KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES A History of the Ancient Iranian World (3000 BCE - 651 CE) Ancient Iran Series | Vol. IV King of the Seven Climes: A History of the Ancient Iranian World (3000 BCE - 651 CE) Edited by Touraj Daryaee © Touraj Daryaee 2017 Touraj Daryaee is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 Cover and Layout: Kourosh Beigpour | ISBN: 978-0-692-86440-1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmited, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the pulishers. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including his condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES A History of the Ancient Iranian World (3000 BCE - 651 CE) Edited by Touraj Daryaee 2017 The publication of this book was made possible through a generous git by the Razi Family Foundation Table of Contents Introduction 1 Map 5 Kamyar Abdi The Kingdom of Elām 7 Hilary Gopnik The Median Confederacy 39 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones The Achaemenid Empire 63 Omar Coloru Seleucid Iran 105 Leonardo Gregorati The Arsacid Empire 125 Touraj Daryaee and Khodadad Rezakhani The Sasanian Empire 155 Khodadad Rezakhani From the Kushans to the Western Turks 199 Contributors 227 THE MEDIAN CONFEDERACY Hilary Gopnik The Medes nlike the other dynasties discussed in this book, the pre-Persian Medes have no voice of their own to tell their story. We know the Medes only through the accounts of their enemies, the Assyrians and Greeks, or through the politicized histories composed by later imperial powers. If the Medes used writing at all, it must have been with a script like Aramaic that was writen on perishable materials because no historical accounts, literary texts, bureaucratic records, or even merchants’ receipts survive to give us clues as to how they led their lives. Fortunately the archaeological record is a litle more forthcoming, so that at least we can reconstruct how the Medes interacted with the material world, and we can then hypothesize about what that indicates about their society, politics, and beliefs. The major gaps in knowledge about the Medes have created a confused and sometimes contradictory picture of their early history. Historians have alternately treated early Median communities as pety kingdoms, unruly tribes, religious innovators, robber-baron fiefdoms, and the basis for an Iranian empire. Their sustained presence in the history of ancient Iran has meant that scholars oten try to impose later incarnations of Media onto the past without accounting for the marked shits in the socio-political and geographic realities that occurred over the one thousand years of history in which a group called the Medes participated. This chapter will outline the existing evidence for the early Medes—before they became part of the Achaemenid Persian Empire—and will argue that these Median communities do not fit easily into any of the conventional historical models that have been used to explain them. There are two main historical sources for the growth and expansion of Media: the contemporary accounts of the Assyrian Empire, which was atempting to control its neighbors to the east, and the stories of Greek historian Herodotus, who was writing for a Greek audience some 200 years ater the height of Median power. U Who were the Medes? Like many groups in the ancient world, it is dificult to place the Medes in a modern framework of group identity. They were alternately described as the people living in a given The Median Confederacy 40 region (the central Zagros Mountains), people speaking a single language (Indo-Iranian Median), people belonging to a specific “Median” ethnic group, and people organized in a shared socio-political system (regional chiefs and later a king). In the absence of writen records, the language spoken by the Medes is lost to us, but some small elements of it have been reconstructed from place names, personal names, and some suggested Median linguistic remnants in Old Persian (Rossi 2010, Zadok 2002). There have been many atempts both through archaeology and linguistics to pinpoint when exactly the Medes arrived in Iran and where exactly they setled, but there is very litle evidence and no clear scholarly consensus (Witzel 2013). We can say for certain that the neighboring Assyrians recognized a group of people that they identified as coming from the “land of the Medes” (māt madayya) as early as the reign of Shalmaneser III (858–824 BCE), and it is almost certain that IndoIranian-speaking peoples had setled in Western Iran at least some 500 years—if not 1,000 years—earlier than this. Atempts at correlating changes in potery types with the arrival of the Medes (for example, Young 1967) have proved fruitless, as it has become evident that potery styles only rarely correlate with ethnic or language groups. Most scholars now believe that the arrival of Indo-Iranian speaking populations into Western Iran was not the result of one mass migration, but instead small groups of nomadic pastoralists infiltrated the area from the northeast over a long period of time, perhaps dating back to the early second millennium BCE. These pastoralists gave rise to a variety of cultural and linguistic groups, one of