THE IMMORTALS AND THEIR NAME

The organizational requirements of the empire demanded a regular organization to administrate military units, and the Achaemenids established a powerful royal army turn his large and centralized realm. At the beginning of the empire, the army was composed only of Persian soldiers were drafted to fight for the king. Later it consisted of hired professional soldiers. Of course, some of the systems went back the previous Iranian dynasty, the Medes, who had its roots in the Assyrian period. The most important unit of the army was that of the Immortals. The Immortals contained an élite regiment known as the King’s spear Carriers. First, this paper aims to show the organization of the immortals, and secondly, their name in historical texts. Therefore we will focus on the divisions of Achaemenid’s army, the formations of immortal units based on ancient and later texts, and then try to explain an immortal title to which Herodotus alludes. It emphasizes linguistic data to lead to a better conclusion. Thus, we concluded that Herodotus’ explanation about ‘anauša’ is more probable than anušiya.

Army, Immortal, Ten thousand, Anauša, Anušiya