Medes, Median Empire, Persian-Median Empire, مادها

Iranian Tribes - Creation of the Perso-Median Empire

"The Persians and the Medes were two tribes of a single nation."[FN 1]  Medes are "one of an Indo-European people, related to the Persians, who entered northeastern Iran probably as early as the 17th century bc and settled in the plateau land that came to be known as Media."[FN 2]  The Persian King "Cyrus completed his immediate task by assimilating the Medes on equal footing with the Persians, forming a composite empire. With the assimilation of the Medes, Cyrus also inherited the remains of the Median empire."[FN 3]

The Medes (old Persian, Maad-ha, مادها) were an ancient Iranian people who lived in  in an area of Northern Iran known as Media and spoke a Northern Iranian language referred to as the Median language. Their arrival to the region is associated with the first wave of Iranian tribes in the late second millennium BCE (the Bronze Age collapse) through the beginning of the first millennium BCE.

The Six Median Tribes:  
Herodotus lists the names of six Median tribes. Some of these are similar to tribal names of the Iranian-Scythians, suggesting a definitive link between these two groups: [1] The Busae group is thought to derive from the Persian term buza meaning indigenous. Whether this was based on an originally Iranian term, or their own name, is unknown. [2] The second group is called the Paraetaceni, or Parae-tak-(eni) in Persian, and denotes nomadic inhabitants of the mountains of Paraetacene. This name recalls the Scythian Para-la-ti, the people of Kolaxis, believed to represent the common people in general, but whom Herodotus calls the "Royal Scythians." [3] The third group is called Stru khat. [4] The fourth group is the Arizanti, whose name is derived from the words Arya (noble), and Zantu (tribe, clan). [5] The fifth group were the Budii, found also among the Black Sea Scythians as Budi-ni. Buddha was of the tribe Budha, the Saka (eastern Scythian) form of the name.  [6] The sixth tribe were the Magi...They were a hereditary caste of priests of the Zurvanism religion that evolved out of Zoroastrianism. The name Magi implies a link with the Sumerians, who called their language Emegir, over time becoming simplified to Magi. Hungarian tradition also traces pre-European Magyar (Hungarian) ancestry back to the Magi. In time, the Sumerian-influenced religion of the Magi was suppressed in favour of a more purely Iranian form of Zoroastrianism, itself evolved from its somewhat dualist beginnings into the monotheistic faith that it is today (also known as Parsi-ism).

Herodotus also mentions that "the Medes had exactly the same equipment as the Persians; and indeed the dress common to both is not so much Persian as Median."

Median Language: 
"Old Persian and Avestan are the two oldest known Iranian languages."[FN 4] "They were both spoken several centuries B.C.E. Together they make up the the oldest stratum of the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language group." (Ibid.)  Northern Iranians, known as Medes, and Southern Iranians, known as the Pars, spoke languages that were closely related to Old Persian."[FN 5]  Median is a substrate of Old Persian. (O. Skjærvø, Harvard Univ., Introduction to Old Persian 2d Ed. , "Median is attested by a large vocabulary incorporated into Old Persian, presumably as a substrate for the official language of the Persian Achaemenid kings.") [FN 6] 

Persian generally had four separate stages of development:

1.            Old Persian

2.            Middle Persian

3.            Classical Persian

4.            Modern Persian

“Old Persian is what the original tribe of the Hakahmaneshinian (Achaemenid هخامنشی) era spoke and they have left for us samples carved on stone in cuneiform script.”[FN 7]  This was the language of Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great.

In the Behistun Inscriptions[FN 8] of King Darius I of Persia (522-486 BC), Persia and Media are described as “provinces” of Iran (¶¶ 11, 14); the army of Iran is referred to as one army: the “Persian-&-Median army” (¶ 25); and Persians and Medes are referred to as “our family” within a shared Iranian ethnicity. (¶ 13)


Archeological sites in Iran commonly have inscriptions in several Iranian languages, such as Shapur's inscription at Ka'ba-i Zartosht, which includes Parthian and Middle Persian texts.  Below is the name of Iran from Ka'ba-i Zartosht, "ērānšahr," which means "Empire of the Iranians."

Brief History of the Median Empire (early 7th century to 551 BC):

Early written evidence of the Iranian-Median Empire comes from Herodotus, who described a group that appeared in Mesopotamia in 836 BC. While they referred to themselves as Arya (Iranian), others called them the Medes ("people of the Mada", a region in the northwestern portions of Iran, roughly the areas of present day Tehran, Kurdistan, and Hamedan, which ancient Greek sources referred to as ‘Media’ or ‘Mede’). 



The Medes excelled in battle and formed a dynasty during the second half of the 7th century BC under their founder Daiauku (known to Greeks as Deiocres, who according to Herodotus reigned from 728 to 675 BC), his successor Phraortes (675-653 BC, who united the Iranian tribes, including the Persians, under a single banner, and lost his life in a premature attack against the Assyrians), followed by his son Cyaxares (625-585 BC).

Meanwhile, beginning as early as the 9th century, and with increasing impact in the late 8th and early 7th centuries, nomadic warriors of Iranian stock, dominated by a group known as the Scythians, entered western Iran, probably from across the Caucasus.

Dominant among these groups were the Scythians, and their entrance into the affairs of the western plateau during the 7th century may perhaps mark one of the important turning points in Iron Age history. 

Herodotus wrote in some detail of a period of Scythian domination, (the so-called "Scythian interregnum" in Median dynasty history). Precise dating of this event remains uncertain, but traditionally it is seen as falling between the reigns of Phraortes and Cyaxares — circa 653 to 625 BC — a period during which a great many Scythians had descended on western Iran, who, along with the Medes and other Iranian tribes, expanded their control from Central Asia to Mesopotamia and posed a serious threat to Assyria (in present-day Iraq).



By 600 BC, the Medes under Cyaxares had carved out an empire that stretched from the southern shore of the Black Sea in Asia Minor to present-day Afghanistan.

Cyaxares's successor, Astyages, sat on the Median throne (585-550 BC) during a period of rapid Median decline, during which he was overthrown around 551 BC by the rise his grandson, Cyrus II the Great who prepared the foundation for a second Iranian dynasty, achieved even greater heights, and soon controlled an even larger realm — the Achaemenid Empire.

It is especially important to note that the Medes and Persians were both of Iranian stock and that the Persian Empire was a result of the synthesis of Northern-Iranians (Medes) and Southern-Iranians (Pars).  The archeological evidence shows the Medes and Pars as a united ethnic group and the Achaemenid Empire was the formal consummation of the ethno-linguistic realities of the people of the Iran.