which eventually coalesced into the people that the Assyrians called the Medes (Rossi 2010). The geographic extent of Media is also the subject of debate. Our only good source of information are the texts from the neighboring Assyrian Empire, which set out to conquer the region, but the Assyrians didn’t really know the area well, particularly as they ventured eastwards. It is clear that the heart of Media lay in the central Western Zagros Mountains near Hamadan, but the eastern border of Median territory is still unknown. Much depends on the identification of the mountain the Assyrians called Mount Bikni, which Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727 BCE) claims to have reached in his campaign against the “mighty Medes of the rising sun” in 737 BCE (Tadmor and Yamada 2011, 47- 38b). Bikni has been identified as either Mount Alvand just south of Hamadan in the eastern range of the Zagros (Levine 1973), or Mount Damavand some 350 kilometers further east near the southern shore of the Caspian Sea (Radner 2003). Bikni is described by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (680-669 BCE) as “the mountain of lapis lazuli” (Leichty 2011, Esarhaddon 1, iv 46) but since neither of these mountains has lapis deposits and both are on the trade routes through which the mineral must have come from the east, this does not help clarify the geographic extent of the Median presence. We have very litle archaeological evidence to support either identification since many Median sites are deeply buried below later occupations, but the easternmost site with potentially Median potery is Tepe Ozbaki, which lies 75 km west of Tehran (Majizadeh 2000, 2001), and it is probable that at its maximum expansion, Media extended at least that far east. Whatever its reach at any given time, it is clear that the geographic definition of Media was always flexible and variable. The land was defined not by borders but by its people. It was the māt madayya in Assyrian terms— the land of the Medes—and not the country of “Media.” 41 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES If we cannot draw borders around a Median territory, we do know that the Medes were defined by their life in the Zagros Mountains. They sowed grain in the broad valleys and pastured their animals on the hillsides, moving from summer to winter pastures as the weather demanded (Gopnik 2010). And the weather in winter was harsh. One Assyrian governor wrote home explaining his delay in geting back to the capital from Media in early spring: “Concerning what the king, my lord, wrote to me: ‘Be at Calah on the 1st of Nisan [March]’ – we are clearing the roads, but it is snowing and snow is filling them up. There is very much snow…The year before last, (when) there was as much snow, rivers were frozen and the men and horses who were with me died in the snow. I shall be in the king my lord’s presence on the 6th or 7th of Nisan.” (Lukko 2013, 190) The Medes raised sheep, goat, and catle for meat, milk, and wool, but it was the Median horses that were considered their most treasured resource. The horses were allowed to graze along with the catle until they were two years old, and then they were captured and trained. The Medes were known for their horsemanship, and when the Assyrians demanded tribute from them it was almost always in the form of horses trained for riding. The mountains could be a dificult terrain to negotiate for the uninitiated, and the Medes were able to take advantage of their home turf to escape the Assyrian military. They are oten described as “fleeing into the mountains,” and it is clear that the Assyrians did not, or could not, follow them. The Medes according to Herodotus The most complete narrative of the early history of the Median state comes to us from the Greek historian Herodotus. In the mid-fith century BCE, Herodotus set out to write the history of the conflict between the Greeks and their eastern rivals. His immediate concern was the Persian Empire, which had staged an ultimately unsuccessful invasion of Greece some 50 years earlier, but Herodotus painted his history with a broad brush that included everything from the source of the Nile to gold-digging ants in India. The Medes—regarded by the Greeks not only as the precursors to the Persians but as an abiding component of Persian military power—take a central place in his narrative, and we are treated to detailed, if fanciful, accounts of their rise to power. According to Herodotus, the Medes were living in small villages with independent rulers, when a certain Deioces embarked on an elaborate scheme to make himself king. First, he set himself up as a talented and supremely fair judge, adjudicating all cases according to “the truth of the facts” (Herodotus, History I:97, trans. Greene, 1987). Then—when he had made the people dependent on his system of justice—he abruptly withdrew his services, throwing the Median communities into disarray and lawlessness. In response, the Median people held a mass meeting in which they decided (and here Herodotus specifies that the meeting was probably stacked by the friends of Deioces) that they must have a single king to ensure fair dealing. “Deioces was so much in everyone’s mouth,” they asked