Читать книгу A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set - Группа авторов - Страница 181

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.

As we do not know whether these Madāya had a supra‐regional Median identity, we are also ignorant about whether they represent a homogenous linguistic group. Although the many “Median” proper names that we have, thanks to the flourishing cuneiform and later especially Greek sources, reveal a dominant Iranian background of these people, one should be cautious about claiming that this evidence definitely proves a homogenous and well‐defined Iranian language, generally and simplistically labeled “Median.” Such a hypothesis, although very common and likewise broadly accepted as fact, does not rest on firm ground (Schmitt 2003; Rossi 2010, 2017). It is highly probable that behind these proper names lurks a much larger and more complex diversity of local Iranian dialects/languages. And certainly, we have to reckon with a larger ethnic diversity in general in these areas where Urartian, Hurrian, Elamite, Assyrian, Babylonian, and other languages played a certain role (Fuchs 2011).

Over the 200 years of rather extensive Neo‐Assyrian documentation there is not a single piece of evidence for a unified political entity in the central Zagros region, let alone for a Median “empire.” Instead, these sources depict a highly fragmented political landscape in the Zagros mountain region, with no discernible tendencies toward greater centralization. The Assyrians encounter a plurality of small political units, whose rulers they call not “king” but “city lord” (bēl āli). Although transhumance was highly important in these regions, horse breeding and trade/robbery also played an important role, since the Khorasan road, i.e. the predecessor of the Silk Road, crossed the central Zagros area. In any case, the Assyrian sources never describe the Medes as nomads but always as a sedentary population. Intensive contact with the Assyrian super power and its gigantic economic space was highly influential in these regions, especially when with the reign of king Sargon (721–705 BCE) the Assyrians began to establish provinces. These contacts certainly transformed local societies and may also have triggered developments toward political unification that can be described as “secondary state formation” (Brown 1986; Rollinger 2020b), although this process never became a supra‐regional phenomenon. This conclusion is confirmed by archeological sources that, likewise, do not indicate the existence of a unified Median state. Important sites like Nush‐e Jan, Godin Tepe, Baba Jan Tepe, or Ozbaki Tepe do not represent “imperial centers” but rather seats of “city lords” with no more than a local reach (Liverani 2003; Stronach 2003; Gopnik 2011). Previously identified seats of power of an alleged Median “empire” in western Iran, like Hamadan, or outside the proper central Zagros area, like Kerkenes Dag˘ı in Asia Minor, do not hold up to critical scrutiny and have been revealed as optimistic academic mirages, constructed to fit preconceived notions of imperial Media (Boucharlat 1998; Sarraf 2003; Rollinger 2003b).

By about the middle of the seventh century BCE Assyrian sources on the Medes become scanty. They reappear on the political stage when the Assyrian Empire fights a final struggle for existence in the last third of the seventh century BCE. Our main source for these events is a Babylonian chronicle, the so‐called “Fall of Nineveh Chronicle” (Grayson 2000: pp. 90–96). Although the Chronicle reveals a Babylonian perspective on the events, it does not deny that it was not only the Babylonian forces under their usurper king Nabopolassar (626–605 BCE) that brought the Assyrian super power to an end but a coalition of Medes and Babylonians, who even concluded a formal treaty of alliance (Rollinger 2003a, 2010; Fuchs 2014). The Medes are described as Ummān‐manda and led by a certain Umakištar (Cyaxares in Greek). Obviously they “descend” to Assyria but the origin and reach of Umakištar's reign remain obscure. They destroy the city of Assur in 614 BCE and, together with the Babylonians, Nineveh in 612. With this event Umakištar disappears again from the historical scene, although some Medes may have participated in the Neo‐Babylonian campaign to the last Neo‐Assyrian residence Harran to deliver the failing Assyrians their final blow (Rollinger 2003a).

