Median Empire

An Iranian power that destroyed Assyria and was then absorbed by its own vassal, and which is known almost entirely from what other people wrote about it. The Medes appear in Assyrian records as troublesome highlanders in the Zagros from the ninth century, and Herodotus gives them a line of kings unifying the tribes at Ecbatana. Their decisive moment came in alliance with Babylon. Cyaxares took Ashur in 614 and joined Nabopolassar at the destruction of Nineveh in 612, ending the Assyrian empire that had dominated the Near East for three centuries. Media then held the north and east, from Anatolia to the Iranian plateau, and its war with Lydia ended in 585 at a battle stopped by a solar eclipse that Thales is said to have predicted. In 550 Cyrus of Anshan, a Persian vassal and by tradition the grandson of the Median king, defeated his overlord when the Median army changed sides. The empire passed to the Persians almost intact, which is why Greek writers went on calling the whole thing Median for a century - and why the archaeology of a state that ended an empire remains thin enough that its extent is still argued. What the Medes actually built is one of the open questions of Near Eastern archaeology. Herodotus describes a seven-walled capital at Ecbatana and a centralised kingdom; the excavated sites of the period on the Iranian plateau are fortified manors rather than an imperial administration, and some historians now argue the Median empire was a tribal confederation that Greek writers turned into a state on the Assyrian model. What is not in doubt is the outcome: the Persian empire inherited Median cavalry, Median dress at court and Median administrators, and the Greeks went on using the verb meaning to take the Persian side in the form medise.

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