him to be their leader. He agreed but laid down increasingly stringent conditions until he had set himself up as an exclusive and dictatorial king who could be seen only by his closest advisors, and who had a network of spies crisscrossing the country. Ater Deioces’s death, his son Phraortes inherited the throne, but—Herodotus tells us—Phraortes was not content to rule The Median Confederacy 42 only Media and extended his kingdom by assuming control over Persia, which at that point was probably a fairly small state to the south of Media. It would be up to Phraortes’s son, Cyaxeres, to muster enough forces to finally defeat the state that had dominated most of the Near East for some 250 years with the destruction of the Assyrian capital at Nineveh in 612 BCE, proving the Medes to be “right good men” (Herodotus History I:95, trans. Greene, 1987) and allowing Cyaxeres to establish an empire of his own stretching from the Halys river in Anatolia to the eastern border of Media. According to Herodotus, the establishment of this border was hard fought; Cyaxeres’s army batled with the King of Lydia, Alyates, for five-years for the control of Eastern Anatolia with the conflict ending only ater an eclipse of the sun (which is conventionally dated to 585 BCE) scared both parties into reaching a truce, sealed by the marriage of Alyates’s daughter Aryene with Cyaxeres’s son Astyages. Under Astyages, the Medes would maintain sway over this territory until it was wrested from them by Astyages’s grandson the Persian king Cyrus the Great. Herodotus’s critics have been harsh about his historiography from the beginning. Greek historian Thucydides accuses him (albeit indirectly) of treating subjects that are “beyond the reach of evidence …time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 1: 21, trans. R. Crawley, 1934). Although Herodotus takes great pains to indicate that he has considered his sources, it is abundantly clear that (like all historians) his understanding of history is the product of his own construct about how power changes hands and historical events unfold. His overall model is of a succession of empires (Assyrian to Median to Persian), but he also looks to the decisions of individual actors as the catalyst for change. It is likely that Herodotus’s story of Deioces’s rise to power from wise judge to dictatorial monarch has much more to do with his own vision of how kingship might develop in a non-state society than it does with any actual sequence of events. But, although the details may well belong to the “region of legend,” the tale indicates that the Persian informants, who must have been the source for Herodotus’s story, believed that during the eighth to seventh centuries BCE the Medes were organized as a series of independent chiefdoms rather than a state, and that it was still possible for the Median people as a whole to control decision making; the contemporaneous Assyrian historical accounts as well as archaeology seem to match this view of the past. The growth of the Median Empire in the sixth century BCE has most recently become the focus of criticism of Herodotus’s version of Median history. Although it was long assumed that the Median Empire was the immediate precursor to the Persian Empire as Herodotus claimed, in the past fiteen years scholars have seriously questioned the very existence of such an empire. This skepticism crystalized in a 2001 symposium in Italy in which scholars came together to discuss the continuity of empires from Assyria, through Media to Persia (Lanfranchi, Roaf, & Rollinger, 2003). It soon became clear that the consensus of researchers was that there was no historical or archaeological evidence other than Herodotus and later classical historians to support the existence of a Median Empire, and that it was likely that Herodotus had simply invented the unified state of the Medes in order to fill the void between Assyria and Persia in the east. Renowned ancient historian Mario Liverani summarized this position in the introduction to the publication of the meeting: “It seems clear 43 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES that the Babylonian information on Media can be read as a reference to a state (not to say an empire) only if we read it on the guidelines of the classical sources. But if we are able to forget for a moment such a pre-conceived opinion, the Babylonian sources can much beter describe the image of a destructive and untamable force rather than a unifying leadership” (Liverani, 2003, p. 7). As I will discuss below, the reimagining of the Median Empire as an “untamable force” rather than an organized state, however, has itself now come under question as new archaeological evidence has found Median ceramic and architectural elements in Transcaucasia to the north of Media in the late seventh and early sixth century BCE, suggesting a new Median presence in surrounding regions ater the fall of Assyria. The Medes according to the Assyrians and Babylonians Where Herodotus provides us with a narrative version of Median history writen 150 years ater the events, Assyrian and Babylonian records give us a contemporaneous, if highly selective, glimpse into Median society. Assyria was the dominant military, political, and