The Medes

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The hill of Hagmatāna rises out of the modern Iranian city of Hamadan, and beneath the streets that climb it the capital of the Medes is still mostly unexcavated — a buried citadel under a living town, the one Median city whose name everyone remembers and whose stones almost no one has seen. The Greeks called it Ecbatana. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, described it as a royal seat ringed by seven concentric walls, each rising above the last by the height of its battlements, the seven crowned in seven colors — white, black, scarlet, blue, orange, and the two highest plated in silver and gold. The picture is plainly more than a surveyor would file. A ring of seven colored ramparts is the ground-plan of a cosmos, the seven of the planetary heavens laid into masonry, and historians have long read it as a fable dressed in mathematics, perhaps the memory of a stepped temple-tower of the old Mesopotamian kind. Yet the hill stands and the city beneath it is genuine, and the people who built there held the northwestern Iranian plateau between two giants — the dying empire of Assyria to the west and the rising power of the Persians to the south — for the better part of a century and a half.

A people on the plateau

The Medes were an Iranian people, speakers of a western Iranian tongue close to Old Persian, settled across the Zagros highlands and the plateau that bears their name — Media, the land south of the Caspian and east of the Zagros, with Ecbatana at its heart. They enter the written record not in their own voice but in the annals of their enemies. Assyrian kings of the ninth and eighth centuries BCE campaigned eastward into the mountains and came home with tribute and horses from a patchwork of “mighty Medes,” māda in the cuneiform, organized not as one kingdom but as a scatter of chiefdoms under local lords whom the Assyrians called city-rulers. The plateau was rich in exactly what an iron-age war machine wanted — pasture, and the horses that pasture fed. Median cavalry would become proverbial; the breeding of horses for the imperial relays of later Persia ran through Median ground.

For the early period there is a hard gap between two kinds of source, and it shapes everything that can responsibly be said about the Medes. On one side stand the Assyrian and Babylonian records — administrative, contemporary, terse, naming Median chiefs as tributaries and adversaries. On the other stands Herodotus, writing two centuries after the events he narrates, who gives the Medes a clean dynastic story: a founder, a line of four kings, a capital, a rise, and a fall. The two do not align, and the friction between them is the central problem of Median history.

The Herodotean king-list

Herodotus tells it as a parable of order chosen out of chaos. The Medes, he writes, lived in scattered villages without law until a man named Deioces, renowned for his justice, was made arbiter of every dispute, grew indispensable, and then withdrew his judgments until the people, unable to live without him, made him king. Deioces built Ecbatana with its seven walls, surrounded himself with ceremony and distance, and founded a dynasty. After him came his son Phraortes, who began the conquests; then Cyaxares, the great warrior-king who reorganized the army and brought down Assyria; and finally Astyages, in whose reign the kingdom passed to the Persians. The conventional dates assigned to this line — a founding around 678 BCE, the fall around 549 — frame the realm as a century and a half of plateau empire.

It is a satisfying shape, and much of it is suspect. The numbers betray the design: Herodotus gives the first two kings seventy-five years between them and the last two another seventy-five, a symmetry that smells of pattern rather than record. The contemporary documents know nothing of Deioces as Herodotus describes him — no Median kingdom of his founding appears in the Assyrian sources of the early seventh century, and the figure he calls Deioces may stand at a great remove from a chief named Daiukku whom an Assyrian king deported. Phraortes, too, leaves no clear trace in the cuneiform. Only the last two kings emerge into the documentary light: Cyaxares, who appears in Babylonian chronicle under the name Umakištar as the Mede who joined the king of Babylon against Assyria, and Astyages, the Ištumegu whom that same chronicle tradition records being overthrown. The dynasty’s first half is legend remembered as history; its second half is history. Reading the king-list is an exercise in knowing where the documents begin.

