Battle of Gaugamela main Persian infantry was poorly trained and equipped in comparison to Alexander's pezhetairoi and hoplites. The only respectable infantry Darius had were his 2,000 Greek hoplites and his personal bodyguard, the 10,000 Immortals. The Greek mercenaries fought in a phalanx, armed not with a heavy shield but with spears no longer than three metres, while the spears of the Immortals were two metres long. Among the other Persian troops, the most heavily armed were the Armenians, who were armed the Greek way and probably fought as a phalanx. The rest of Darius' contingents were much more lightly armed; the main
Ancient Greek Tsakonian language, which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek. By about the 6th century CE, the Koine had slowly metamorphosized into Medieval Greek. Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language at least closely related to Greek, but its exact relationship is unclear because of insufficient data: possibly a dialect of Greek; a sibling language to Greek; or a close cousin to Greek, and perhaps related to some extent, to Thracian and Phrygian languages. The Macedonian dialect (or language) appears to have been supplanted by Attic