The Medes prominently reappear in the inscriptions of the last Neo‐Babylonian king, Nabonidus (556–539 BCE) (Rollinger 2003a, 2010, 2020a). Three events focus on the Medes through a Babylonian lens. The first one is once more the city of Harran in Syria. Nabonidus claims that the Babylonians were unable to rebuild the temple Ehulhul of the moon god Sîn, allegedly destroyed by Medes during the final struggles of the Neo‐Assyrian Empire in 609 BCE, because the Medes were supposedly still “roaming around” for more than 50 years. This is clearly an ideologically biased view where an allegedly permanent Median presence in Syria during the first half of the sixth century BCE is made accountable for Babylonian inactivity to rebuild the temple. In the same way, the Medes are presented as archetypical temple destroyers, an uncoordinated and destructive mass of people, and thus as true barbarians. This also goes for the second event, when Nabonidus looks back on the fall of the Neo‐Assyrian Empire and describes the Medes as a destructive flood that ruined not only Assyria but also Mesopotamian cultic rites and cult centers. The third event is contemporaneous to Nabonidus, when he focuses on the end of Median dominance in the central Zagros area. In this context another Median leader is introduced 60 years after Umakištar. His name is Ištumegu (Astyages in Greek). The event in question is also addressed by the so‐called Nabonidus Chronicle originating in Persian times, although inscription and chronicle are not in accordance concerning the dating of the event (553 vs. 550 BCE). Ištumegu seems to have ruled a political entity of medium size around its center, Hagmatana (Agbatana or Ekbatana in Greek; Hamadan in modern times), which controlled a territory no larger than the central Zagros region. He is not presented as a relative of the former Umakištar, and his political and especially military instruments appear to have been much less developed than those of his predecessor. He is in control neither of northwestern nor of southwestern Iran. He is not characterized as suzerain and superior of the king of Anshan, i.e. later Cyrus the Great. Rather, it was the latter who took the initiative and campaigned against his northern neighbor and rival, whom he quickly overthrew, and plundered Hagmatana (Rollinger 1999, 2010, 2020).

With this event the Medes do not disappear from cuneiform sources. Media has a coda in Darius' Bisitun inscription (Rollinger 2005). It figures as a kind of supra‐regional entity reaching from eastern Anatolia to central western Iran and farther to the east, and as far as the southern Caspian Sea. At first glance, one may take this as evidence for the extension of a former Median “empire.” But a closer look reveals that this is still a politically fragmentary and heterogeneous area, where several individual uprisings with different usurpers took place, only one claiming to be a descendant of the already legendary Umakištar. This evidence is thus best explained as a reflection of the reach of a very short‐termed confederation that owes its brief existence mainly to the special historical circumstances around the fall of the Neo‐Assyrian Empire.

The persistence of local traditions in a politically still fragmented landscape in these areas during early Persian times is also demonstrated by a much‐disputed passage of the so‐called Nabonidus Chronicle (ii 16) (Rollinger 2009; Rollinger/Kellner 2019). The passage deals with a campaign of Cyrus the Great in 547 BCE (the ninth year of king Nabonidus) toward a land which cannot be defined with absolute certainty because the text is partly broken. Only traces of the country's first sign are preserved rather badly, and it has been argued for about 100 years how to read this sign (Rollinger 1993: pp. 188–197). The discussion is characterized by the fact that such readings/interpretations have nearly always been presented as a “fact,” the tablet's bad state of preservation and the many different readings put forward notwithstanding. From the very beginning there was a mainstream opinion that the first sign of the country has to be read as Lu‐[xxx] and the country thus to be interpreted as Luddu, i.e. Lydia. This is the main reason for dating Cyrus' conquest of Lydia in 547 BCE. Divergent opinions concerning the reading of the sign have always been pushed aside, and this is also true in current discussions. In this context, astonishingly, it has been totally ignored that this discussion should not be based solely on the reading of the sign in question. Obviously the many differing opinions expressed on this problem in the last 100 years more than clearly demonstrate that the tablet's state of preservation is simply not sufficient to claim that the problem can be definitely solved by presenting this or that solution (cf. van der Spek 2014: pp. 256, n. 184; more cautiously: Payne and Wintjes 2016: p. 14 with n. 6). Rather, one has to contextualize the problem and look at the whole passage in question. There it is stated that

King Cyrus (II) of Parsu mustered his army and crossed the Tigris downstream from Arbēla (Erbil) and, in the month of Iyyar, [march]ed to X [???]. / He defeated its king (or: put its king to death), seized its possessions, [and] set up his own garrison [there]. After that, the king and his garrison resided there

(Nabonidus Chroncile ii 15–18; Grayson 2000: p. 107).

