Median Empire

What the Assyrians wrote down

formationDrafted from (eds), History of the Ancient Near East Monographs V (2003)

The Medes enter the written record in the ninth century BC, in Assyrian royal inscriptions, and they enter it in the plural.

Assyrian kings campaigning east into the Zagros from Shalmaneser III onwards record receiving tribute from the land of the Medes, and what they describe is a country of bel ali — city-lords — many of them, named individually, holding fortified settlements and horses. Assyria wanted the horses particularly; the Zagros was where cavalry mounts came from, and the campaigns are largely about extracting them. Sargon II lists dozens of Median chiefs. Esarhaddon made treaties with several of them at once, and the tablets survive.

Musée du Louvre, Paris · (eds), History of the Ancient Near East Monographs V (2003) · Unknown artist · Public domain

At no point in three centuries of Assyrian documentation is there a king of the Medes. There are Median chiefs, plural, who pay, revolt, are punished, and pay again.

That is where the evidence starts, and it sets the shape of everything after it. Most states of this period can be introduced with a founder, a capital and a date. The Medes have to be introduced with a plural noun in somebody else's tribute list.

Herodotus supplies the rest — four kings, a capital at Ecbatana with seven concentric walls in seven colours, an empire from the Halys to eastern Iran — writing a century after it had ended, from Persian informants, in a work whose Median section has the shape of a folk tale. The next chapter sets that account out in full, and the one after it is about whether to believe him.

What is not disputed is that something out of western Iran destroyed Assyria in 612 BC, and that Cyrus took something over in 549. What was in between is the argument.

The four kings

expansionDrafted from Herodotus, The History of Herodotus (1890)

There is exactly one narrative of how the Medes became a power, and Herodotus wrote it. It runs to four kings and about a hundred and fifty years, and it is worth setting out at length before anyone starts arguing with it, because everything else ever said about Median history is either drawn from this account or written against it.

Deioces builds a wall and disappears behind it

Deioces was chosen to rule by Medes who wanted their disputes settled, and the first thing he asked for was a bodyguard and a palace. The second was a city. He compelled the Medes to make one fortified city and to pay chief attention to it, and there he built the walls the Greeks called Agbatana — seven of them, standing in circles one within the other, each ring higher than the next by the height of its battlements, with the palace and the treasure-houses inside the last. The battlements of the first circle were white, of the second black, of the third crimson, of the fourth blue, of the fifth red; the two innermost were overlaid with silver and with gold.

Herodotus, The History of Herodotus (1890) · Behzad39 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Then he made himself invisible.

He established the rule, Herodotus says, which he was the first to establish: that nobody should enter the presence of the king, that all business should be done through messengers, and that the king should be seen by no one. To laugh or to spit in his presence was forbidden, and that last prohibition applied to everybody without exception, the king included.

The reason given is not mystical and is worth quoting for its bluntness. He surrounded himself with this state so that his fellows, who had been brought up with him and were of no meaner family nor behind him in manly virtue, might not be grieved by seeing him and make plots against him, but that being unseen by them he might be thought to be of different mould.

That is a working description of how a first among equals stops being one. The men most dangerous to Deioces were the men who knew what he had been, and the remedy was architecture. Meanwhile the people wrote down their causes and sent them in; he judged them and sent them out again; and he kept watchers and listeners over all the land he ruled.

Phraortes attacks the wrong city

Deioces reigned fifty-three years and united only the Medes. His son Phraortes was not satisfied with that. He marched first against the Persians and made them subject, and then, ruling two strong nations instead of one, went from people to people through Asia until he came to the Assyrians at Nineveh — who by then, Herodotus notes, had been left without support because their allies had revolted, though at home they were prosperous enough.

He was killed there, in the twenty-second year of his reign, and most of his army with him.

Cyaxares sorts the army into kinds

His son Cyaxares was, in Herodotus' judgement, much more warlike than his forefathers, and the reason given is administrative rather than temperamental. He was the first to band the men of Asia into separate divisions: he arrayed the spearmen and the archers and the horsemen apart from one another, where before that they had all been mingled together without distinction.

An army sorted into arms can be given orders by arm. That single sentence is the closest thing in the Median record to an account of an institution, and what it describes is the difference between a levy and a machine.

He fought the Lydians in the war that ended when the day turned to night, he brought everything above the river Halys under his rule, and he went back to Nineveh to avenge his father. He beat the Assyrians in the field and sat down before the city.

Twenty-eight years, ended at dinner

And then a great army of Scythians came upon him, under Madyas son of Protothyes, who had driven the Cimmerians out of Europe and followed them the long way round with the Caucasus on their right. The Medes fought them, were beaten, and lost their power.

