Topic: Cyrus (5)

• PersonAstyages

  Astyages (Greek Astyagēs; Babylonian Ištumegu; from an Old Iranian *R̥šti-vaiga-, perhaps 'lance-hurler') was the last king of the Medes, who reigned from about 585 until his kingdom fell to his Persian neighbour Cyrus around 550 BCE. Son and successor of Cyaxares, the king who had helped destroy…

• PersonAtossa

  Atossa (Old Persian *Utauθā, corresponding to Avestan Hutaosā; lived c. 550 to after 480 BCE) was an Achaemenid queen, the daughter of Cyrus the Great and the mother of Xerxes I. She married in turn her brother Cambyses II, the usurper Bardiya (the 'Smerdis' of the Greek writers), and Darius I,…

• PersonCroesus

  Croesus (Greek Kroisos; reigned c. 560 to the mid-540s BCE) was the last king of Lydia, ruler of the wealthy kingdom of western Anatolia from his capital at Sardis, subjugator of the Ionian Greek cities of the coast, and, in the Greek imagination, the archetype of the fabulously rich king undone…

• PersonHarpagus

  Harpagus (Greek Harpagos) is the Median grandee who, in the account of Herodotus, engineers the fall of the last Median king Astyages and the rise of Cyrus the Great, and then, as Cyrus's general, completes the Persian conquest of the western Anatolian coast. In Herodotus's founder-legend of Cyrus…

• PersonTomyris

  Tomyris (Greek Τόμυρις; fl. c. 530 BCE) is, in the account of Herodotus, the queen of the Massagetae, the nomad people beyond the Araxes against whom Cyrus the Great led his final campaign. Ruling alone after her husband's death, she refused Cyrus's offer of marriage, seeing that his suit aimed at…