The document's geographical perspective reveals an important dimension of argumentation, although this crucial point is generally nearly totally ignored, for the alleged statement that Cyrus crossed the Tigris and marched toward Lydia is very difficult to explain. According to Google Maps, the distance between Erbil and Sardis is 1739 km, calculating the shortest route through upper Mesopotamia crossing the Euphrates at Birecik and continuing via Gaziantep to the west. But, Cyrus could not have taken this short route, for most of the area was, at least at that time, controlled by the Babylonians (Jursa 2003; Rollinger 2003a). If the reading Lu‐[???] is supposed to be correct, he must have taken a route via eastern Anatolia that was about 2000 km in length. This is slightly less than the distance between Cologne and Moscow (about 2300 km). From this perspective, such an interpretation becomes hardly tenable. It is as if a nineteenth‐century central European chronicle on Napoleon's campaign against the Tsar had described the event as follows: “The French emperor crossed the river Rhine below Cologne and marched against Moscow.”² Lydia is therefore not really an option, whereas the reading Ú‐[???] is still a very attractive one. But even if this reading cannot be proven definitively, it is clear that Cyrus marched against a still independent country in the immediate reach of a route along the Tigris, and a region in eastern Anatolia is a very good candidate. Thus the chronicle becomes an important testimony also for Median history, for it proves that Cyrus' conquest of Ekbatana did not mean that he was also in control of eastern Anatolia. Apparently, there still existed an important political entity in this area that was only conquered by Cyrus in 547 BCE. There is further indirect evidence for this.

We know that Darius I and Xerxes set up inscriptions not only in their favorite residences, like Persepolis and Susa, but also in residences of those former political entities that were conquered by Cyrus and in which the early Achaemenids presented themselves as true and legitimate successors of their Teispid predecessors (Rollinger 2015: pp. 118–120). This is true for Hamadan and Babylon, for example, but also for Van. The inscription placed at a steep rocky flank of the former Urartian capital was obviously tremendously important, for Xerxes explicitly mentions that his father Darius already intended its construction, but only he was able to achieve this. The inscription only makes sense, however, if the choice of the location commemorates the former capital of a substantial political entity that ended through Teispid conquest. Together with the evidence from the Nabonidus Chronicle, this means that in the first half of the sixth century BCE the Medes cannot have been in permanent control of eastern Anatolia. Their power was mainly limited to the central Zagros area.

This now brings the Classical sources into play, for there is, for example, Herodotus' testimony that during an eclipse generally dated to 585 BCE, the Medes and the Lydians met at the river Halys in central Anatolia to forge an alliance. Although many historians still treat Herodotus as sourcebook, simply used like a quarry to rephrase history, it is increasingly clear that he has to be dealt with as a literary work completed during the Peloponnesian War, presenting a view on the past, first and foremost, through a Greek lens of around 420 BCE. In his Histories he skillfully elaborates ancient Near Eastern history as a sequence of empires, where empire is modeled according to the Persian‐Achaemenid empire of Herodotus' own time (Bichler 2000; Rollinger 2003c, 2014; Rollinger et al. 2011). This is also the guiding principle of Ctesias' work, which survived only in fragments, developing Herodotus' concept of a Median “empire” even further (Wiesehöfer et al. 2011; Waters 2017). It is Herodotus, and especially Ctesias, who formed the basis for later Classical sources that structured world history as a sequence of empires – a view that was adopted by late antique Christianity and passed on through the Middle Ages to modern times (Wiesehöfer 2003, 2005). It is mainly this reception history that saved for the Medes a prominent place in a Western view of world history canonized over a lengthy period. Both Herodotus and Ctesias describe Median history as a succession of kings ruling a united and far‐reaching territory from the beginning to the very end (Rollinger 2010, 2011, 2020a). Apart from the name of the last king, Astyages, however, they completely disagree about the number of these kings, their names, and the duration of the Median period. With indigenous ancient Near Eastern sources they share only two facts: it was the Medes who brought the Assyrian Empire to an end, and it was Cyrus who overcame Astyages. It was apparently the fall of the Assyrian Empire that directed historical attention toward the Medes, yet without much further information on what these Medes really were. Herodotus, moreover, reports a famous story about how the Medes established monarchy. But this story has been decoded as a mix of Iranian mythology and sophistic Greek theories of the end of the fifth century BCE on how states come into being (Panaino 2003; Meier et al. 2004; see also Gufler 2016, and Degen/Rollinger 2020). Whereas Ctesias' Medes control the entire Ancient Near East, those of Herodotus do not. Their reach extends as far west as the river Halys (Kızılırmak) where they allegedly share a border with the Lydians. This border looks very much like a Greek construction of the fifth century BCE to organize ancient Near Eastern history, however (Rollinger 2003a). And to prove such a construction it is connected with a legendary story. This is exactly the “historical” context for localizing the Median‐Lydian treaty at the Halys river and for the famous story about the sage Thales, who predicted an eclipse of the sun that brought Median‐Lydian strife to an end. The Medes might have been roaming through Anatolia for a very brief period of time, and they may indeed have concluded a treaty with the Lydians, but there was no permanent Median control of eastern – let alone central – Anatolia in the sixth century BCE.³

