The Culture of the Ancient Medes and Persians

Abstract

The real history of Iran commences with the mention of the wars between the Akkadian Semites and the Aryan inhabitants of western Iran in the 9th century B.C. and with the founding of the Median kingdom - the capital of which was Hagmatāna (Greek Ecbatana, known today as Hamadān; the name denoted originally ‘place of meeting’ — at the close of the 8th and the beginning of the 7th century B.C. It is mainly due to the work of two scholars, the German Ferdinand Justi (1837–1907) and the Czech Justin Václav Prášek (1853–1924), that the history of the earliest Aryan powers in Iran, the Medes, and their even more renowned successors the Persians, is now not only clear to us in outline but with a wealth of detail as well. After the catastrophic invasions by the savage brethren of the Medes, the Scythians, the Medes, in conjunction with the Babylonians, succeeded in destroying the kingdom of their Assyrian oppressors and in establishing the first Iranian empire. With the exception of a few proper names of rulers, generals and cities and about three appellatives (tigris, ‘arrow’, spaka, ‘dog’, tetaros, tatyras, ‘pheasant’, cf. the New Persian tadarv, Czech tetřev, ‘woodcock’), the language of the Medes is unfortunately unknown to us since no Median records have been preserved. In the 6th century the Persian kingdom, which originated in a part of the present-day Fars and had annexed part of Elam, began to grow in importance. In Akkadian texts it was called Anzān. The standard of culture in both kingdoms, until the year 550 B.C. under the hegemony of Media, was at first not very high. But there too the social organisation was on the whole the same as that to the east of the Iranian mountain country.