Maximum extent of the Median empire, ca. 600 BC.
The origin and history of the Medes is quite obscure, as we possess almost no contemporary information, and not a single monument or inscription from Media itself. Josephus relates the Medes to the biblical character, Madai, son of Japeth. “Now as to Javan and Madai, the sons of Japhet; from Madai came the Madeans, who are called Medes, by the Greeks” Antiquities of the Jews, I:6. The Medes appear in history first in 836 BC. The earliest records show that the Assyrian conqueror Shalmaneser II received tribute from them in connection with wars against the tribes of the Zargos. His successors undertook many expeditions against the Medes.
In spite of repeated rebellions by the early chieftains against the Assyrian yoke, the Medes paid tribute to Assyria under Sargon’s successors, whenever these kings marched in with their fierce armies.
In the second half of the seventh century BC, the Medes gained their independence and were united by a dynasty. The kings who established the Mede Empire are generally recognized to be Phraortes and his son Cyraxares. They were probably chieftains of a nomadic Mede tribe in the desert and on the south shore of the Caspian, the Manda, mentioned by Sargon, and they likely founded the capital at Ecbatana.
According to Herodotus, the conquests of Cyaxares the Mede were preceded by a Scythian invasion and domination lasting twenty-eight years (under Madius the Scythian, 653-625 BC). The Mede tribes seem to have come into immediate conflict with a settled state to the West known as Mannae, allied with Assyria. Assyrian inscriptions state that the early Mede rulers, who had attempted rebellions against the Assyrians in the time of Esarhaddon and Assur-bani-pal, were allied with chieftains of the Scythians and Jeremiah and Zephaniah in the Old Testament agree with Herodotus that a massive invasion of Syria and Philistia by northern barbarians took place in 626 BC. The state of Mannae was finally conquered and assimilated by the Medes in the year 616 BC.
In 612, Cyaxares conquered Urartu, and with the help of Nabopolassar the Chaldean, succeeded in destroying the Assyrian capital, Nineveh; and by 606, the remaining vestiges of Assyrian control. From then on, the Mede king ruled over much of Iran, Assyria and northern Mesopotamia, Armenia and Cappadocia. His power was very dangerous to his neighbors, and the exiled Jews expected the destruction of Babylonia by the Medes. When Cyaxares attacked Lydia, the kings of Cilicia and Babylon intervened and negotiated a peace in 585 BC, whereby the Halys was established as the Medes’ frontier with Lydia. Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon married a daughter of Cyaxares, and an equilibrium of the great powers was maintained until the rise of the Persians under Cyrus.
In 553 BC Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, rebelled against his grandfather, the Mede King Astyages, son of Cyaxares; he finally won a decisive victory in 550 BC resulting in Astyages’ capture by his own dissatisfied nobles, who promptly turned him over to the triumphant Cyrus. Thus were the Medes subjected to their close kin, the Persians. In the new empire they retained a prominent position; in honor and war, they stood next to the Persians.
When the Persian empire decayed and the Cadusii and other mountainous tribes made themselves independent, eastern Armenia became a special satrapy, while Assyria seems to have been united with Media.
Deioces
It is difficult to separate myth from fact in the case of Deioces. If the account of Herodotus may be trusted, the Medes’ dynasty derived its origin from Deioces, a Mede chieftain in the Zagros, who was, along with his kinsmen, transported by Sargon to Hamath (Haniah) in Syria in 715 BC. At the time of the ascent of Deioces, the Medes lived in separate, autonomous villages, or rather townships. In a period of great lawlessness all over Media he made every effort to enforce justice in his own village; his reputation as an impartial judge thus gradually spread, until finally he claimed that this role was too troublesome and refused to continue administering justice. Lawlessness then reigned anew, worse than before, so that the Medes assembled and at last resolved to elect a king to rule over them. They elected Deioces, who is said to have ruled for fifty-three years. He ordered a strong fortress city to be built, with walls arranged in seven concentric rings; all government authority was centralized in his capital, Ekbatana. He retired to his palace, within the innermost of the seven rings, and surrounded himself with a kind of bodyguard. He enforced law and order by introducing “watchers and listeners” throughout his realm, the forerunners of the Achaemenid “king’s eyes” or “ears. . with the founding of the Median state.”