cultural power in much of the Near East from the mid-ninth to late-seventh century BCE. For over 200 years, Assyrian kings, based in their capitals on the northern Tigris River, managed to wrest control of much of the surrounding territory from their neighbors until at their height in the seventh century they controlled the entire area from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean to the western reaches of the Zagros mountains. There are essentially three kinds of Assyrian documents that tell us about the Medes: the oficial royal annals of the Assyrian kings, the many leters to the capital from various oficials stationed in the eastern reaches of the empire, and “omen texts” which seek advice from a god in response to a specific question. Each provides a very diferent view of the interaction between the Assyrians and the Medes they sought to control. The first mention of the Medes comes from the famous Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (858-824 BCE): Moving on from the land Parsua I went down to the lands Mēsu, Media (the land of the Medes), Araziaš, (and) Harhār, (and) captured the cities Kuakinda, Hazzanabi, Esamul, (and) Kinablila, together with the cities in their environs. I massacred them, plundered them, (and) razed, destroyed, (and) burned (those) cities. I erected my royal statue in the city Harhār. (Grayson 1996, p. 68, AO 102.14, ll. 120-125) The Medes then appear again as enemies in the inscriptions of Shalmaneser’s son Shamshi-Adad V (823-811 BCE) I marched to the land of the Medes (KUR ma-ta-a-a). They took fright in the face of the angry weapons of Assur and of my strong warfare, which have no rival, and abandoned their cities. They ascended a rugged mountain (and) I pursued them. I massacred 2,300 soldiers of Hanasiruka the Mede. I took away from him 140 of his cavalry (and) carried away his property and possessions in countless quantities. I razed, destroyed, (and) burned Sagbita, (his) royal city, together with 1,200 of his cities. (Grayson, 1996, p. 185 AO 103.1, ll. 27-35) The Median Confederacy 44 These early royal inscriptions give the impression of raids into poorly known enemy territory rather than any concerted atempt at directly controlling the region. The figures are clearly greatly exaggerated since even if we read “cities” as towns or villages, it seems impossible that they numbered anywhere near 1,200 or that they could muster 2,300 soldiers. The royal annals were designed as propaganda, and the standard sequence of conquest, looting, and destruction was as much a rhetorical trope as it was a description of actual events. Shamshi-Adad seems to identify Hanasiruka as a king, although this will be the only time that the Assyrians call a Median leader “king.” Still, some themes that will recur over the next hundred years first appear in these inscriptions: the Medes live in towns, they are horsemen, and they flee into the mountains to escape the Assyrian army. It is only under the kings Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727 BCE) and his son Sargon II (721-705 BCE) that the Assyrians atempted to take direct control of Median territory by founding new Assyrian provinces in the western Zagros. They also converted some Median towns to Assyrian centers, renaming them with the prefix kār, which meant “harbor” or “trading station” (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary K p. 234 kāru A-3a). Again, the royal display inscriptions are colorful, sometimes grotesque, narratives of conquest that can only be understood as heavily filtered and distorted accounts of Assyrian “victory”. From the reign of Tiglath-PiIeser III: I, Tiglath-pileser, king of Assyria, who personally conquered all of the lands from east to west (lit. “from sunrise to sunset”), appointed governors in places where the chariots of the kings, my ancestors, never crossed over. In my ninth palû, I ordered (my troops) to march against the Medes. I conquered the cities of city rulers who were unsubmissive. I defeated them and carried of their booty. I firmly placed my steles in the city Bīt-Ištar, the city Ṣibar (Ṣibur), Mount Ariarma and Mount Silḫazu, mighty mountains. I received payment from those who did submit: I received 130 horses from the city Bīt-Ištar and its district; 120 (horses) from the cities Ginizinanu, Sadbat, (and) Sisad…; 100 (horses) from Upaš of (the land Bīt)-Kapsi (lit. “son of Kapsi”); 100 (horses) from Ušrû of the land Nikisi; …100 (horses) from Uitana of the city Mišita; (ii 40´) 100 (horses) from Ametana of the city Uizak. (Tadmor and Yamada 2011, Tiglath-Pileser III 35, 2.25) From the reign of Sargon II: The people of Ḫarḫar drove out Kibaba, their mayor, and sent word to Talta of Ellipi (that they wished) to be his vassals. That city I captured and I carried of its spoil. People of the lands my hand had conquered I setled therein. I set my oficial over them as governor. The upper canal of Bit-Ramatua, the lands of Urikatu, Sikris, Shaparda, Uriakku, six districts, I captured and added them thereto. The weapon of Aššur, my lord, I appointed as their deity. Kār-Šarrukīn, I called its name. From 28 mayors (bēl āli) of the land of the mighty Medes I received tribute, and I set up my image in