The Medes

The Medes (Old Persian Māda, Greek Mêdoi, Assyrian and Babylonian Mādāya) are, in the ancient telling, the people who made the first Iranian empire and then lost it to their kinsmen the Persians. They are also among the most argued-over peoples of the ancient Near East, for the fullest account of them, Herodotus's, is a Greek story built on Median oral tradition, while the documents that might check it, Assyrian annals, Babylonian chronicles, the excavated mounds of the Zagros, tell a thinner and less orderly tale. Out of that gap has grown the central problem of this entry, and one of the liveliest questions in Achaemenid studies: was there ever a Median empire at all, a centralised state on the Assyrian or later Persian model, or has the Greek picture given a crown and a capital to what was in truth a shifting confederacy of highland chiefs? The compendium keeps that question open, because the reference scholarship keeps it open. What is not in doubt is the aftermath: from 550 BCE the Medes and Persians stood together as the two ruling Iranian peoples of the empire, so nearly matched that the Greeks used the Mede and the Persian almost interchangeably, and named the great wars against the King, and betrayal to his side, after the Medes.

The land and the name

Media lay in north-western Iran, in the Zagros highlands and on the fertile plain of Hamadān, the ancient Ecbatana. Its boundaries were never fixed: they shifted over several hundred years, and, as the reference article states plainly, 'its precise geographical extent remains unknown to us'. In the early period the western Median principalities, each independent of the others, reached not far beyond the Hamadān plain, hemmed by the Zagros; to the north lay Gizilbunda in the mountains, to the south the Elamite country and the kingdom of Ellipi, to the east the great salt desert (the Dašt-e Kavīr). The capital's name is fixed in Darius's own rock: Old Persian Hagmatāna (Elamite Agmadana, Babylonian Agamtanu, New Persian Hamadān), which the Greeks rendered as Ecbatana. It was the seat of the Median kings and, after them, one of the residences of the Persian court, chosen for its cool highland summers. The Medes themselves are first named in an Assyrian text of 834 BCE, when Shalmaneser III passed through their lands; from then the Assyrian kings raided and taxed the Zagros for horses, cattle, and the lapis lazuli and fashioned metalwork of the region, generation after generation, and the Medes appear in their records not as one kingdom but as many, a country of 'city-lords' each holding his own district.

The kings of Herodotus: Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares, Astyages

The classical account of a Median kingdom is Herodotus's (1.95–130), and it is a shapely one. He gives four kings of a single family who ruled 150 years. Deioces, the first, was a just man chosen judge by his quarrelling neighbours and then made king; he founded Ecbatana and built it in seven concentric painted walls, and he set the throne apart from the eyes of men, ruling through messengers so that the king should be seen by no one. This last, in Herodotus's own words, is the pattern the Persians would inherit:

"Deïokes established the rule, which he was the first to establish, ordaining that none should enter into the presence of the king, but that they deal with him always through messengers; and that the king should be seen by no one." (Herodotus 1.99, trans. Macaulay)

His son Phraortes subdued the Persians and began to conquer Asia people by people; Cyaxares, the third, reorganised the army out of a tribal levy into ordered ranks of spearmen, archers and horse, and it was he who, in league with Babylon, brought down Assyria; Astyages, the fourth and last, reigned long and lost the kingdom to Cyrus. Herodotus paints Ecbatana with the same wondering brush the Greeks always kept for Persian splendour:

"He built large and strong walls, those which are now called Agbatana, standing in circles one within the other. And this wall is so contrived that one circle is higher than the next by the height of the battlements alone. … The two last have their battlements one of them overlaid with silver and the other with gold." (Herodotus 1.98, trans. Macaulay)

Only two of these four kings, Cyaxares (Babylonian Umakištar) and Astyages (Babylonian Ištumegu), are named in any cuneiform document. Deioces and Phraortes are known only from Herodotus and from scholarly attempts to find them in the Assyrian record, attempts that remain contested. The chronology is a thicket: the reference article lays out no fewer than four rival reconstructions of the four reigns, differing by decades, none secure, because the anchor points, above all the 'twenty-eight years of Scythian domination' Herodotus reports (1.106), cannot be reconciled with the cuneiform history of the seventh-century Near East and may be a legendary interpolation. Behind Deioces the just judge there probably lies not one man but the slow work of several generations of Median chiefs, telescoped by Herodotus into a single founder. It is a warning worth keeping in view: the tidy dynasty of the Histories is already, in its earliest reaches, more memory than record.

The fall of Assyria

The one great deed the Medes are firmly recorded to have done stands at the hinge of Near Eastern history: the destruction of Assyria, the terror of the age. Here the Babylonian chronicles, contemporary and sober, carry the story where Herodotus grows vague. When Babylon rose against Assyrian rule under Nabopolassar (from 626 BCE), the Medes under Cyaxares turned on their old oppressor from the east. In 615 they struck the Assyrian province of Arrapḫa; in 614 they took the ancient capital Aššur, and there Cyaxares and Nabopolassar made their alliance, sealed by the marriage of Astyages's daughter Amytis to Nabopolassar's son Nebuchadnezzar. In August 612, after a siege, the joined forces of Medes and Babylonians stormed Nineveh itself and levelled it; the reference article judges that 'the major part in the city's downfall was played by the Medes'. The remnant Assyrian state at Harran was finished off in the campaigns that followed. In the Babylonian chronicle that is the main source for these wars (the Gadd or Nabopolassar Chronicle), the Medes appear under two names used for the same people, Mādāya and the archaic, ominous Umman-manda, the latter a term the Babylonians reached for when they meant a barbarous host out of the mountains. With Assyria gone, four powers were left in the Near East, Egypt, Babylonia, Media and Lydia; and the Medes, under Cyaxares and then Astyages, are said to have pushed their frontier west to the Halys, where in 585 an eclipse of the sun broke off a five-year war with Lydia and fixed the border, and to have reached, by later and indirect evidence, toward Parthia, Hyrcania and Armenia.

Was there ever a Median empire?

Here is the entry's spine, and it must be set out honestly, because the confident story just told is exactly what the best recent scholarship has learned to doubt. The picture of a centralised Median empire, a great state stretching (in Ernst Herzfeld's older view) 'from north Mesopotamia to Bactria and India', rests almost entirely on Herodotus and on the assumption that his Persian-shaped narrative reports a real institution. Against this, Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg mounted the decisive critique. As the reference article summarises her, she 'insists that there is no real evidence about the very existence of the Median empire and that it was an unstable state formation'; her paper's very title puts the question the field now cannot avoid, Was There Ever a Median Empire?. The case is partly an argument from silence with teeth. No Median royal archive has been found; we do not even know that the Medes wrote. No inscription of a Median king survives; no securely Median capital has been excavated (Ecbatana lies unexcavated beneath modern Hamadān). The contemporary Assyrian records, which are detailed, show a country of many independent city-lords right up to the seventh century, not a unified realm; and where a later Median 'empire' is claimed to have held Assyrian territory, some scholars (Robert Rollinger among them) now argue the land in fact stayed Babylonian. Even the Greek tradition, read closely, wavers: the reference article notes the view 'that Asia Minor was never under direct and stable Median control'. The counter-case is not empty, the fall of Nineveh is real, Cyaxares and Astyages are attested kings, and a Median state of some reach clearly existed, but its character, whether a true empire or a loose and shifting hegemony dressed by Greek memory in the borrowed robes of Persia, is genuinely unsettled. This compendium therefore speaks of a Median kingdom whose deeds are partly secure and whose imperial shape is contested, and it flags the difference wherever it matters, rather than repeating the confident Herodotean empire as fact.

