Topic: the Medes (2)

• 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…