The Medes

Academia.edu recommends Karen Radner on the Medes. Rather, Assyrian views on the Madâ. Ionians like Herodotus were in the habit of imala on the vowel A; hence -ides for Greek names you see everywhere else as "Leonidas".

Our view on the Madâ is Herodotus'. His Iranian data comes from Achaemenids all very keen to write a history leading to their own empire full of Divine pharna glory (hence Iranian names like "Tissaphernes" everywhere). Radner points out that the Assyrians had to live with the Madâ for centuries before Shah Darius, and were equally as literate as would be Darius and Herodotus. Radner asks the Assyrians to speak.

The Assyrian record is imperfect. Radner points out that local concerns rarely make the royal inscriptions unless they are rebelling against royals. No news is good news - for the king. Less good for the later historian: we have to hope for royal correspondence and, failing that, palace finances or even merchant records. Or for some Boulder County astrologer.

Adad-Nirari 810-783 BC seems first to note that the Madâ are out there. His empire had a horse shortage. With Urartu rising in Anatolia, and with Egypt being out of reach, said empire had to look east. Then came a gap as Assyria declined. Tiglath-Pileser III in 744 BC turned Assyria around and Sargon II, building a whole city in the region, has a wealth of correspondence. He's followed 705 BC by Sennacherib Of The Daddy Issues, also prolific in inscription, less so in (preserved) correspondence. Ashurbanipal is the last great king and, after him, Assyria doesn't record very much of anything. Then Assyria falls, to the Madâ... if we believe Herodotus.

For Assyria, the Madâ start out as "mighty Medes" and then - over the late 700s BC - devolve into "eastern Arabs". Some of the eastern mountain-men owned coherent kingdoms, or empires: Ellipi, Mannea, Elam, Urartu. Even Parsua (Persis) existed by now, usually as a province. The Madâ did not raise up a king as of Ashurbanipal in the 600s BC.

Some Madâ instead raised up local fortresses, extorting tolls along what we'd call the Silk Road. Others routed traffic AROUND the Silk Road, avoiding those tolls. That annoyed Assyrians who'd taken some of those Median forts - at great expense - only to see no profit from them. Eastern Arabs indeed!

Also "Arabian" is the Median ethnography. Some of those Madâ do look like Aryans, several eerily like Zoroastrians. I admit, I smiled at the name "Bagparna" - "God's Glory". But some names cannot be so translated. Of these Radner identifies Kassites. Some names are Schemitische - there is even a "Belshazzar" up here.

To sum up, "Mede" looks like "Scythian" or indeed "Arabian" as a catch-all term for "mountain man up in that plateau with the horses we need". The Aramaeans, faced with Cyrus, likely figured him for a "Mede from Parsua". (Cyrus identified himself as King of Elam at that time.) The Lydians - having taken up where Urartu left off - saw an army of general Medes led by a Persian. The Greeks didn't know the difference and, at that time, hadn't learnt to care. So "Mede" and "Persian" were synonymous to them.