The fall of Astyages to Cyrus

However grand or loose the Median state, its end is dated almost to the year. Three primary traditions bear on the war between Media and Persia: Herodotus (with echoes in Strabo and Ctesias), the Nabonidus Chronicle, and the so-called Dream Text of Nabonidus of Babylon. Herodotus (1.123–128) makes Cyrus the grandson of Astyages by his daughter Mandane and a rebellious vassal, and has the Median noble Harpagus betray his king on the field, defecting with a great part of the army to Cyrus. The Babylonian record knows nothing of the grandson or the vassalage; it calls Cyrus simply king of Anšan (that is, of Persia), and it too reports a betrayal, but from within Astyages's own ranks:

"the troops of Astyages revolted, took him prisoner, and handed him over to Cyrus. The latter advanced to Agamtanu (i.e., Ecbatana), and took to Anshan the silver, gold, and other goods found there." (the Nabonidus Chronicle, as translated in the reference article, after Grayson)

The Dream Text likewise has Cyrus, king of Anšan, defeat 'the many troops of the Umman-manda' with a small army and carry off Ištumegu (Astyages) in chains. The war ran from 553 to 550 BCE; Media fell in the sixth year of Nabonidus, 550. What followed was less a conquest than a change of dynasty. The reference article's judgement is careful and important: 'It seems that Cyrus did not abolish the Median kingdom. What occurred was, rather, a transition of royal power from one dynasty to another.' Cyrus and his Achaemenid heirs took over the official titles of the Median kings and their apparatus of rule; Ecbatana became a Persian capital and the summer seat; and the Median nobility kept its standing. When Cyrus took Media he did not so much destroy a rival state as inherit one, and the empire the Persians built was in an old and real sense a Medo-Persian one.

The two ruling peoples, and the Greek habit of 'the Mede'

The consequence ran deep through the whole Achaemenid age. Media kept, in the reference article's phrase, its 'privileged position, occupying the second place after Persia itself'. Medes served beside Persians and Elamites in the standing corps the Greeks called the Immortals; a Mede, Datis, commanded at Marathon; Gobryas, the first governor of conquered Babylon, may have been a Mede. And to the outside world the two peoples were one. As the reference article puts it, 'The Greeks, Jews, Egyptians, and other peoples of the ancient world called the Persians Medes and regarded the Persian rule as a continuation of that of the Medes.' Herodotus himself slides constantly between the terms: the invaders at Marathon are 'the Medes', the war-terror of the empire's name is the terror of the Mede.

"They were the first also who endured to face the Median garments and the men who wore them, whereas up to this time the very name of the Medes was to the Hellenes a terror to hear." (Herodotus 6.112, of the Athenians at Marathon, trans. Macaulay)

From this usage comes the Greek political word mēdismos, 'medism', the crime of siding with the Persian King: to a Greek, to betray the Hellenic cause was to 'medize', to go over to the Mede. The King of Persia is 'the Great King' but his host is 'the Mede'; even the King's own line remembered the Medes as the power the Persians had supplanted. Xerxes, rallying the Persians to a new war, roots the empire's whole habit of conquest in the day Cyrus took Media:

"Never yet, as our old men assure me, has our race reposed itself, since the time when Cyrus overcame Astyages, and so we Persians wrested the sceptre from the Medes." (Herodotus 7.8, trans. Rawlinson)

The sceptre had passed from Mede to Persian; but in Greek eyes it was the same sceptre, and they went on calling it Median for as long as the empire stood.

Median dress, the Magi, and the great revolt

Three things mark the Medes' particular weight within the empire. The first is dress. The flowing sleeved riding-costume and soft cap the Greeks called 'Median' was taken up by the Persian court itself, worn by the King and given to his great men as a mark of honour; on the Apadana reliefs at Persepolis the Medes are shown not as tribute-bearers but, with the Persians, as hosts leading the delegations in, and the Median guardsmen stand in that same dress. Herodotus reports the borrowing as the empire's characteristic openness:

"The Persians more than any other men admit foreign usages; for they both wear the Median dress judging it to be more comely than their own, and also for fighting the Egyptian corslet." (Herodotus 1.135, trans. Macaulay)

