Alexander : a history of the origin and growth of the art of war from ...

12 ORIENTAL ARMIES.The existence of such castes gave rise to what eventuallybecame standing armies, and from the ranks of these werechosen the king'sOriental govermnent.body-guard, always an important factor inThe Phoenicians fii"st employed mercenary troops. A paidforce enabled the citizens to continue without interruptionthe commercial life on which their power rested. But suchtroops were of necessity unreliable. Egypt and Persia inlater times employed mercenaries in large numbers.In addition to these methods of recruitment, drafts of entiredistricts, or partial drafts of the country, were usual.These swelled the standing armies, caste or mercenary, toa huge size, but furnished an unreliable material, which,against good troops, was in itself a source of weakness, butwhich often won against similarly constituted bodies.The methods of conducting war, in organization and tactics,were always on a low scale in the Orient. The originof every military device is in the East ; successive stepstowards improvement were made in Europe by the Greeksand Romans. Despite that a certain luxurious civilizationrose to a higher grade among the Orientals, the militaryinstinct of these down-trodden races was less marked thanamong the freemen of the West. In one respect alone —cavalry—were the Oriental nations superior. This superioritywas owing to the excellence of their horses and tothe prevalence of horsemanship among them. In aU otherbranches they fell distinctly below the Europeans.The chief characteristic of the operations of the ancientOrientals was that of huge raids or wars of conquest, whichoverran vast territories, and often led to the conflict of enormousarmies, to the extinguishment or enslaving of nations,or to long drawn-out sieges of capitals or commercial cities.In battles, it was sought by stratagem to fall on, and, by pre-