Kār-Šarrukīn. (ARAB 2, I.11) These passages from Tiglath-Pileser’s and Sargon’s annals may tell us much more than the kings’ boasting intended. The extensive list of horse tribute in Tiglath-Pileser’s 45 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES inscription makes it clear that, where other conquered areas might deliver booty of gold, wooden furniture, oil, grain, wine, or men, horses are the tribute of choice from Media. From Sargon’s annals we learn that, even in the idealized world of the royal inscriptions, the Medes are capable of shiting allegiance away from the Assyrians. The appointment of an Assyrian governor and the renaming of Ḫarḫar to Kār-Šarrukīn (roughly translated as Sargonmart) is part of a patern of response that sought to more directly control these towns. At the same time we encounter the term “mighty Medes” (madayya dannu), which becomes the most frequent way to refer to the Medes during this period. The persistent use of this term is surprising; the Assyrians are usually concerned with denigrating their enemies rather than aggrandizing them: In Sargon’s annals Manneans are called wicked, the people of Syria dogs, the ruler of Carchemish is said to have sinned, and the arch-villain of Sargon’s narratives, Rusa the Urartian, is compared to a woman in labor, a fleeing bird, and a pig. It isn’t clear if the Assyrians specify that the Medes are mighty because they feared them or because they wanted to rhetorically boast of them as allies, but the fact that the Medes are both visually and rhetorically distinguished from other enemies highlights their special status in the eyes of the Assyrians. The scribes of both kings tell us that one very concrete way of establishing suzerainty over a town or region was to set up a stone stela with the image of the king and an inscription detailing the results of rebellion. Remarkably, one of these stelae was discovered by archaeologists in the 1960s in the heart of Media at the village of Najafabad1 in the Assadabad Valley of the Zagros Mountains. It had an almost life-size image of Sargon II on one side (Figure 1) and on the other a long, detailed description of the king’s campaign in Media that had been only summarily treated in the homeland version of the annals (Levine, 1972). Part of it reads: At that time, the people of the city of Harhār who are submissive to Aššur (and) perform corvée duty [. . .] They drove of [Kibab]a, their city ruler, and withheld the horses (which were) to be given yearly as their tribute. They strengthened their city wall and repeatedly requ[ested (military) aid . . . before] the day had progressed [x double-hours] I had brought about their defeat; I inflicted a major defeat on them. I impaled their fighting men on stakes. The land of Igali, the land of Sikris, (and) the land of Bit-Uargi, distant regions whose name(s) the kings who preceded me had never heard, […] My [awe in] spiring splendour overwhelmed them and they abandoned their cities. They gathered their people (and) their property and […] the land of Abra… for their support […] I put to the sword and took the remainder of them as booty, (namely) people, horses, mules, oxen, sheep, (and) donkeys. … to/for […] I tore The site as a whole, formerly spelled Najafehabad, dated to much later Sassanian and Islamic period occupations. The stela had probably been brought there as a relic during the Sassanian period (contra Radner 2013). 1 The Median Confederacy 46 down, demolished, (and) set on fire.2 This local inscription also features the Ḫarḫar rebellion, although tellingly the consequences of the revolt are painted even more severely in the account designed to be read by Median communities. All these inscriptions use the unusual term “bēl-āli” for the Median leaders, a term that is occasionally applied also to other rulers of polities in the Zagros mountains, but otherwise unknown in the Assyrian records. Literally translated the term means “head of a city” but it has been variously translated as “mayor,” “chietain,” “city leader,” or “city lord.” Each of these translations reveals the cultural and intellectual context of the translator, but none seems to capture the full texture of what it was to be a bēl-āli.3 The term as used by the Assyrians is probably also a reflection of their own interpretation of a power structure that was unfamiliar to them and could only be rendered in terms that the Assyrians themselves understood. A remarkable series of leters found in the Assyrian capital cities of Nimrud and Nineveh go a long way to further enlightening us about the Median communities that the Assyrians were trying to control. These leters were writen by palace oficials stationed in conquered regions to the king back home. Where the display inscriptions were pure propaganda, the leters reflect the confused and oten conflicting realities of imperial administration. The Assyrian governors were torn between their own interests, the demands of the Assyrian palace, the complex machinations of local leaders, and the power of the surrounding populace to just say no by refusing to appear to deliver tribute or pay obeisance. The Assyrian oficials were ostensibly backed by the Assyrian military, but it is clear in the leters that the palace