For twenty-eight years the Scythians ruled Asia. Herodotus says they exacted the tribute they had laid on each people and then, quite separately from the tribute, rode about and took whatever else they wanted, and that by this combination of unruliness and recklessness everything was ruined.

What ended it was not a battle. Cyaxares invited the greater number of them to a banquet, made them drunk, and killed them.

The Medes then recovered their power and their subjects, took Nineveh, and made the Assyrians their subjects — all except the land of Babylon. Cyaxares died having reigned forty years, counting the years the Scythians held, and Astyages his son received the kingdom from him.

That is the story. Every element of it is arresting and none of it is corroborated, and the next chapters are about the one part that is.

612

peakDrafted from Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2015)

The Neo-Assyrian empire was the most formidable military state the world had yet seen, and in the space of about fifteen years it stopped existing. The Babylonians revolted under Nabopolassar in 626; the Medes came down out of the Zagros; and in 612 the two of them together besieged and took Nineveh.

The Babylonian Chronicle records it. That matters more than it sounds, because the Chronicle is a contemporary cuneiform document written by people with no stake in a Median empire, and it is effectively the only such document about the Medes doing anything. It names them as participants — using the term Umman-manda, which is an old Mesopotamian word for barbarian northerners rather than an ethnic label — and it describes an army and a king called Cyaxares. It does not describe provinces, an administration, or an empire.

British Museum, London (BM 21901) · Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2015) · Photograph: Zunkir · CC BY-SA 4.0

After Nineveh the Medes and Babylonians divided what Assyria had held, roughly: Babylonia took Mesopotamia and the west, the Medes took the north and the Iranian side. Then, according to Herodotus, Cyaxares pushed west into Anatolia and fought Lydia for five years.

That war produced the one precisely dated event in Median history, and the date comes from astronomy rather than from any record. In the middle of a battle on the river Halys a total solar eclipse fell; both armies stopped, and a peace was made and sealed with a marriage. Herodotus says Thales of Miletus had predicted the eclipse, which he almost certainly could not have done in the way described. The eclipse itself is real and can be computed: 28 May 585 BC.

The frontier settled on the Halys and stayed there for thirty-six years, until a Persian crossed it.

So the height of Median power is two events — one attested by a Babylonian chronicle and one by the sky — with sixty years of asserted empire between them that no contemporary document describes.

An empire, possibly

aside?What aside meansDrafted from (eds), History of the Ancient Near East Monographs V (2003)

The Medes helped the Babylonians destroy Nineveh in 612 BC, ending Assyria, and for the next sixty years are described by Herodotus as ruling an empire across western Iran and eastern Anatolia until Cyrus overthrew Astyages in 550.

Whether that empire existed is genuinely contested. The Median state is known almost entirely from Herodotus, writing a century later and at a distance, and from Assyrian references to Median chiefdoms. Archaeological evidence for a centralised Median administration is thin to absent, and a substantial body of scholarship holds that the Medes were a tribal confederation that Greek and later Persian sources retrospectively promoted into an empire because the Achaemenids needed a predecessor to have succeeded.

(eds), History of the Ancient Near East Monographs V (2003) · Mortezagr · CC BY 4.0

The honest position is that a published figure exists for the extent of a state whose existence is itself argued about. Provenance and truth are different properties, and this is the case where they come apart furthest: the number can be traced to a source, and the thing it measures may never have been there.

A predecessor worth having

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002)

The Achaemenids presented Cyrus's overthrow of Astyages not as a conquest but as a legitimate transfer within a related royal house — Cyrus's own genealogy makes him Astyages's grandson through his mother, and the Persian and Median elites appear jointly in Achaemenid iconography and administration thereafter.

Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002) · Bontenbal · CC BY-SA 3.0

That may be true. It is also exactly what a new dynasty needs to be true. A usurper who is also an heir does not have to explain himself, and the Medes were too numerous and too militarily useful to be governed as a defeated people.

The wider point is what this does to the record. Almost everything about the Median empire reaches us through the Achaemenids' account of their own origins and through Herodotus, who was working from Persian informants a century later. An empire that needed a predecessor produced the description of one, and modern scholarship cannot easily separate the Median state from the Achaemenid story about it.

So the succession from Media to Persia is itself contested — not the fact that Cyrus took Ecbatana, which is in a Babylonian chronicle, but the question of what he took over: an empire, or a coalition of highland chiefs with a good story attached.

An army that changed sides

endDrafted from Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002)

Cyrus of Anshan revolted against Astyages around 553 and defeated him around 549, and the detail that matters is that the Median king's own army is said to have handed him over.