The breaking of Assyria

The one Median achievement that the contemporary record confirms in full is also the largest: the destruction of the Assyrian empire, the terror of the Near East for three centuries. By the late seventh century Assyria was overextended and feuding within its own house, and two powers on its flanks moved against it at once. In southern Mesopotamia, the Chaldean Nabopolassar had seized Babylon in 626 BCE and begun prying the Assyrian garrisons loose from the south. From the plateau, Cyaxares drove west into the Assyrian heartland. A Babylonian cuneiform tablet — the document modern scholarship calls the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle, recovered and first edited by C. J. Gadd in 1923 — narrates the campaigns year by year in the flat, dated prose of the chronicle genre. It records the Medes taking the ancient religious capital Aššur in 614, and there, at the ruined city, the Mede Umakištar and the Babylonian Nabopolassar meeting and binding themselves in alliance.

Two years later they finished it. In 612 BCE the combined armies of Media and Babylon laid siege to Nineveh, the great Assyrian capital on the Tigris that Babylonian astronomers and Assyrian kings alike had made the largest city in the world. After three months the walls broke; the Assyrian king died in the fall of his city; Nineveh was sacked and burned, and the chronicle notes the looting going on until the Medes at last turned for home. The fall of Nineveh shocked the ancient world — the prophet Nahum in the Hebrew Bible exults over the city’s ruin in lines written within living memory of the event — and it redrew the map. Assyria was finished. Babylon took the rich Mesopotamian south and west; Media took the north and the Iranian east; the alliance was sealed, the Greek and Babylonian traditions agree, by a royal marriage. The Medes had become, for one generation, a great power, fronting Babylon across the old Assyrian carcass and pressing northwest against the kingdom of Urartu and against the Lydians of Anatolia, where the war between the two reportedly broke off when a solar eclipse turned the battlefield dark.

Was there a Median empire?

Here the modern scholarly fault-line opens, and it is worth stating plainly, because the word empire carries more freight than the evidence may bear. The traditional picture — drawn from Herodotus and the much later Persian historical tradition — has the Medes building, between the fall of Nineveh and the rise of Cyrus, a genuine empire across the Iranian plateau and deep into Anatolia: a centralized state with a capital, a court, satrap-like governors, and an administrative reach that the Persians then simply inherited and enlarged. A revisionist current, crystallized at an international meeting held at Padua in 2001 and published as the volume Continuity of Empire (?). Assyria, Media, Persia, questions the whole construction. Mario Liverani, in the lead essay The Rise and Fall of Media, argued that what the sources actually attest is not a structured empire but a temporary coalition of plateau war-bands — that Cyaxares may have been less a king ruling an imperial administration than a leader chosen to take the Medes into the spoils of Assyria’s collapse. On this reading there is no Median bureaucracy for the Persians to inherit, because there never was a Median state of the kind Herodotus described; the archaeology of the plateau, thin on the monumental and administrative remains that a centralized empire leaves behind, has been read to support the doubt. Other scholars defend a middle position — a real and formidable power, certainly, perhaps short of a fully articulated empire. The question turns, as so much of Iranian antiquity does, on how far the Greek narrative can be trusted against the silence of the spade and the terseness of the chronicles. What is not in dispute is that the Medes broke Assyria and held the plateau; what is in dispute is the architecture of the realm they held it with.

The Magi

Of the six Median tribes that Herodotus names — the Busae, the Paraetaceni, the Struchates, the Arizanti, the Budii, and the Magi — one would outlast the kingdom, the language, and the plateau itself, and would lend its name to a word spoken in every European tongue. The Magi were, in Herodotus’s account, a hereditary tribe turned priestly caste: the ritual specialists of the Iranian cult, the men who tended the sacred fires, performed the libations and the blood-offerings, chanted the long invocations over the sacrifice, interpreted dreams and read the sky. They were indispensable to a king who wished the gods addressed correctly, and they kept the technical knowledge of how to address them. Whether the Magi were originally Median or were a priestly order that the Medes shared with the wider Iranian world is itself uncertain; what the sources show is that by the time the plateau enters Greek view, the Magus and the Mede are bound together in the Greek mind, and the priesthood that the Persians later carried across their empire was understood to be Median in root.

