According to Herodotus, the Persians numbered 300,000 and were accompanied by troops from Greek city states that supported the Persian cause (including Thebes).
At first the Persians' superior numbers gave them the advantage, but eventually the Athenians broke through the Persian line, whereupon the Persian army routed and fled.
The mountains and foothills that approach the range are home to a significant portion of Iran's population, including, in addition to ethnic Persians, significant numbers of Assyrian Christians, Kurds, and Turks as well as Lurs, Bakhtyārī, and Qashqāʾī tribal groups.
As sources on the ground have told BBC Persian, a number of IRGC officers were involved at a command level before the operation was officially launched.
This database is named PHOND, Persian Handwritten Optical Numbers & Digits, and it is available to the research community.
Herodotus estimated the Persian army to number in the millions, but modern scholars tend to doubt his reportage.
It is not the first time the Iranian authorities have resorted to such tactics, but Sadeq Saba, head of BBC Persian, said the number of incidents and level of harassment has increased in the last few weeks.
A resident of Saravan, Yar Ahmad, told BBC Persian that a number of people in the nearby village of Lolokadan had been injured, with broken arms or legs, but only had first aid kits for treatment.
From several thousands in the times of the Greco-Persian Wars, the numbers of full citizen Spartans had declined to a few hundred in the times of Cleomenes III.