That story is in Herodotus, in Ctesias, and — importantly — in the Babylonian Nabonidus Chronicle, which is contemporary and says that Astyages' troops rebelled against him and delivered him to Cyrus. It is the second of the two things about the Medes that a cuneiform document confirms.

British Museum, London · Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002) · Photograph: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) · CC BY-SA 4.0

What Cyrus did afterwards is the reason the Median question is hard. He did not treat Media as a conquered country. Ecbatana became one of the Achaemenid royal capitals; Medes held high office and appear beside Persians in the Persepolis reliefs and in the administrative tablets; and the Achaemenid genealogy made Cyrus a grandson of Astyages through his mother, which converts a usurpation into an inheritance. Greek writers thereafter used Mede and Persian almost interchangeably — the Persian wars are the Median wars in Greek, and medizing is the word for collaborating with the enemy.

That treatment is either evidence that the Medes had been an empire worth inheriting, or the reason we believe they were.

The succession from Media to Persia is disputed for exactly that circularity. What is not disputed is that something was overthrown in 549. What cannot be established is what it was: nothing survives to show how it was governed, and the two events that can be dated are dated by documents no Mede wrote.

The Medes are the state everybody is least sure about, and they stand at the head of twelve centuries of Iranian empire. That is worth saying at the start rather than assuming past: the sequence that runs to the Sasanians begins with a question mark, and the question is not a small one.

The family of Cyaxares

afterlifeDrafted from Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun in Persia (1907)

Twenty-seven years after Cyrus took Ecbatana, the name of a Median king was still worth enough to raise an army with.

In 522 BC Darius seized the Persian throne and the empire came apart in his hands. He spent something over a year putting it back together, and when he had finished he had the whole account carved on a cliff at Behistun, above the road from Babylon to Ecbatana, in three languages. It lists nine rebels. Two of them claimed to be Medes of the same house.

Kermanshah Province, Iran · Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun in Persia (1907) · Photograph: Hamidreza Sorouri / Persian Dutch Network · CC BY-SA 4.0

Phraortes

The first is named on the rock as Fravartish, whom the Greeks would call Phraortes. Darius' own text puts the claim in his mouth in a single sentence:

A certain Median named Phraortes revolted in Media, and he said unto the people: "I am Khshathrita, of the family of Cyaxares."

And the sentence that follows is the one worth stopping on. Then did the Medians who were in the palace revolt from me and go over unto that Phraortes; he became king in Media.

Not the tribes, not the hill country. The Medes at court — the ones inside the Persian administration, who had presumably done well out of it — left and went to a man on the strength of a great-grandfather's name.

The revolt was serious. Darius sent Hydarnes, who beat the Medes at Marush and then could not finish the job and sat down to wait for the king. Parthia and Hyrcania went over to Phraortes as well, and had to be put down separately by Darius' own father. Only when Babylon was settled could Darius march into Media himself. He caught Phraortes at Kundurush; the pretender fled to Raga with a few horsemen and was taken.

What was done to him is recorded because Darius wanted it recorded. His nose and ears were cut off, his eyes put out, his tongue cut out; he was chained and put on display at the gate of the palace in Ecbatana, and then crucified.

And the second one

There was another. Citrantakhma raised Sagartia, and the inscription says he too gave himself out to be of the family of Cyaxares. Darius sent Takhmaspada — a Mede — to deal with him, and had him mutilated in the same way and crucified at Arbela.

Two men, in two provinces, in the same year, reaching for the same dead dynasty. Whatever the Median kingdom had actually been, the memory of it was still a live political instrument a generation after it stopped existing, and Darius thought it dangerous enough to answer with a mutilation performed at the gate of the Median capital and then published on a mountainside in three scripts.

The quieter inheritance

The rest of it went by absorption rather than revolt.

Ecbatana stayed a royal residence and became one of the Achaemenid capitals. The Median tribes are still being listed as tribes. And Herodotus, describing Persian habits a century later, remarks almost in passing that the Persians wear the Median dress, judging it more comely than their own — the conquerors dressed as the conquered, at court, as a matter of taste.

Herodotus records something else about the Median order that the Persians kept: the nations under it governed one another in a graded chain, the Medes ruling the whole and in particular their nearest neighbours, those ruling the peoples who bordered on them, and those again the ones beyond. Rule passed outward by stages rather than radiating from a centre. He says the Persians observed the same rule in giving honour, which is to say they inherited the shape of the thing along with the clothes.

A kingdom whose existence modern scholarship still argues about left behind a court dress, a way of ranking subject peoples, and two men who were tortured to death for saying they belonged to its royal house.