The fire they tended belonged to the old Iranian religion — a worship of cosmic order, aša, “truth,” against druj, “the lie,” with fire as the visible sign of that order and the great recipient of cult, alongside the worship of the sun, the waters, and a roster of Iranian gods. This is the matrix from which the reformed religion of Zoroaster grew, the religion whose scriptures, the Avesta, preserve the oldest layer of Iranian sacred poetry. The relation is delicate and much debated. The prophet’s own hymns, on linguistic grounds, are placed by most scholars far to the east and centuries before the Median kingdom; the western plateau — Media, Persia — belongs to the religion’s later expansion, not its origin. The Magi are best understood not as Zoroaster’s first disciples but as the existing Iranian priesthood into whose keeping the worship of Ahura Mazda was, over generations, gathered and systematized — the custodians through whom an eastern prophet’s teaching became, eventually, the fire-tended liturgy of an empire. The historical Magi of Media are therefore distinct from two things they are easily confused with: the codified Zoroastrian priesthood of much later centuries, and the figure the word would become.

For Magus did become a figure. The Old Persian maguš passed into Greek as magos, and from the Greek mageia — “the art of the Magi” — descends, through Latin, the English magic and the whole family of words around it. The path of the word is the path of a misunderstanding made productive. To a Greek, the Magus was the exotic Eastern wise man, keeper of secrets, reader of stars, master of rites — and mageia slid, even within Greek, from “Persian priestcraft” toward “sorcery.” The earliest datable appearance of the word is itself a hostile one: the great trilingual cliff-inscription that Darius the Great had carved at Bisitun, on the very road between Babylon and Ecbatana, names a usurper Darius destroyed as Gaumāta the Magian. The priest of an imperial fire-cult and the European wizard are the two ends of a single thread of philology — the same word, stretched across two and a half millennia and bent, somewhere in transmission, from a functionary’s title into a name for hidden power. The Magi’s reputation as masters of the stars also tied them, in the Greek imagination, to the astral learning of Babylon, so that “Chaldean” and “Magus” became near-interchangeable names for the Eastern keeper of celestial wisdom; and the same eastward-looking imagination would later make the Persian priest one ancestor of the Roman mysteries of Mithras and of the dualist Iranian and Mesopotamian gnosis of late antiquity.

The passage to Persia

The Median kingdom ended not in a sack but in a mutiny. To the south, in the highlands of Persis bordering the old kingdom of Elam, a vassal line of the Medes had grown — the Persians, ruled by a house whose king, Cyrus, was by tradition a grandson of the Median Astyages through his mother. Around 550 BCE Cyrus rose against his overlord. The contemporary Babylonian record, the Nabonidus Chronicle, sets the event in the sixth year of the Babylonian king Nabonidus — the span from 550 into 549 BCE — and tells it with merciless brevity: the army of Astyages mutinied against him on the march, seized their own king, and handed him over to Cyrus, who then marched on Ecbatana and carried off its silver and gold and treasure to his own city. The Median realm did not so much fall as change hands. Its capital, its priesthood, its cavalry, its administrative habits where they existed, and its very dynasty by blood passed into the Persian house, which absorbed them and built upon them the largest empire the ancient world had yet seen — the work that belongs to the Achaemenid empire Cyrus founded.

What the Medes gave their successors was not a ruin to be remembered but a going concern to be inherited. Ecbatana became one of the great Persian capitals, the summer residence of the King of Kings, and later a seat of the Parthians after them; the Median dress, the Median honor-guard, the Median nobility kept their place at the Persian court, so that Greek observers often could not tell where the Mede ended and the Persian began and spoke of the whole as “the Medes” long after the kingdom was gone. The fire the Magi tended kept burning. The priesthood that had served the kings on the plateau served the new King of Kings, carried its rites across the breadth of the empire, gathered the worship of Ahura Mazda into the great Iranian religion, so that the Magi entered Achaemenid Persia not as a conquered priesthood but as the empire’s recognized keepers of fire, sacrifice, and the calendar.

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