wanted to avoid military responses to rebellion. The Medes themselves oten seem to play a cat and mouse game with the Assyrians who nominally controlled them by retreating to their mountain centers when they didn’t care to engage with the Assyrians. When a new governor was appointed in Kār Šarrukīn, his first set of orders from the palace was to placate and reassure the Median bēl-āli: “Concerning the city-lords [bēl āli] about whom the king my lord wrote to me (saying) ‘Speak kindly with them! Your friend and enemy should not be treated diferently’ . . . The son of Asrukanu has come to visit. I dressed him in purple and put silver bracelets on his wrists” (Fuchs and Parpola 2001, SAA XV, 91). Where the populations of other regions were subjected to mass deportations and heavy demands for forced labor and tribute, the Assyrians seemed wary of antagonizing the Medes, and a tone of strained tolerance and negotiation dominates the leters home. It is clear from these leters that the position of bēl-āli could be hereditary; a certain Karakku, the bēl-āli of the Median city of Uriakku, swore loyalty to Sargon II in 714 BCE, but a few years later the governor stationed in Kār Šarrukīn writes: “Concerning what the This translation was generously provided to me by Grant Frame. It will be published as part of the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period Project. 2 The term is almost always writen with the logogram EN-URU. In Akkadian the plural form is bēl-ālāni and I have used this plural form when required here. 3 47 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES king my lord wrote to me: ‘arrest and imprison the son of Karakku of Uriakku, and appoint Rametî in his stead!’ I had the son of Karakku arrested and imprisoned, as the King my lord wrote, and we sent Rametî in his stead”(Fuchs and Parpola 2001, SAA XV, 85). Apparently Karakku’s son Uppite had succeeded him as bēl-āli, but had then commited an ofence against the king, probably by withholding tribute. So the position of bēl-āli was dynastic, even though the Assyrian king could sometimes depose rulers who displeased him. A tantalizing broken line, however, follows this passage in the leter: “The Uriakkeans did not agree to be under him but said: ‘The son of Irtukkanu [Rametî]. . . [broken line].” We know from subsequent leters that Rametî was eventually appointed but this single broken line suggests that the people of Uriakku had some say in the mater, or at least that their opinion matered enough to write about it to the central administration. Clearly the threat of force wasn’t always suficient to keep the Medes in line. Even the palace favorite Rametî later seems to play a waiting game with the Assyrian oficials as the governor writes a few months later: “the son of Irtukkanu, city lord [bēl āli] of Uriakku—ater the magnates had moved on from his presence, he visited me, brought the rest of the tribute, and will take it to the magnates”( Fuchs and Parpola 2001, SAA XV, 101). An interesting postscript to this whole episode occurred in the following year when the governor was on leave back at the capital. On his return he found that Karakku’s son, Uppite—who had presumably remained captive in Kār Šarrukīn—escaped to a neighboring town with his four sons. They were eventually recaptured and their subsequent fate is unknown, but the power of the family was not easily quashed by the Assyrian king’s displeasure. If during the reign of Sargon II, the mighty Medes appear to be contained by diplomacy and the strategic backing of competing factions, by the reign of his grandson Esarhaddon (680-669 BCE), the Assyrians have seemingly lost ground in Media. Although we don’t have the diplomatic correspondence from Esarhaddon, another set of records reveals trouble in the Median provinces. These omen texts are phrased as inquiries to the god Shamash with the answer sought in extispicy—the examination of the innards of an animal, usually a ram. Again and again in these texts, the king inquires about the power of the Medes and their allies, the Cimmerians and Manneans. One Median bēl-āli in particular—Kaštaritu, bēl-āli of Karkaššî—becomes the focus of the king’s concern: “Šamaš, great lord, give me a firm positive answer to what I am asking you! Kaštaritu, city lord of Karkaššî, who wrote to Mamitiaršu, a city lord of the Medes, as follows: ‘Let us act together and break away from Assyria.’ Will Mamitiaršu listen to him? Will he comply? Will he be pleased? Will he become hostile to Esarhaddon, king of Assyria this year? Does your great divinity know it?”