A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set

6 Magee, P. (2005) The chronology and environmental background of Iron Age settlement in southeastern Iran and the question of the origin of the Qanat irrigation system. Iranica Antiqua, 40, pp. 217–231. Discusses the relationship of southeastern Arabia with southern Iran.

7 Vogelsang, W.J. (1992). The Rise and Organisation of the Achaemenid Empire: The Eastern Iranian Evidence. Leiden: Brill. Amongst the first attempts to deal with the Eastern provinces.

8 Wilkinson, T.J., Boucharlat, R., Ertsen, M.W., et al. (2012). From human niche construction to imperial power: long‐term trends in ancient Iranian water systems. Water History, 4 (2), pp. 155–176. Deals with irrigation techniques but more specifically with the underground water galleries in the regions corresponding to the southeast of the Achaemenid Empire.

1 1Dahaneh‐i Ghulaman in Sistan is a remarkable exception. See below.

2 2On the other hand, Iron Age III installations, such as Pirak Level III in Pakistani Baluchistan and Nad‐i Ali, in southwestern Afghanistan (near Dahaneh‐i Ghulaman), are supposedly abandoned in the Achaemenid epoch (Franke‐Vogt 2001).

Robert Rollinger

It is no easy feat to correctly ascertain the role of the Medes in the historical and political development of the Ancient Near East. This is mostly due to two distinct problems, the first being a disparate and heterogeneous source tradition. Just as importantly, however, scholarly “tradition” has led to the calcification and entrenchment of certain ideas and preferences, as regards, for example, which source genres to use in trying to write Median history. At times, the salient issues are thus not grasped in their entirety or are ignored in favor of a narrative reconstruction of historical events allegedly based on a solid foundation in the sources. As recently as the late twentieth century, it was accepted historical knowledge that the fall of the Assyrian Empire was followed by the rise of a Median “empire” which ruled vast tracts of the Ancient Near East for half a century, until Astyages, the last Median ruler, was overthrown by one of his own vassals, namely Cyrus the Great. Only relatively late, the important works of the late Heleen Sancisi‐Weerdenburg pointed out the many difficulties and inadequacies of this view (Sancisi‐Weerdenburg 1988, 1995; see also Kienast 1999). Sancisi‐Weerdenburg was particularly critical of the alleged “imperial” structure and character of Median rule and identified a number of striking dissimilarities with other imperial entities of the Ancient Near East. She also emphasized the almost complete dependency of modern historiography on Classical (i.e. Greek) sources, to the nearly complete disregard of Ancient Near Eastern sources. Unfortunately, Sancisi‐Weerdenburg's work was met with very little acceptance. On the contrary, her hypotheses and conclusions were ignored, and the problematic nature of previous scholarship was marginalized.

An international symposium held in Padua in 2001 attempted to rigorously review all available sources and to present a secure (as far as possible) narrative of Median history (Lanfranchi et al. 2003). While the participants were largely successful in their first aim, no consensus on an accepted narrative could be reached due to the frustratingly incomplete and fragmentary nature of the sources. There was, however, a general consensus that the existence of a Median “empire” cannot be conclusively proven and should not be treated differently from other hypotheses. Opinions were divided on any further detailed characterization of historical events: whereas many of those present rigorously refused it or attempted to follow through on the theses of Sancisi‐Weerdenburg by questioning the geographic extent of Median influence (Liverani 2003; Rollinger 2003a, b; Henkelman 2003; Jursa 2003), others still chose to accept the notion of a Median “empire” (Roaf 2003). The discussion has continued up to the present (Tuplin 2005; Lanfranchi 2021; Rollinger 2004, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2020a; Waters 2005). What follows is an attempt to tackle this “Median dilemma” 1 and to throw a more general light on the Medes and their “history,” the available sources, the problems, and what we can state with some certainty.

In the reign of the Neo‐Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (858–834 BCE), Medes (Madāya) are mentioned for the first time. In the following centuries, they appear again and again in Neo‐Assyrian sources, especially in royal inscriptions, but also in archival records, mainly as opponents encountered when the Assyrian armies campaign in the central Zagros area – where they are primarily localized – but also as vassals of the Neo‐Assyrian super power (Radner 2003; Bagg 2020, pp. 379–382). Although it is unclear how far to the east the Assyrians reckoned with the presence of a Median population, there is evidence that it was as far as the region of the modern cities of Teheran and Rey (Rollinger 2007).

Not only for the Neo‐Assyrian era of the ninth through seventh centuries BCE but also for the following Neo‐Babylonian and early Persian times (sixth century BCE) our sources exclusively exhibit an external view of the Medes (Liverani 2003). There is not a single indigenous source representing a “Median” perspective on their matters, their history, or their agenda. Nor do we know whether there was a shared Median identity and whether the Medes of our sources called themselves Medes (Lanfranchi 2003: p. 84). Sometimes the Neo‐Assyrian sources refer to “mighty Medes” and “distant Medes.” At least these qualifications look very much like projections from outside in order to organize the expanding knowledge of an area becoming increasingly well known by the Assyrians. Some of these “Medes” were localized inside the empire, some of them outside; this makes them, as seen through an Assyrian lens, a border population. The Medes within Assyrian reach were regarded as vassals and had to swear the loyalty oath to the Assyrian heir apparent Esarhaddon (672 BCE).

The origin of the term Madāya is unknown, its specific trans‐regional usage evidently derives from Assyrian practice. Like in antiquity the ethnic term “German,” picked up from a very local and indigenous usage and artificially spread over the entire population east of the Rhine river by Caesar himself, the Assyrians might have taken up a local designation somewhere in the central Zagros area and transferred it to a far larger population covering the whole of the central Zagros and farther to the east.

Although the most popular one, the designation Madāya/Medes was not the only one used for the population of the central Zagros area. In the second half of the eighth century BCE appears the designation “Arabs of the east” (Radner 2003: p. 55). We do not exactly know what this actually means but it seems to reveal some kind of uncertainty about how to label the peoples of the central Zagros regions. “Arab,” a term that also appears for the first time in world history in the inscriptions of Shalmaneser III, may, at least initially, represent not an ethnically or linguistically determined designation but one referring to a specific mode of living, where transhumance or trade with camels might have played a major role (Lanfranchi 2003).

In Neo‐Babylonian and (retrospective) Persian sources the term Ummān‐manda appears for the Medes (Adali 2011). The term clearly is a designation deriving from outside and has a pejorative connotation. Moreover, it is evident that the term Madāya and the Neo‐Assyrian concept attached to it – i.e. a rather homogeneous and substantial population of the central Zagros area – became part of a tradition and was adapted by contemporary and later, adjacent and more distant languages and cultures, like the Urartians, Babylonians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans.