Takabarâ in O.P.

[Lyceum]

Dan, I have not heard of any other uses. I am not an expert, and there is a lot of scholarship on these matters which few people interested in ancient warfare seem to read, but I would not take the claim seriously without evidence.

The modder's description of the Persian army is not in perfect English, so perhaps he is being misunderstood.

Yes but where else are they getting it from? Seriously that thread is mental along with others I've seen online. Now I haven't read every bit of old Persian, but I don't think I've seen takabara in a military context like that. But it's been a while. To be fair it does kind of make sense in that taka here is probably alluding to a crescent shape reminiscent of Macedonian kausia hence yauna takabara. Though from what I remember there is some issue in modern scholarship offer how this equation works. I know, Skjærvø literally glosses it as petasos-bearing.

Regardless of whether or not it works linguistically, it's all moot without proof. I've seen a lot of bad etymologies posited online, in that thread and others, often based on later Iranian languages like Farsi. Not only is this nonsensical but many of these don't even make grammatical (abara is an athematic strong stem! Stop messing with it) let alone etymological sense (Stop reading modern permutations and loans back into the past!). In fact part of its popularity may be due to similar sounding words in Farsi, I think takavar or takabar is a commando, tak is attack/strike.

In fact a lot of words one sees bandied about, online, for old Persian armies are clearly moderns attempting to make ancient words, often calqued on Greek sources! so I've seen "immortals" referred to as amrtyan (a calque) when the old Persian was anusyian (companions) and, anyway, if an Old Persianwanted to say "immortal" he wouldn''t say something like that which would actually mean "un-man" but something like anausan...

And why is we don't see genuine old Persian words bandied about? like arshtikan for spearmen? huh?

I'd be very, very, wary and consider the sources used, e.g often none. This is without even brooching the myriad problems in the evidence for those of us who pick up some Old Iranian languages...so yeah...Maybe it's mentioned in the sources, I don't know, I haven't read all of them and have less time for Persian than I do Avestan. If you do find something I'd be happy to see it though since I am interested in it.

Also, Sean!, have you seen Llewellyn-Jone's book on King and Court in Ancient Persia? Still haven't got to it myself, it looks interesting but the best of the Edinburgh readings in Persia group is yet to come so I'm not too fussed. Still, this is more your kind of thing.