet today are Dharavi, Kibera etc., nothing much more than a million people.

The slums that exist today which are larger, e.g. the largest - Orangi (2mn people) is much less dense.
This is probably telling us something.

Conceptually a slum/camp is limited by how far you can walk in a day to get food, fresh water and bring it back again, or dispose of your waste.
This limits the maximum size, as observed by... Maurice.

Herodotus' Persian camp is not just unprecedented at the time, but without precedent since.

The main differences between a squatter camp and a Persian military camp is that squatter camps don't all have to be in the same place and are not supported by the machinery of an imperial economy (they're hardly supported by anything). Xerxes' army had to be in one place and was supplied by food dumps and the entire Persian fleet. If 1 000 000 people congregate of themselves into a single area at 1000 people/ha or more, what is the great difficulty in 3,4 million people congregating into an area under the command of the Great King, an area moreover that they don't occupy for more than a few days at a time?

Are you actually claiming that there were food dumps prepared inside Greek territory prior to or during the invasion?

The food dumps were laid down from the Thracian coast to Therma in Macedonia, i.e. on most of the route the Persian army would march along. After that the army depended on the fleet and whatever it could strip from the countryside (which would be considerable as the Greeks had just gathered their harvest).

So you army of  several million men concentrated in one area fed  itself from foraging the Greek countryside

My take is that it would spread out, like Sherman's army in Georgia in 1864, and help itself to the harvest - a harvest meant to keep the entire local population and livestock fed for 12 months until the next harvest.

Here's a street view of the Thessalian countryside. Doesn't look too bad for grazing to me. The texan herd drivers would have liked it. 

Much like the other examples such as  the Helvetti and the Voortrekkers Shermans army in Georgia was considerably smaller.

Just thought but if this was the say in say Boeotia, Thessaly etc and other medizing areas would it not have caused mass famine which would mean that these states would not have been able to field troops to support Mardonious at Platea?

What I haven't been able to find out is any estimate of the size of the Greek population at the time broken down by areas.