Xenophon remembered the same scarlet Median robes as the very cement of the court, the King clothing his nobles and bidding them clothe their own (Cyropaedia 8.3). The second mark is priestly: Herodotus names the Magi as one of the six tribes of the Medes (1.101), a hereditary caste who furnished the priests not of the Medes only but of the Persians too, and who had stood at the court of Astyages as dream-readers and diviners; so the priesthood of the whole empire was, in origin, a Median institution. The third mark is written in Darius's own rock, and it is a revolt. Twice the Medes rose to reclaim their old primacy. In the year of rebellions after Darius seized the throne (522–521 BCE), a Median pretender named Fravartiš (Phraortes to the Greeks) claimed descent from the line of Cyaxares and raised Media against the new King; Darius, in the Behistun inscription, counts him among the most dangerous of the 'lying kings', and remembers the whole convulsion in the idiom of the Lie:

"The people became hostile, and the Lie multiplied in the land, even in Persia and Media, and in the other provinces." (Darius I, the Behistun inscription, DB §10)

Fravartiš was defeated, mutilated and impaled at Ecbatana as an example (DB II); a Median rebellion is recorded again under Darius. That the Medes rose to be kings again, and claimed the blood of Cyaxares when they did, is itself the measure of how recent and how galling their loss of the first place still was.

Median culture, and how thin the ground is

On everything but their politics the Medes are frustratingly silent. We have no Median archive, and no certainty that they possessed a script; a single pre-Achaemenid inscription found on Median soil is in Akkadian and names no Mede. It has been proposed that Old Persian cuneiform was in origin a Median invention borrowed by the Persians, but this is speculation. Of Median art the reference article is blunt: it 'remains a matter of speculation, and even its existence is denied by some scholars'; no securely Median artefacts are agreed to exist. What we do have is architecture. At Tepe Nush-i Jan, some sixty kilometres south of Hamadān, David Stronach excavated a complex founded around 750 BCE with a stepped mud-brick fire-altar in its central temple, the earliest such temple structure yet known in Iran, and at Godin Tepe a columned hall that reads as a forerunner of the great Achaemenid audience halls. In these sites the Medes are seen borrowing from Assyria and Urartu and turning what they borrowed to new ends, and the reference article draws the larger point: 'the Achaemenids borrowed the cultural achievements of the ancient Near East through the intermediary of the Medes.' Of Median religion we know almost as little, chiefly from Herodotus and from Median personal names, some of which carry the old Indo-Iranian arta- ('truth') or theophoric elements including the name of Ahura Mazdā; a common Indo-Iranian Mazdaism, into which Zoroaster's reform began to reach only under the last Median kings, is the most that can be said. Even the qanāt, the underground water-channel that watered the Iranian plateau, the Greeks remembered as a work of Media, granted by the Persian kings to those who would green the waterless land (Polybius 10.28). The Medes, in short, are a people we know almost wholly through others' words and others' clay, and the honest shape of their history is the shape of that evidence: firm at a few points, conjectural across the rest.

What the Medes were

Set against the older textbook, which gave the Medes a century-long empire from Anatolia to India and a smooth descent into the Persian one, the picture that survives close scrutiny is at once smaller and more interesting. The Medes were the Iranian people of the north-western Zagros who, out of a patchwork of highland chiefdoms, rose far enough to help end Assyria and to hold a real hegemony over 'upper Asia' for two or three generations, before Cyrus took their kingdom in 550 and made it the junior partner of his own. Whether that hegemony was ever an 'empire' in the institutional sense is a question the evidence does not settle and this compendium does not pretend to. What is certain is their long afterlife inside the empire they had briefly led: the second people of the realm, their dress on the King's back, their Magi at his altars, their capital his summer seat, their very name the word by which half the world went on calling his Persians. The Medes did not vanish when Astyages fell; they became one of the two peoples whose partnership was the empire, and it is no accident that the last and irreversible authority the ancient world could imagine was 'the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not'.