Cyaxares

Cyaxares destroyed the Assyrian Empire and made Media a great power. He came to the throne around 625 BC, according to Herodotus after his father Phraortes was killed attacking Assyria and after a period of Scythian domination over Media lasting twenty-eight years — which Cyaxares ended, in one account, by inviting the Scythian leaders to a banquet and killing them drunk. His first achievement was military reform. Herodotus credits him with separating the Median army into specialised units of spearmen, archers and cavalry, where previously they had fought as an undifferentiated mass. It is the reason he could do what his predecessors could not. Assyria had ruled the Near East for three centuries and had been in trouble since the death of Ashurbanipal around 631 BC. Cyaxares allied with Nabopolassar of Babylon, sealed by the marriage of his daughter or granddaughter to Nebuchadnezzar. The Medes took Ashur in 614 BC. The allied armies destroyed Nineveh in 612 BC after a siege of three months, and the remnant of the Assyrian state was extinguished at Harran and Carchemish over the following years. The empire was divided: Babylon took Mesopotamia and the Levant, Media the northern and eastern highlands and Assyria proper. He then pushed into Anatolia against Lydia. The war ran five years and ended at the battle of the Eclipse in 585 BC, when a solar eclipse — reportedly predicted by Thales — stopped the fighting and both sides made peace at the Halys. His son Astyages was overthrown by Cyrus. The eclipse gives the battle one of the earliest firmly datable days in ancient history.

• Lived: 655 BCE – 585 BCE
• Nationality: Median
• Roles: ruler, general