The Medes left power—but almost no words of their own
Iron Age Medes spoke a Median language across western and northern Iran, yet they left no native archives. Assyrian, Babylonian, and Greek writers sketched them instead, and archaeology only seriously entered the “Median triangle” after the 1960s. Empire without a library is a historian’s headache.
Around the eleventh century BC they occupied mountainous northwestern Iran and the northeast of greater Mesopotamia, near Ecbatana, the modern Hamadan. Their grip on Iran seems to have firmed in the eighth century BC, and by the seventh all of western Iran answered to them, though nobody can draw the frontier. Old Persian Māda- names the land; the linguist W. Skalmowski links it to an Indo-European root for the middle, the same one behind Latin medium and English mid.
Herodotus, writing around 440 BC, pictured a mighty people whose empire ran from the early seventh century BC to the 550s BC, helped bring down Assyria and rivalled Lydia and Babylonia. He also passed on a tale that they were once called Arians and renamed themselves after Medea of Colchis. A recent reassessment of contemporary documents has shaken that grand picture, and some specialists doubt a powerful Median kingdom ever existed.
Digging began in earnest only in the 1960s. Before then, searchers concentrated on the so-called Median triangle bounded by Hamadan, Malayer and Kangavar. From 1967 David Stronach excavated Tepe Nush-i Jan, 14 km west of Malayer, uncovering a central temple, a western temple, a fort and a columned hall, plus pottery tied to a late seventh-century consolidation of power around Hamadan. Godin Tepe, dug from 1965 by T. C. Young Jr., revealed a local ruler's residence that grew substantial, much like strongholds described in Assyrian texts.
What is clearer is the aftermath. Once Cyrus the Great of Persia defeated the last Median king, Media did not fade away; it became a prized province for Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian rulers in turn.
Source: Medes
