The Medes

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 Medvedskaya and Dandamayev state plainly in the Iranica article, 'its precise geographical extent remains unknown to us'.^[1] 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 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 later a residence of the Persian court, chosen for its cool highland summers (see Ecbatana).

The Medes are first named in an Assyrian text of 834 BCE, when Shalmaneser III passed through their lands, and from then the Assyrian kings raided and taxed the Zagros for horses, cattle and metalwork, generation after generation. In those records the Medes appear not as one kingdom but as many, a country of 'city-lords' (Akkadian bēl āli) each holding his own district, and the Assyrians describe them always as a settled population, not nomads.^[2] Even the name is an outsider's. The term Mādāya is of unknown origin and its wide use is an Assyrian habit; Robert Rollinger compares the ancient word 'German', a local name that Caesar spread over a whole population, and suggests the Assyrians did the same, taking up a designation from somewhere in the central Zagros and stretching it across the highlands and eastward.^[2] Whether the people so labelled shared a single identity, or called themselves Medes at all, is not known.^[2] The Babylonians later reached for a second, ominous name, the archaic Umman-manda, when they meant a barbarous host out of the mountains, and applied it to the Medes under Cyaxares.

Herodotus divides the Medes into six tribes, the Busae, the Paretaceni, the Struchates, the Arizanti, the Budii and the Magi.^[3] The list is the one piece of Median social structure the Greek tradition preserves, and its last name is the most consequential: the Magi, later the priestly caste of the whole empire, are here simply one Median tribe among six, which makes the priesthood the Persians inherited a Median institution in origin. What the six divisions meant on the ground, and how far the scheme is Median fact rather than Greek tidying, cannot be recovered.

Of the Median language even less is secure than the name. No connected text in Median survives, and it is uncertain that the Medes wrote at all; what is taken for their speech is reconstructed almost entirely from personal names preserved in cuneiform and Greek. Those names are dominantly Iranian, which places the Medes in the Iranian family, but the further step, a single well-defined language neatly labelled 'Median', is less firm than the handbooks imply. Rollinger, following Rüdiger Schmitt and Adriano Rossi, cautions that behind the names probably lies not one tongue but a diversity of local Iranian dialects, in a region where Urartian, Elamite, Assyrian and other languages were also spoken.^[2] A related claim, often repeated, holds that a set of words in the royal Old Persian of the inscriptions is not Persian at all but Median in form, borrowed into the chancery language of the court, so that even the empire's official Old Persian carries a Median layer; the identification rests on sound-changes that separate the two dialects, and, like the language itself, it is inference from scattered evidence rather than a documented fact. What is reconstructed of their speech, like everything else known about the Medes, comes at second hand, from Assyrian, Babylonian, Hebrew and Greek witnesses.

The classical account of a Median kingdom is Herodotus's, 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, built it in seven concentric painted walls, and withdrew the throne from every eye, dealing with his subjects only through messengers. This seclusion, in Herodotus's telling, 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^[3]

His son Phraortes subdued the Persians and began to conquer Asia; Cyaxares, the third, reorganised the tribal levy into ordered ranks of spearmen, archers and horse, and it was he who, with Babylon, brought down Assyria; Astyages, the fourth and last, reigned long and lost the kingdom to Cyrus. Herodotus paints Ecbatana with the wondering brush the Greeks 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^[3]

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 contested attempts to find them in the Assyrian record. The chronology is a thicket: Medvedskaya and Dandamayev lay out four rival reconstructions of the reigns, differing by decades, none secure, because the anchor points, above all the 'twenty-eight years of Scythian domination' Herodotus reports, cannot be reconciled with the cuneiform history of the seventh century.^[1] Kuhrt's edition of the dossier finds the same: the Assyrian evidence 'contains no hint of a Scythian-Median conflict', and Herodotus's own figures can be made to run two ways.^[4] The Deioces story fares worse still under close reading. Rollinger treats it not as history but as a construction of about 420 BCE, a mix of Iranian legend and the sophistic Greek theorising of the day about how states first arise, so that behind the just judge there lies no single founder but the schematic thought of Herodotus's own century.^[2] Astyages, the fourth king, and his overthrow by Cyrus about 550 end the line (see Astyages). The tidy dynasty of the Histories is, in its earliest reaches, more memory than record.

The one great deed the Medes are firmly recorded to have done stands at the hinge of Near Eastern history: the destruction of Assyria. 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. In August 612, after a siege, the joined forces of Medes and Babylonians stormed Nineveh and levelled it; the Iranica article judges that 'the major part in the city's downfall was played by the Medes'.^[1] The remnant Assyrian state at Harran was finished in the campaigns that followed. In the chronicle that is the main source for these wars, the Medes appear under two names for the same people, Mādāya and the archaic Umman-manda.^[5]

With Assyria gone, four powers were left, 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. That western reach is now doubted. Rollinger reads the Halys frontier as a Greek construction of the fifth century, a conspicuous boundary invented to organise Near Eastern history into empires with tidy edges, and holds that the Babylonian presence in northern Mesopotamia and Syria makes lasting Median control of eastern Anatolia unlikely; the Medes may have raided through Anatolia and struck a treaty with Lydia, but they did not hold it.^[2] The dispute over the Halys is a small instance of the larger question the Medes always raise, of how much of the confident story survives the documents.

Much of that confident narrative is what recent scholarship has learned to doubt. The maximal case is the older textbook one, given its strongest form by Ernst Herzfeld: a centralised Median empire reaching, on his reconstruction, from northern Mesopotamia across the plateau to Bactria and India, the state from which the Persian empire was directly modelled. It rests almost wholly on Herodotus, eked out by Ctesias's legend of a Bactrian conquest and by the Median form of certain satrapy-names, from which Herzfeld argued that Gandhāra and the Panjab 'must have been part of the Median empire'.^[6]

Against this Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg mounted the decisive critique in a 1988 paper whose title became the question the field could no longer avoid, Was There Ever a Median Empire?. She held that no contemporary Near Eastern evidence supports a centralised Median state, that the whole edifice depends on Herodotus, and that scholars had projected his Persian-shaped picture back onto sources that do not contain it, a case she reduced to an epigram: 'The Median empire exists for us because Herodotus says it did'.^[6] Rollinger has pressed the argument through the cuneiform record. Across two centuries of detailed Assyrian reporting, Media never appears as one polity but as many districts, each under its own 'city-lord', with no movement toward a single centre; the sites once claimed as seats of imperial power, Hamadān itself and Kerkenes Dağ in Anatolia, 'do not hold up to critical scrutiny and have been revealed as optimistic academic mirages, constructed to fit preconceived notions of imperial Media'; and the absence of any Median document is itself an argument, for 'in the entire 3000-year history of the Ancient Near East, the Medes would thus have established the only \"empire\" from which no kind of textual documentation, neither from inside nor from outside, has survived to this day'.^[2] Mario Liverani, reading the same dossier, found a hegemony rather than a state, Median power 'based on alliances with other highlands polities, rather than on territorial control', its coalition caught in the Babylonian phrase 'the kings going at his sides' and in Jeremiah's plural 'kings of the Medes'.^[2]

A mediating position holds the ground between the empire and its dissolution, and it comes chiefly from the archaeology. Bruno Jacobs and David Stronach grant that the far-flung Herodotean empire has collapsed and that the rock-cut tombs and other 'Median' skills once assumed have proved late, yet they resist Liverani's further claim that the Medes reverted to 'tribal pastoralism' before Cyrus. Excavation and survey show continuous permanent settlement through the sixth century, monumental building at several sites, and an early form of money in the heart of Media around 600 BCE, so that, in their judgement, 'it is more than likely that a united Median kingdom managed to control a major part of northern Iran during at least the first half of the sixth century BCE'.^[7] An international symposium at Padua in 2001 reviewed the whole dossier and reached only a partial settlement: there was general agreement that a Median 'empire' cannot be proved, but no agreed narrative to put in its place, some participants pushing Sancisi-Weerdenburg's scepticism further and others still willing to speak of an empire.^[2]

The balance has moved against the maximal empire and toward a Median kingdom of real but limited reach, centred on Ecbatana and the central Zagros, whose western and eastern extent the evidence will not fix. Beyond that, the field is not agreed, and the most careful advocate of the deflationary case says so himself: the arguments for a loose confederation, Rollinger concedes, 'are likewise more probabilities than conclusive proof', the terminology of the Babylonian texts may be too vague to bear the weight, and the Greek habit of calling Persians 'Medes' could still be read as the memory of a real overlordship.^[2] What would settle the question is the kind of evidence the Medes did not leave, or that cannot be reached: a royal inscription in a Median king's name, an administrative archive, or the excavation of Ecbatana itself, which is impossible, because the pre-Hellenistic strata under Hamadān were stripped away in antiquity when Seleucid or early Parthian builders founded their structures on virgin soil.^[7]

The end of the Median state is dated almost to the year. The war between Media and Persia ran from about 553 to 550 BCE and turned on the defection of Astyages's own army, which handed him to Cyrus (see Astyages for the campaign and its rival ancient versions, Harpagus for the Median noble whom Herodotus makes the betrayer, and Cyrus the Great for the conquest from the Persian side). The aftermath was less a destruction than a change of dynasty. Medvedskaya and Dandamayev judge that 'It seems that Cyrus did not abolish the Median kingdom. What occurred was, rather, a transition of royal power from one dynasty to another.'^[1] Cyrus and his Achaemenid heirs took over the titles of the Median kings and their apparatus of rule; Ecbatana became a Persian capital; and the Median nobility kept its standing. When Cyrus took Media he inherited a kingdom rather than obliterating a rival, and the empire the Persians built was in an old and real sense a Medo-Persian one.

One strand of the dynastic tradition deserves a caution. The Hellenistic writer Berossus reports a Median royal marriage, a daughter of Astyages named Amytis wed to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, sometimes taken to seal the Medo-Babylonian alliance against Assyria. Berossus wrote three centuries later, and the report most likely confuses Astyages with his father Cyaxares, the reigning king when such a marriage-alliance would have been struck, and is too uncertain to build the alliance upon.^[1]

The consequence ran deep through the whole Achaemenid age. Media kept, in Medvedskaya and Dandamayev's phrase, its 'privileged position, occupying the second place after Persia itself', ranked immediately after Persia in the royal lists of lands from Naqš-e Rostam onward.^[1] The near-parity was written into the royal style: from the time of Xerxes the King could be titled 'king of the Persians and Medes', a formula that set the two peoples together above the rest.^[8] And to the outside world they were one, the Iranica article observing that '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.'^[1] 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. Of all the subject nations, only the Medes were paired with the Persians rather than counted below them (see the peoples of the empire).

In the first Persian generation Medes held the highest commands. After Cyrus took Sardis it was two Medes, Mazares and then Harpagus, whom he left to reduce the Greek cities of the coast, and Herodotus names both as Medes.^[8] A Median general, Takhmaspada, served Darius and appears in the Behistun inscription; Datis, the commander who led the expedition to Marathon in 490, is regularly called 'the Mede' by Herodotus.^[8] Beyond the officer class the Medes furnished standing contingents, settled like other peoples in garrison-colonies from Asia Minor to Egypt.

Yet the partnership is harder to document than the ideology suggests, and Briant draws the tension out. After the reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses it becomes 'impossible to find men who are described as Medes among the high-ranking imperial personnel'; the historians of Alexander's day can identify only three Medes among the empire's grandees, where 'a Persian man' is common.^[8] Two difficulties compound the problem. The Iranian name-stock is largely undifferentiated, so that without an explicit label a Mede cannot be told from a Persian, and the label itself is unreliable: even 'Datis the Mede' may be a surname rather than an ethnic tag, since one ancient lexicon calls him a Persian.^[8] Media kept its prime place in the lists of lands to the end, but those lists were copied by rote, and whether the near-equality of the two peoples was a living fact of government throughout the empire's history, or chiefly a matter of dress, ideology and the first generation's memory, the evidence does not decide.^[8]

On the Apadana reliefs at Persepolis the Medes appear twice over, and the doubling is itself a statement of rank. They come as the first of the gift-bearing delegations, bringing vessels and garments and the fine metalwork for which they were prized, and they stand again, in the same dress, as the ushers who lead the other nations in by the hand, alternating with Persians along the stairway. No other subject people is shown both bringing gifts and conducting the procession.^[1] The flowing sleeved riding-coat and soft cap the Greeks called 'Median' were taken up by the Persian court itself, worn by the King and given to his great men as a mark of honour. 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^[9]

The Medes' name for metalwork is fixed in Darius's own foundation charter at Susa, which lists the craftsmen of each nation and records that 'the goldsmiths who wrought the gold, those were Medes and Egyptians'.^[10] One older inference from the dress should be resisted, however. Because Darius had his Persian subjects carved in two costumes, a voluminous 'court dress' and a tighter 'riding dress', it was once argued that the riding-dress figures were all Medes, and that Medes therefore shared the governance of the empire on equal terms with Persians. Jacobs and Stronach reject the reading: the two dresses are two Persian costumes, and the case for reading half of them as Medes was 'never very convincing'.^[7] The Medes' standing was high and real, but it has to be argued from the lists, the offices and the ideology, not read off the clothing.

One Median institution the court took wholesale was priestly. Herodotus counts the Magi among the six Median tribes, and they furnished the priests not of the Medes only but of the Persians too, standing at every sacrifice: 'A Magian man stands by them and chants over them a theogony … seeing that without a Magian it is not lawful for them to make sacrifices.'^[9] So the priesthood of the whole empire was, in origin, a Median caste (see the Magi).

The habit of calling the Persians Medes runs so deep in Greek that the two names are barely distinguished. Herodotus can name a Persian commander a Mede without a thought: the Spartan Pausanias, mocking the luxury of the dead Mardonius over his captured dinner-service, speaks of 'the foolishness of the leader of the Medes'.^[9] The war-terror of the empire is likewise the terror of the Mede. At Marathon, the first Greeks to stand against the invaders faced down a name:

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, the Athenians at Marathon, trans. Macaulay^[9]

The King of Persia is 'the Great King', but his host is 'the Mede', and to take his side is to 'medize'. Even the Persian royal line remembered the Medes as the power it had supplanted: rallying the Persians to a new war, Xerxes traced the empire's whole habit of conquest to the day Cyrus deposed Astyages, when the Persians won their dominion from the Medes (see Astyages).^[9] In Greek eyes the sovereignty had passed from Mede to Persian, and they went on calling it Median for as long as the empire stood.

