Peoples & Lands (2)

• PeopleThe Magi

  The hereditary priestly specialists of the western Iranians, named by Herodotus as one of the six tribes of the Medes: the officiants without whom, the Greeks report, no Persian could sacrifice. They tended the sacred fire, chanted over the offering, poured libations to river and mountain, interpreted dreams and omens, exposed the dead, and attended the king; from their name, through Greek suspicion of their arts, comes the word 'magic'.

• PeopleThe Medes

  The Iranian people of the north-western Zagros, settled about the plain of Ecbatana (modern Hamadān), who by the Greek account raised the first great Iranian kingdom: a line of four kings, Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares and Astyages, that broke Assyria (Nineveh fell in 612 BCE to the Medes and Babylonians together) and ruled 'upper Asia' until Cyrus the Persian overthrew Astyages in 550. Whether a centralised 'Median empire' truly existed, or whether the Greeks retrojected a Persian-style state onto a looser confederacy, is one of the sharpest debates in the field. Under the Achaemenids the Medes were the near-equals of the Persians, the two ruling Iranian peoples, so that Greeks called the whole empire, its army and its wars simply 'the Medes' and treason to their own side 'medism'.