Ancient Persia and Iranian Civilization

Clement Huart

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136199882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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Part One
The Medes and the Achæmenids

Chapter I
The Iranians on the Plateau of Media. Campaigns of
the Assyrians

PREHISTORIC Persia has been studied by J. de Morgan,¹ but no light has yet been thrown on the invasion of the plateau of Media by the Iranians from the North. Settlements are found on the southern slope of the Damavand massif in Mazandaran and in the Lar valley near Muhammadabad, and prehistoric remains in the silt of the torrential Ab-i-Parduma, recalling the crudest types of the European Quaternary period. Neolithic workshops have been discovered in the Pusht-i-Kuh (the Kassite country) and at Tepe Gulam in Luristan. Bronze Age tombs and a dolmen have been found at Kraveh-Kadeh, in the mountains above Lenkoran on the Caspian. At an undetermined but certainly very ancient epoch Elam or Susiana was inhabited by Negritoes.²

The cuneiform inscriptions of the Assyrian king Tiglathpileser I, a great warrior, about 1115-1100 B.C., tell us of the expeditions which he undertook to extend his sway. He attacked the Moschians, north of Commagene, and then the mountains of Armenia, where he was confronted by impenetrable forests; he went as far as Lake Van.³

Not until the expedition of Shalmaneser III in 837, nearly three centuries later, do we find mention of the Parsua, in the mountains of Kurdistan, between the sources of the Zab and the Diyala, a district in which twenty-seven princes reigned over as many states, and the Amadai, that is, the Medes, who inhabited the plain; so these peoples appear for the first time.¹

Both peoples spoke an Indo-European language; for this fact we have the evidence of Strabo, who tells us that the Medes, Persians, Bactrians, and Sogdians spoke one same language with slight variations.² They were not autochthonous, even so far as this term has a meaning in the case of primitive peoples which we see moving from one place to another, in the remotest antiquity known to us, and even in prehistoric times. They were immigrants from the vast, almost desert tracts, which the ancients knew under the name of Scythia, and perhaps from the part of that enormous territory which corresponds to the present Southern Russia. The memory of these movements has been preserved in the Avesta, which speaks vaguely of a lost country, a kind of earthly Paradise called Airyanem-Vaejo. Driven from their original habitat by the cold, the Aryans came to Sogdiana (Bukhara and Samarqand) and Margiana (Marv), whence they were compelled by an invasion of locusts and hostile tribes to move further south, to Balkh and then into Khurasan, whence they spread into Persia.³

Is it possible to determine the approximate time of this migration? In 1100 the Medes were not yet established in the country which was called, after them, Media. Moreover, the Hittites had constituted in Asia Minor an empire which fought against the Assyrians and the Egyptians.⁴ The Medes only appear on the scene long after these first invaders. We can hardly give a date earlier than the first millennium to their intrusion on to the high plateaus, which were at that time inhabited by a population whose racial origin is unknown to us. This population was either driven back into the hills or assimilated by the invaders.

The Medes were divided into six tribes, whose names Herodotos has preserved for us—Busæ, Paretaceni, Struchates, Arizanti, Budii, and Magi.¹ They were a pastoral people, possessing horses, oxen, sheep, goats, and trained watch-dogs. They travelled in waggons with wheels and axles rudely cut from tree-trunks. The family was based on patriarchal authority and polygamy, and brides were carried off by main force—that is, they practised exogamy. They were acquainted with gold, electrum (a compound of gold and silver, which they could not separate), and bronze. Their art was confined to very simple decoration. When they were established in the country they took to agriculture, but they remained divided into independent clans, which were, however, able to combine in time of danger.

When Shalmaneser III made his first expedition against Namri (Kurdistan), in 844, the Assyrian king found a country which had long been under Babylonian influence, under a king with the Semitic name of Marduk-Mudammik. The latter fled into the mountains; his treasures were seized and his people made captive; and a king of Kassite origin, named Ianzu, was chosen to reign over the devastated country. This Ianzu revolted seven years later; he escaped into the forests, but was finally taken and led into Nineveh in triumph.

Under the successor of Shalmaneser III, Shamshi-Adad IV (824-812), the Medes are mentioned once more, as being conquered and paying tribute. It would seem that their country was well populated, for it has many cities, great numbers of prisoners are brought in, and the horses and cattle taken are reckoned in thousands. Adad-nirari III, the son of the foregoing, led seven expeditions into Media in 810 and the following years, without making much headway.

In 744 Tiglath-pileser III, who had ascended the throne on 13th April, 745, invaded the country, where, like his predecessors, he found the clans disunited, and attacked them one after another. From this campaign he brought back sixty thousand prisoners and enormous numbers of oxen, sheep, mules, and dromedaries, which he led in triumph to his capital Calah. One of his generals advanced as far as the foot of Bikni, the ' Crystal Mountain ', Mount Damavand, which the conquerors regarded as the extreme northern limit of the world. This excursion decided the succes of the campaign, and the chieftains of the country hastened to pay homage. Later, in 737, the whole of Media was ravaged, doubtless in consequence of a revolt; the furthest valleys and the most rugged mountains were scoured, and a throng of captives took the road to the plains.

