Topic: folktale (3)

• 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…

• 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…