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
Classification of Thracian Classification of Thracian The linguistic classification of the ancient Thracian language has long been a matter of contention and uncertainty, and there are widely varying hypotheses regarding its position among other Paleo-Balkan languages. It is not contested, however, that the Thracian languages were Indo-European languages which had acquired satem characteristics by the time they are attested. The longer Thracian inscriptions that are known (if they are indeed examples of Thracian sentences and phrases, which has not been determined) are not apparently close to Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, or any other known language, and they have not been satisfactorily deciphered aside from