Fifteen years later, in 722, Sargon II took Samaria and carried off the people of the Kingdom of Israel, as is narrated in the Second Book of Kings (xvii, 6), The Israelites were distributed between Calah, the capital of Assyria at the time, the banks of the Khabur, and the cities of the Medes. Some years after this historic event, in 715, the same king, in the course of a campaign against the Mannai, who inhabited Adharbayjan south of Lake Urmiyah and were related to the Medes, captured one of their chiefs, named Dayaukku, and, contrary to the inveterate custom, spared his life and sent him and his family into exile at Hamath in Syria. Now, this name Dayaukku is the same as that of the founder of the Median empire, which the Greeks have transmitted to us in the form Deioces; but the similarity of name does not prove that it was the same man. Once more the suzerainty of Assyria was recognized for a time, and twenty-two chieftains of Medic tribes took the oath of allegiance.

In the reign of Esarhaddon, Sennacherib's son, about 674, the armies of Assyria made their way beyond Damavand to the salt desert, a country rich in lapis lazuli, which they had never reached before. This is sufficient evidence that the statements in the inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser I, mentioned above, had exaggerated greatly. Esarhaddon captured two kings, Sidirparna and Eparna, and took them to Assyria, with their subjects, their two-humped camels, and their trained horses. Other kings accompanied him to Nineveh and appealed for his protection, bringing gifts of lapis lazuli and horses.

Notes

¹ LXXXII, LXXXIV, LXXXV.

² LXXXIII, XX, vol. iv, pp. 3, 7, 17, 118, 161.

³ Delaporte, Mesopotamia, in this series, pp. 246-7 of the English.

¹ XVII, p. 453.

² Strabo, xv. 724.

³ CV, vol. i, pp. 211, 683. Cf. Avesta, Vendidad, 1, 6 ff, and Bundahish, cc, 25, 30. The latter places this country north of Adharbayjan, the Arran of the Middle Ages, the modern Qarabagh.

⁴ Herodotos (i. 72) knows of a tribe which had advanced as far as the Halys. This was the Hittites, or Kheta, whom the ancients called Leucosyrians or White Syrians. Recent discoveries at Boghaz-Keui (Pteria) have shown that one, at least, of the languages of their inscriptions was Indo-European.

¹ Hdt., i. 101.

Chapter II
The Empire of the Medes

Deioces

HERODOTOS tells us that Deioces, son of Phraortes, had such a name for his sense of justice that the people of his village, and then the members of his tribe, all submitted disputed cases to him. Seeing that he was growing powerful, Deioces let it be known that he could not spend all his time at the expense of his own affairs, and gave over this activity, whereupon thefts and disorders began once more. Then the Medes resolved to set up a king, and for that office they chose Deioces.¹

The first act of the new king was to surround himself with a powerful bodyguard; his second was to make himself a capital. For this he chose the town of Hamadan, which the Greeks called Ecbatana. He did not found it, for it is mentioned under the name of Amadana in the inscription of Tiglathpileser I, but he gave it new glory, increasing the population. The name Hangmatana means ' Meeting-place ' and seems to indicate that the clans, formerly scattered, gathered there in a more concentrated fashion. The new city was built on the model of the cities of the plain. It stood on the hill now called Musalla, to the east of the present town. The walls, seven in number, were concentric, and increased in height inwards, so that the innermost rose above all the rest. The king's palace, which held his treasures, stood inside the seventh wall, which had gilded battlements, whereas those of the other walla were painted in bright colours, like the Birs Nimrud.² Among the Babylonians these colours symbolized the sun, moon, and planets, but among the Medes they were merely artistic imitation. This old palace must have survived a long time, for we find a description of it in Polybius (x, 24).

Deioees also instituted a court etiquette, probably copied from Assyrian usages; no one might see the king face to face, and petitions had to be carried to him by messengers. This rule and many others were intended to inspire fear and reverence, by making access to the sovereign difficult.¹

During his reign of fifty-three years (708-655) Deioces had time to work for the unification of the Medes, hitherto dispersed, in a single nation. He was fortunate enough to escape the attention of the Assyrians, if he is not the same as the Dayaukku of the cuneiform texts, for Sennacherib was too busy fighting Babylon and Elam or Susiana to give thought to the high and difficult mountains of Kurdistan, and the only expedition which menaced Media was that which was conducted against Ellipi, that is, the district of Kirmanshah. The rest of the country kept quiet and paid its tribute regularly, so that the Assyrians had no cause to intervene.

Phraortes

Deioces was succeeded by his son Phraortes (Fravartish), who bore the same name as his grandfather. He carried on his father's policy, that is, the maintenance of good relations with Assyria, where Assurbanipal was on the throne,² by the regular payment of tribute, and the conquest and absorption of the tribes of the same stock established on the plateau. In this way the Medes came to take possession of the parts inhabited by the kindred Persians. Emboldened by these successes, they tried to shake off the yoke, and attacked the Assyrians; but those veteran troops, which had finally subdued Elam, which were well disciplined and had grown old in their arms, were too much for the impetuous Medes. The latter were utterly defeated, Phraortes was killed, after a reign of twenty-two years (655-633),³ and the greater part of the army was wiped out.

Cyaxares

Then C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE THE MEDES AND THE ACHÆMENIDS
• PART TWO THE PARTHIAN ARSACIDS
• PART THREE THE SASSANIDS
• CONCLUSION
• CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX