Who won the Battle of Gaugamela?
Alexander the Great won a decisive victory at Gaugamela on 1 October 331 BC, defeating the far larger Persian army of Darius III on ground the enemy had chosen in what is now northern Iraq. Darius fled, Babylon and the royal treasuries fell to Alexander, and Darius never faced him in battle again.1
On a wide plain in what is now northern Iraq, a young Macedonian king faced the full might of the Persian Empire on ground his enemy had chosen and prepared. By the end of the day at Gaugamela, the Persian field army was broken, and Alexander the Great was on his way to ruling the empire that had once invaded Greece.2
The battle from both sides
Two perspectivesAlexander came to Gaugamela to end Darius and win the Persian empire outright, though the Persians had chosen and leveled the ground for their chariots and vast numbers. He drew his line up at an angle and edged rightward, stretching the Persian front until a gap opened in their center. Into it he drove the wedge of his Companion cavalry, straight toward Darius himself. When the Great King fled, the heart went out of his army. The victory delivered Babylon, Susa and Persepolis and made Alexander master of the Persian world, though years of campaigning farther east still lay ahead of him.
Darius met Alexander on open ground of his own choosing, leveled for scythed chariots and his huge, many-nationed host, determined to use numbers where the mountains had failed him at Issus. His chariots and cavalry pressed the Macedonian wings hard, and his horsemen broke through toward the baggage. But Alexander's oblique advance pulled the Persian line apart, and when the Companion wedge lunged at the royal position, Darius fled the field as he had at Issus. His flight unraveled the army and doomed the empire; the following year Darius was dead at the hands of his own men and the Achaemenid realm was gone.3
The second meeting
Alexander had already beaten the Persian king Darius III once, at Issus. Darius, determined not to lose again, gathered a vast army from across his empire and chose a broad, flat battlefield (see the map below) where his numbers, his cavalry and his scythed chariots could be used to the full. He even had the ground leveled for the chariots.4
According to Arrian, some of the king's advisers had persuaded him that he had lost at Issus only because the field there was too narrow, and Darius was easily convinced. He rearmed as well. Diodorus says he had longer swords and lances made for his men and built 200 scythed chariots. Alexander, meanwhile, reached the Euphrates at Thapsacus in midsummer 331 BC and then forced a crossing of the Tigris, whose current was so strong that his men struggled to get over.5
When was the Battle of Gaugamela fought?
The Battle of Gaugamela was fought on 1 October 331 BC. The date is unusually secure for an ancient battle because an eclipse of the moon anchors it. Arrian and Plutarch both place a lunar eclipse shortly before the fighting, and a Babylonian astronomical diary records the eclipse and then the battle eleven days later.6
Modern eclipse tables put that eclipse, a total one, on the evening of 20 September 331 BC. The diary, a clay tablet kept by the astronomers of Babylon, dates the eclipse to the 13th and the battle to the 24th of the Babylonian month Ulûlu, the same eleven-day gap. Plutarch sets the eclipse in the Athenian month Boedromion and has Darius reviewing his army by torchlight on the eleventh night after it, while Arrian dates the battle itself to the month Pyanepsion, when Aristophanes was archon at Athens.7
The darkened moon was read as an omen on both sides. Aristander, Alexander's seer, promised a battle and a victory within the month. Curtius says the eclipse frightened Alexander's own soldiers, who complained that they were being dragged to the ends of the earth against the will of the gods, until Egyptian seers declared that the sun stood for the Greeks and the moon for the Persians.8
Where was the Battle of Gaugamela fought?
Gaugamela lay on an open plain in northern Mesopotamia, northeast of ancient Nineveh and across the Tigris from modern Mosul. It is usually placed near Tell Gomel in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, about 75 km (47 miles) northwest of Erbil, the ancient Arbela that gave the battle its other name.9
The name belonged to a village. Plutarch explains it as "camel's house," after an ancient king who gave a home there to the swift camel that had carried him to safety, and Livius links it to the Semitic word for the animal and a hill shaped like a dromedary's hump. Arrian puts the Persian camp near the river Bumodus, about 600 stades from Arbela, and many ancient writers called the battle after that city; Plutarch already pointed out that they were wrong to place it there.10
The exact field is still debated, and earlier travelers looked farther south, around Karamleis. A team led by the historian Michał Marciak has used satellite imagery and models of what each army could see to argue that the site by Tell Gomel fits the ancient accounts much better.11
How many soldiers fought at Gaugamela?
Alexander had about 47,000 men: Arrian gives 40,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry. The Persian army was much larger, but nobody knows its real size. Ancient writers give totals from about 245,000 to more than a million. Every source agrees the Persians had more men, and far more cavalry.12
| Source | Persian strength given |
|---|---|
| Arrian | 1,000,000 infantry, 40,000 cavalry, 200 scythed chariots and about 15 elephants13 |
| Diodorus | 800,000 infantry and at least 200,000 cavalry, with 200 scythed chariots14 |
| Curtius | 45,000 cavalry and 200,000 or 600,000 infantry (editions of the Latin text differ), with 200 scythed chariots15 |
| Plutarch | A million men16 |
| Modern view | True size unknown; Britannica calls some ancient totals fantastic17 |
What the sources do preserve is the range of peoples in the army. Arrian lists Bactrians, Sogdians and Indians under Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, Saca horse archers, Arachosians, Parthians, Medes, Babylonians, Armenians and Cappadocians, and Syrians and Mesopotamians led by Mazaeus. On Alexander's side the core was the Macedonian phalanx of pikemen and the Companion cavalry, with Greek allies, Thessalian horsemen and light troops filling out the line.18
The night before the battle
On the eve of the battle Parmenion and other senior officers urged a night attack. Alexander refused, and his reply in Plutarch is that he would not steal his victory. Plutarch adds a second reason: Darius had blamed mountains, narrow passes and the sea for his defeat at Issus, and Alexander wanted to leave him no excuse this time.19
Darius had no fortified camp and feared exactly the attack that Parmenion proposed, so he kept his army standing in battle order through the night. Arrian thought this long, anxious watch wore the Persians down before the fighting began.20
The oblique advance
Darius took the center with his kinsmen, his royal guard and his Greek mercenaries, with the elephants and 50 chariots in front of him. On his left, facing Alexander, stood Bactrian and Saca horsemen with 100 chariots; on his right, where Mazaeus commanded, another 50 chariots stood ahead of the Armenian and Cappadocian cavalry. Alexander took the right wing with the Companion cavalry, put the phalanx in the center and gave Parmenion the left with the Thessalian horse. Behind the front he placed a second line with orders to face about if the army was surrounded.21
Badly outnumbered, Alexander did not attack head on. He advanced his line at an angle, edging to the right, forcing the Persians to shift and stretch to match him. As Darius's line pulled sideways to keep from being outflanked, a gap began to open in it. Alexander kept moving right until he was almost off the ground the Persians had leveled, and Darius, afraid that his chariots would be useless on rough ground, sent the cavalry of his left wing riding around the Macedonian flank to stop him.22
What happened to the scythed chariots at Gaugamela?
Darius launched his scythed chariots, about 200 of them, against the Macedonian line, and they did far less than he had hoped. Light troops shot down horses and drivers or pulled them from the reins, and where chariots broke through, the infantry opened its ranks to let them pass and then closed again behind them.23
Arrian credits the Agrianians and the javelin men under Balacrus, posted in front of the Companions, with breaking the charge, and says the chariots that got through were overpowered by the army's grooms and the royal guard. Diodorus gives them more success. In his account the phalanx beat spears on shields to frighten the horses and turn many of the chariots back into their own ranks, but some of those that reached the Macedonians cut off arms and even heads.24
The wedge
With the chariots spent, Alexander struck. The Persian horsemen sent around his flank had left a break in their own front, in the Persian left center. At the head of his elite Companion cavalry, formed into a wedge with the nearest phalanx battalions beside it, he drove straight through the gap in the Persian line and aimed himself directly at Darius. It is one of the greatest cavalry charges in history.25
The king flees
With Alexander bearing down on him, Darius fled the field; Arrian says the king, who had been afraid for a long time, was the first to turn. Plutarch tells how the royal chariot was hemmed in by heaps of the dead, so that Darius left it and his armor behind and escaped on a mare. Diodorus has a different story, in which a javelin thrown by Alexander killed the king's charioteer and the guards, thinking Darius himself had fallen, broke and ran. Once their king had gone, the vast Persian army lost its heart and began to come apart, and what had been a battle became a rout.26
On Livius's reading, the Babylonian astronomical diary tells it the other way round: there it is the troops who desert their king and go home. Jona Lendering of Livius warns that for all the detailed descriptions in Greek and Roman writers, we know very little about how the fighting itself really went.27
The crisis on the left
While Alexander drove at the center, his left wing under the veteran Parmenion was pressed hard by the Persian cavalry. A body of Persian and Indian horsemen poured through a gap that had opened in the Macedonian line and rode all the way to the baggage camp in the rear, where some of the captives took up weapons to help them. Diodorus says Mazaeus sent 2,000 Cadusians and 1,000 Scythian horsemen on this raid, and that Darius's mother Sisygambis refused to leave with them. Arrian says the second Macedonian line turned and fell on the raiders from behind.28
Parmenion sent riders to call Alexander back. Plutarch has an earlier appeal reach Alexander just before his own charge, and Alexander reply that Parmenion had lost his head, since the winners would have the enemy's baggage anyway. Alexander broke off his pursuit of Darius and turned his Companions back across the field, and the cavalry clash that followed, as the enemy horsemen tried to cut their way out, was the fiercest of the whole battle. About 60 Companions fell, and Hephaestion, Coenus and Menidas were wounded. Only then could the rout become complete.29
Alexander rode after Darius until dark, rested beyond the river Lycus, the modern Great Zab, and pressed on to Arbela, about 600 stades from the battlefield. Darius had already gone, but his treasure, his chariot, his spear and his bow were taken there.30
How many died at Gaugamela?
No reliable count survives. Ancient writers put Alexander's dead at between about 100 and 500, and the Persian dead at anything from 40,000 to 300,000. None of these figures can be checked, but every source makes the losses very one-sided.31
Arrian gives about 100 Macedonians killed and more than 1,000 horses lost to wounds or exhaustion, nearly half of them from the Companion cavalry, against about 300,000 Persian dead and even more prisoners. Curtius counts 40,000 Persians and fewer than 300 Macedonians; Diodorus counts more than 90,000 Persians and about 500 Macedonians, with very many wounded.32
An empire falls
Gaugamela decided the war. Babylon opened its gates, the Persian treasuries fell into Alexander's hands, and the empire that had once threatened Greece at Marathon and Salamis passed to a Macedonian king still in his twenties. Plutarch writes that after the battle the Persian Empire was thought to be finished, and that Alexander, now hailed as king of Asia, handed out riches, lands and provinces to his friends.33
The Babylonians came out to meet him with their priests and leaders, bringing gifts. Alexander ordered the temples that Xerxes had destroyed to be rebuilt and kept Mazaeus, who had surrendered the city, as its satrap. At Susa, Arrian says, he took 50,000 talents, and from there he pushed on to the great royal capital of Persepolis.34
The prize was immense. On Rein Taagepera's figures, as tabulated by Peter Turchin and colleagues, the Achaemenid Empire at its height covered about 5.5 million km² (2.1 million square miles), and the empire Alexander ruled at his death in 323 BC about 5.2 million km² (2.0 million square miles). Gaugamela is the battle that opened it to him; see how it compares with the other great battles of the Persian Empire.35
What happened to Darius III after Gaugamela?
Darius escaped over the mountains into Media with his Bactrian cavalry, his kinsmen and about 2,000 Greek mercenaries. He fell back to Ecbatana but never fielded another army. In the summer of 330 BC, as Alexander closed in, his own nobles led by Bessus arrested him, stabbed him and left him to die.36
Arrian says Darius chose the hard road to Media because he expected Alexander to make for the rich prizes of Babylon and Susa. When Alexander came after him, he retreated east toward Bactria. His cavalry commander Nabarzanes, Bessus and Barsaentes, the satrap of Arachosia, seized him and carried him along in a covered wagon. When Alexander's horsemen caught up, Nabarzanes and Barsaentes wounded the king and fled, and he died before Alexander could see him. Arrian puts his age at about fifty and says Alexander sent the body to be buried in the royal tombs. Bessus took the royal name Artaxerxes and called himself king of Asia, but Darius was the last Achaemenid king to rule the empire.37
Gaugamela vs Issus: what was the difference?
Both battles set Alexander against Darius III in person, and both ended with the king in flight. The difference was the ground and the stakes. Issus, in November 333 BC, was fought in cramped, broken coastal country where Persian numbers could not tell; Gaugamela was fought on an open plain Darius had chosen and leveled, and it decided the war.38
| Rank | Issus | Gaugamela |
|---|---|---|
| Date | November 333 BC39 | 1 October 331 BC40 |
| Ground | Hilly coastal plain behind the river Pinarus41 | Level plain near the river Bumodus, cleared for chariots42 |
| Persian army in Arrian | About 600,00043 | 1,000,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry44 |
| Alexander's army | About 41,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry (Livius)45 | About 40,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry (Arrian)46 |
| What Darius lost | His camp, his mother, his wife and his children47 | His field army, Babylon, Susa and Persepolis48 |
Darius plainly drew a lesson from Issus: Arrian says he blamed the narrow field for his defeat, and Livius.org notes that this time he looked for a broad battlefield where his larger numbers could count, as they had not at Issus. The lesson did not save him. In both battles the decisive moment came when Alexander's cavalry reached the king. After Issus, Darius still had an empire to raise a new army from; after Gaugamela he never fielded another. To see where both battles rank, read the greatest battles of antiquity.49
Gaugamela is in the ancient battles quiz and the Greek battles quiz. See what else happened on 1 October, or play today's Battle of the Day.
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