(Starr 1990, SAA4-41) Even the formerly routine collection of horse tribute from the Medes now seems to be fraught with dificulty. One inquiry asks about a contingent of oficials marching to Media to obtain horses: “Will they (be able to) march about for as many days as they wish, will they, either going or returning, escape, be saved, or save themselves from the troops of the Medes, or from the troops of the Manneans, from the troops of the Cimmerians, and from any other enemy? Will they stay alive and well, and return alive with the tribute of horses, and set foot on Assyrian soil? Will Esarhaddon hear good news? Will he be delighted and happy?” (Starr 1990, SAA4-65) The Median Confederacy 48 Median bēl-ālāni also appear in another curious set of documents found on a floor in a temple annex to the palace at the capital of Nimrud. The clay tablets were deliberately smashed during the destruction of the site in 612 BCE, but they had been writen some sixty years earlier during the reign of Esarhaddon. Known as the adê tablets, these texts record oaths made by eight Zagros-dwelling bēl-ālāni who swore loyalty to the Assyrian king and his crown prince Ashurbanipal (668-ca. 631 BC). Although the meaning of these oaths has been hotly debated since their discovery in 1955—suggestions have ranged from vassal treaties to the swearing in of a corps of Median bodyguards to the crown prince (Liverani 1995, Scurlock 2012)—a recent discovery of a very similar tablet from the Syrian site of Tell Tayinat points to an empire-wide atempt at making all allies swear allegiance to the crown-prince before Esarhaddon’s death (Fales 2012). We are told in one of Esarhaddon’s inscriptions that six years earlier one of these bēl-ālāni, Ramataya of Urakazabarna, a Mede, had himself come to the Assyrian court, bringing tribute of horses and lapis lazuli, to seek aid from Esarhaddon against rival bēl-ālāni. In the event, it would appear that the oaths and alliances fell apart, and the tablets that recorded them were taken from the storage room in the temple and crushed. If by the mid-seventh century, the Median bēl-ālāni threatened to form alliances that would create a coalition of the willing against the Assyrians, there is no hint that the basic political organization of the Medes as independent bēl-ālāni was in flux as Herodotus’s story of Deioces’s rise would suggest. Yet by 614 BCE, a Babylonian chronicle records the arrival on the scene of Umakištar, a leader of the Median army, whom most historians identify with Herodotus’s Cyaxeres. Umakištar sacked the traditional Assyrian religious center of Ashur and formed an alliance in front of its city gates with the Babylonian king Nabopolassar— who failed to show up for the actual batle in time. Two years later, the Medes, led by Umakištar joined Nabopolassar en route to Nineveh and the two forces laid siege to the Assyrian capital:“they carried of the vast booty of the city and the temple and turned the city into a ruin heap” (Grayson 2000, Chronicle 3, l. 45). Although one line in the chronicle (l. 38) refers to “the king of the Umman-manda” (an archaic name for powers from the east) seemingly in reference to Umakištar, Umakištar himself is never directly called the king of the Medes. Again, the traditional association of Umakištar with Cyaxeres the king depends in large part on accepting the Herodotean version of history. It remains possible, instead, that the chronicle presents Umakištar as a “king” in order to provide a suitable confederate to Nabopolassar instead of listing a more accurate but less dramatically efective coalition of the Median bēl-ālāni who may have actually provided the troops for the defeat of the Assyrians. Umakištar returned home ater the defeat of Nineveh, and the Medes virtually disappear from the contemporaneous historical record of Babylon until the sixth year of Nabonidus’s reign (550 BCE) when it is recorded that the Median king Ištumegu (Astyages), was seized in a military coup, allowing Cyrus, king of Anšan, to loot the Median royal city at Ecbatana, thus spelling the end of the Median dynasty and the beginning of the Persian Empire (Grayson 2000, Nabonidus chronicle, col ii, lines 1-4). 49 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES The Medes according to archaeology If the Greek, Assyrian, and Babylonian texts provide a picture of the Medes as seen by outsiders, the archaeology of the area can tell us how the Medes themselves used their material culture—their architecture, their potery, their weapons, and even their livestock and crops—to create the communities that defined them as Medes. Until the 1960s there were virtually no archaeological sites that could be identified as Median. In 1965, archaeologists Cuyler Young and David Stronach set out to change that by embarking on an archaeological survey of the central western Zagros with the goal of identifying Median sites to excavate. The two sites that they eventually selected, Tepe Nush-i Jan and Godin Tepe, changed not only our understanding of the Medes but of the entire prehistory of Western Iran. Since that time, other sites have added additional information to a growing sense of how communities thrived in the Zagros Mountains. Tepe Nush-i Jan Nush-i Jan is located at the edge of the Malayer Valley, some 60 kilometers south of Hamadan, right in the heart of Media. Perched on top of a natural shale outcrop some 37 meters high, Nush-i Jan is one of the best-preserved sites excavated in the past 50 years. As David Stronach and his team began excavation at the site in 1967, they removed what they thought was a preserved floor only to come down on what appeared to be an underlying massive deposit of shale (Stronach and Roaf 2008). It was only ater a week’s excavation that they realized that the “floor” was a ceiling and the shale was deliberately-laid fill that preserved an intact temple (Figure 2). The temple