The Persian Army/The Egyptian Army

An excerpt from Soldiers & Ghosts by J.E. Lendon:

They bore shields stretched with the skins of cranes, when they marched against Greece, and they wore horses' foreheads as helmets, with the mane streaming down the back and the ears thrust up in the front. They marched with the Indians, with their garments of cotton and their bows of reed, but even with the Indians they made but a tiny part of the host that Xerxes, the Great King of Persia, had summoned forth from the recesses of his empire. For there were Persians with golden pomegranates on their spear-butts and Medes and Assyrians with helms of twisted bronze and Bactrians and Scythians and Parthians and Caspians, and the Ethiopians in the skins of leopards and lions: and the Ethiopians bore spears tipped with gazelles' horns, and before they fought painted their bodies half red and half white. And there were Arabians and Libyans with javelins burned hard at the point and Phrygians and Lydians and Mysians and Thracians with caps of fox skin. And to vie with the horse heads there were proud tiaras and humble snoods and helmets of leather and wood and bronze, with brazen ears and the horns of oxen wrought upon them.

The Persians have been known for rallying and fielding the largest armies of the ancient world. At battles such as Gaugamela and Thermopylae, perhaps a few hundred thousand. Some ancient historians exaggerate exponentially, Herodotus claiming over a million at Gaugamela and up to five million for the campaign to Thermopylae.

A Persian army would seem a gargantuan, disorganized ocean to the casual observer of ancient times (not that the observer's eyes would be casual in any sense; on the contrary, he would probably soil himself). But the loosely packed nebulae did hold a theoretical order. The organization seems to suggest the Persians used a base-ten numeric system, as the largest divisions were 'thousands', or hazarabam. The hazarabam were more or less akin to the modern 'regiment'. Each of the hazarabam were divided into sataba, or 'hundreds'. Dathabam come next. This 'ten' seems to be the only division that had any practical use, as the others were only hypothetical, really.

An excerpt from Fighting Techniques of the Ancient World by Simon Anglim, et al.:

Each dathabam would deploy in a file of 10, with the dathapatis (section commander) holding the spara up in front and nine archers lining up behind [in single file]. The dathapatis carried a 2m (6ft) long thrusting spear to defend the rest of his section; should he fall, then the archers defended themselves as best as they could with falchions -- short, curved swords with and edge but no point.

This 9:1 of ranged to hand-to-hand infantry (sparabara) indicates that if the incredible weight of Persian shot failed to decimate the enemy, then the odds were slanted against them when it literally came to blows. This explains the relative ease of how the few-but-heavily-armoured Greeks managed to rout Persian forces on several occasion without suffering massive casualties.
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The Egyptian Army

As we stated earlier,