Twice the Medes rose to reclaim their old primacy, and the first rising is written into Darius's own rock. In the year of rebellions after Darius seized the throne (522–521 BCE), a Median pretender named Fravartiš, whom the Greeks called Phraortes, 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:

After that the Lie waxed great in the country, both in Persia and in Media and in the other provinces.

Darius I, DB §10, trans. Kent^[11]

Fravartiš was defeated, mutilated and impaled at Ecbatana as an example, and a further Median rising is recorded in the same inscription. That the Medes rose to be kings again, and claimed the blood of Cyaxares when they did, is the measure of how recent and how galling their loss of the first place still was. The primacy stayed worth fighting for long after: an interpolation in Xenophon reports the Medes in revolt again late in the fifth century, brought back under control by Darius II, though the causes and extent of that rising are lost.^[8]

On the ground the Medes are known from a handful of excavated sites, and what those sites show has become central to the debate over the kingdom. 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; at Godin Tepe a columned hall reads as a possible forerunner of the great Achaemenid audience halls, and further seats have been dug at Baba Jan and Ozbaki.^[1] None of these is an imperial capital. In the deflationary reading they are local princely seats with no more than a district's reach, exactly the fragmented landscape the Assyrian texts describe.^[2] How much the Medes gave to Achaemenid architecture is now argued both ways: Hilary Gopnik has scaled back the old claim that the Median columned halls were the direct model for Pasargadae and Persepolis, while the stepped Achaemenid stone altar still seems to echo the fire-altar first found at Nush-i Jan, so that a Median inheritance survives even as its scale is reduced.^[7]

The material record also fills out the ordinary life the texts pass over. The Medes were masters of mud-brick, redoubtable horse-breeders whose famous pastures raised everything from heavy warhorses to a miniature breed, and skilled metalworkers, the craft the Apadana gift and the Susa charter both attest.^[7] To Media, too, the Greeks credited the qanāt, the underground channel that carried cool water from distant aquifers to the fields, granted by the Persian kings to those who would green the waterless land.^[10] Of Ecbatana under the Persians almost nothing has been recovered, its early strata having been cleared away in the later rebuilding, so that the capital of the Median kings and summer seat of the Persian ones is a near-blank in the archaeology.^[7]

Of Median religion the evidence is as thin as for everything else, and it comes chiefly from Herodotus, from the Magi, and from Median personal names. Some of those names carry the old Indo-Iranian principle arta ('truth', the subject of arta) or theophoric elements including the name of Ahura Mazdā, and Boyce read arta in Median names of the Assyrian record as early as the ninth century.^[12] The most that can be said in general is that the Medes shared a common Indo-Iranian Mazdaism, into which Zoroaster's reform may have begun to reach only under the last Median kings. Whether it had is contested. Boyce pressed a political reading, that Astyages 'held to the Old Iranian faith of his forefathers, whereas Cyrus put himself forward as a champion of Zoroastrianism', so drawing to the Persian cause those Medes who already adhered to the eastern faith; Diakonoff and others doubt that the reform had reached the Median court at all.^[12] For the wider question of Achaemenid Zoroastrianism, see Ahura Mazdā. Median religion, like the Median language and the Median past, is known only in fragments, and only from the outside.

The Medes outlasted their kingdom in more than the empire's memory. When Alexander's conquest broke the Achaemenid realm, the last Persian satrap of Media, Atropates, held the north-western corner of the country and founded a dynasty there; the region kept his name, Media Atropatene, the Arabicised form of which survives as Azerbaijan, and it became a lasting stronghold of the Median Magi and of the old faith.^[13] In the wider world the name endured as a byword for an authority beyond appeal. The pairing of the two peoples, fixed in the royal title and in the Greek habit alike, passed into the Hebrew scriptures as the very type of a decree that cannot be revoked, 'the law of the Medes and the Persians, which altereth not'.^[14]

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 smaller and far less certain. The Medes rose from a patchwork of north-western Zagros chiefdoms far enough to help end Assyria and to hold a real dominance over 'upper Asia' for two or three generations, before Cyrus took their kingdom about 550 and made it the junior partner of his own. The thinness of what they left behind sets a firm limit on how much more can be claimed for them; the depth of their mark on the empire that absorbed them does not. For as long as that empire stood, half the ancient world went on calling its kings, its armies and its wars by the name of the people Cyrus had displaced.