The Medes

The Medes enter written history as a name in Assyrian records. In the 9th century BCE, Assyrian kings campaigning in the Zagros mountains listed the Madai among the peoples they met, raided and taxed. The Medes spoke an Iranian language, a cousin of Old Persian, and lived in the high valleys of what is now western Iran, raising horses that Assyrian kings took home as tribute.

Ecbatana and its seven walls

Most of what we read about the Medes comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, more than a century after their kingdom ended. He tells of Deioces, a village judge so famous for fairness that the Medes made him king, and of the capital he built at Ecbatana. It had, Herodotus says, seven concentric walls, each painted a different colour, the innermost two plated with silver and gold. Ecbatana lies beneath modern Hamadan, and the city still carries its name: Hamadan descends from the Old Persian Hagmatāna, usually explained as 'place of gathering'. Archaeologists have found little of Herodotus's city, partly because modern Hamadan sits on top of it. In the hills around it, at sites such as Godin Tepe and Nush-i Jan, excavators have uncovered fortified halls and a temple with a fire altar from the Median period. Some historians now doubt that the Medes ever ran a centralised empire of the kind Herodotus describes. They may have been a looser confederation of chiefs.

What is not in doubt is the part the Medes played in one of the great turning points of the ancient world. Under their king Cyaxares, allied with Babylon, they sacked Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, in 612 BCE. Assyria, which had dominated the Near East for centuries, collapsed within a few years. Herodotus also describes a war between the Medes and the Lydians of Anatolia that ended when an eclipse of the sun darkened a battle. The armies stopped fighting and the river Halys became their border. Astronomers usually date that eclipse to 585 BCE.

The last Median king, Astyages, was overthrown around 550 BCE by Cyrus, ruler of the Persians of Anshan; in Herodotus's telling, Cyrus was his own grandson. The Medes were not erased. They became partners in the new empire, and Greek writers often called the Persians 'Medes'. Herodotus also names the Magi as a Median tribe. Their name travelled through Greek and Latin and gives English the word 'magic'.