A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

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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.

      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).

      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).

      By about the middle of the seventh century