Finally, some additional evidence demonstrates that the claim for a Median “empire” lacks a solid basis.⁴ There are no archeological remains of imperial centers, nor are there documentary archives surviving from a supposed Median administration. Not a single document has come down to us from their supposed domain, since multiple documents previously thought to have done so have been shown to be untrustworthy. There is also no contemporary correspondence between foreign kings and Median rulers, neither from Babylonia nor from any other country. In the entire 3000‐year history of the Ancient Near East, the Medes would thus have established the only “empire” from which no kind of textual documentation, neither from inside nor from outside, has survived to this day.

In addition to these negative findings, which result from careful reevaluation of existing evidence, the model of a geographically and chronologically limited political “confederation” dominated by Iranian peoples has been developed as an alternative to the notion of a Median “empire.” In the short term, this confederation likely played an important role in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Neo‐Assyrian Empire, though it was never to develop comparable imperial structures. Indeed, a prime motivation of the members of this “confederation” is said to have been raids reaching as far as central Anatolia. There was no organized “rule” as such, no stable authority, as the “confederation” was in itself a short‐lived collective brought together by momentarily overlapping goals and ambitions. As such, it was more likely dominated by short‐term alliances and dependencies which would scarcely have endured beyond the next raiding season. If any coherent order of rule developed at all, as this theory goes, it could only have happened in the central Zagros region between Lake Urmia and Elam. The loose, mixed structure of the short‐termed Median confederation is also confirmed by the wording of the Nabonidus inscriptions, which carry clear connotations of disorder and chaos when dealing with the Medes. The Medes' appearance is characterized as a great flood and their military organization is described as a loose confederacy with primitive hierarchies. Significantly, this confederation revolving around a charismatic leader is circumscribed by the formulation of “Kings who march at his side” (Rollinger 2003a: p. 318). Moreover, particular verses in the Book of Jeremiah paint a similar picture by describing Median kings (plural!) as part of a larger federation (Liverani 2003).

It should be pointed out that, in all honesty, these arguments are likewise more probabilities than conclusive proof. There is room for interpretation, in any case: one may or may not agree on the applicability of the “secondary state formation” model and its implications for the Zagros region. Likewise, one may find the terminology of the Nabonidus inscriptions too vague or too obviously following Neo‐Babylonian preconceptions of Medes as “barbarians” to be helpful, or even doubt the historical value of biblical texts in general. The synonymity of “Medes” and “Persians” for Greeks could be explained in a different way: the relationship between Persians and Medes could still be conceived as one between vassals and overlords, and, finally, the new interpretation of Nabonidus Chronicle ii 16 could be challenged.

Still, taken together with negative evidence for a Median “empire,” the evidence presented in favor of a loose confederation of peoples does seem to comprise a sustainable basis for this hypothesis. It must, of course, remain a hypothesis, but one with a relatively coherent and dense line of argumentation that is more plausible than previous explanations.