Armies of Asia and Africa from Persia to the Zulu Kingdom

Begin with a force drawn from many subject peoples under regional satraps, which carried Persian power from Cyrus the Great conquest of Lydia in 546 BC to the defeats at Marathon, Salamis and Plataea, and fell to Alexander the Great in the 330s BC.

Qin crossbowmen and conscript infantry won through standardized weapons and a ranking system that rewarded battlefield achievement with land and status, and the Terracotta Army discovered in 1974 preserves their organization in clay.

Chandragupta Maurya raised this army from about 322 BC and ended his conflict with Seleucus I by treaty, yielding 500 war elephants; the bloody Kalinga War of 262 to 261 BC then turned Ashoka away from conquest.

After defeat at Baideng in 200 BC the early Han bought peace with the Xiongnu, until Emperor Wu took the offensive from 133 BC and Huo Qubing and Wei Qing won at Mobei in 119 BC.

Nubian archers with six to seven foot bows were the heart of this army, which under King Piye conquered Lower Egypt and, centuries later under Kandake Amanirenas, fought Roman Egypt to a peace favorable to Kush.

Aksum backed its army with a strong navy to dominate Red Sea trade, sent expeditions into southern Arabia, and under King Kaleb invaded Yemen in the sixth century before losing that foothold in the Aksumite-Persian wars of 570 to 578.

The Guptas fielded five arms of infantry, cavalry, chariots, elephants and ships; Samudragupta conquests are recorded on the Allahabad Pillar, and Hun invasions around 500 AD weakened the empire fatally.

Camel-mounted Sanhaja Berber tribesmen became an imperial force under Yusuf ibn Tashfin, won at Sagrajas against Alfonso VI of Castile in 1086, and ruled from Mauritania into Spain until the dynasty collapsed by 1147.

Turkic and Afghan cavalry archers, many of them former slave soldiers, held northern India from 1206 and repeatedly repelled Mongol invasions, sparing the subcontinent the conquest that struck Persia and Central Asia.

Built on a hereditary weisuo system, the Ming standing army exceeded one million troops; the 1449 Tumu Crisis, when the emperor himself was captured, shifted strategy toward fortifying the Great Wall.

Kongo forces defeated the Portuguese near Mbanda Kasi in 1623, suffered a catastrophic loss at Mbwila in 1665 where King Antonio I died, and recovered some ground at Kitombo in 1670.

Babur won at Panipat in 1526, and his successors combined cavalry, elephants and gunpowder artillery under the mansabdari system, which tied ranked nobles to supplying set numbers of troops and horses.

Nurhaci reorganized his troops into companies of 300 households in 1601, creating a hereditary system of eight colored banners that conquered Ming China in 1644 and remained the Qing core until 1912.

Under Shaka, age-based regiments called amabutho, the short stabbing iklwa and the buffalo horns formation built the last army on this path, which beat British forces at Isandlwana in 1879 before losing the war.