had apparently been carefully filled with stone when it was abandoned, presumably to ensure that it was not ritually polluted even ater it was no longer in use. The preserved ceiling—a one-in-a-million archaeological find made possible only by the ritual in-filling of the building—was vaulted with mud-bricks, the earliest example of mud-brick vaulting yet discovered and testimony to the engineering expertise of the temple builders. The walls of the building were decorated by a repeating series of triangular and cross-shaped niches that seem to have been designed to create paterns of shadow and light across the surface of the wall. The temple had been stripped of almost all portable artifacts before it was abandoned, but in the central room a stone platform about one and a half meters square bore a 25-centimeter round depression on top that was still filled with ash when the excavators removed the shale fill above it. This apparent fire altar is reminiscent of later Zoroastrian tradition, but the preserved fire bowl is too shallow to allow for the perpetual fire required by Zoroastrian cult practice. The excavators have suggested that this temple belonged to a Median religious tradition of fire worship, perhaps already associated with Zoroastrian Mazdean worship, but not yet fully fiting within the dictates of later Zoroastrianism (Stronach and Roaf 2008). Surrounding the temple at Nush-i Jan were several other large buildings, including storage magazines, an older temple, and most notably a columned hall—one of the earliest examples of the form that came to define Achaemenid Persian palatial architecture. The roof of the 300-square-meter hall was supported by three rows of four columns and a wide bench or platform was placed against the back wall. The function of this hall in association with the temple isn’t clear, but by analogy to other such structures it can be assumed that The Median Confederacy 50 the large roofed space was intended for groups of people, perhaps the congregants of the temple, to assemble: to eat, drink, discuss, celebrate, mourn, maybe even sleep. Godin Tepe Like the temple complex at Nush-i Jan, the Median remains at Godin were perched on top of a 30-meter-high hill, but unlike the rock outcrop at Nush this mound was made up entirely of the remains of human setlement (Gopnik and Rothman 2011). Godin Tepe was first setled about 7,000 years ago and was prety much continuously occupied until about 500 BCE. At the top of the eroded detritus of thousands of years of mud-brick structures, a Median community built a single impressively large building that at its prime enclosed a space of almost 5,000 square meters. The Godin citadel included storage magazines, kitchens, banqueting rooms, and perhaps bedrooms on the second floor (Figure 3), but it was the large columned hall at its center that was built first and remained the raison-d’être of its construction (Gopnik 2011). Although it is likely that the building with its thick surrounding wall and five watch towers, was originally intended in part as a defensive fortress, by its final years the arrow slots had been allowed to fill up with garbage such that the yearly plastering that kept the mud-bricks waterproof had to stop some half-meter from the wall base (Figure 4). The artifacts found in the building bear no signs of military intent; the only weapons were two iron arrowheads that could have equally been used for hunting. Instead, several large garbage dumps in the back corners of the storage rooms and on the kitchen floor contain abundant remains of eating and drinking on an impressive scale. Thousands of pieces of cooking pots, small drinking bowls, and fine-ware serving bowls; the bones of young pig, sheep, and goat; and the seeds of barley, wheat, herbs, and grapes, all testify to the feasting that must have been one of the main activities in this central meeting place. It seems more than likely that this citadel was the home base of one of the Median bēl-ālāni whom the Assyrians had such a hard time controlling. It is possible that a succession of leaders occupied the space since there is considerable evidence for rebuilding and renovation of the building over time. It was finally peacefully abandoned and let to fall to ruin before a family of farmers moved into the remains some years later and built a small house there. The columned hall at Godin was well preserved and probably reflects the typical layout of these reception rooms (Figure 5). Laid out in five rows of six columns, the columns would have been made of wood (which of course does not survive in the archaeological record) and would undoubtedly have been plastered and probably painted. A row of plastered mud-brick benches, some painted red, lined the side and rear walls of the hall with a raised seat against the rear wall that was clearly intended as a seat of honor, presumably for the bēl-āli who presided over the congregation. In front of the seat of honor was a hearth on a platform, a necessary feature given the cold winters of the Zagros Mountains. Significantly, this main hall was complemented by a small side room that was also equipped with benches and a seat of honor, the location for one-on-one meetings with supplicants or diplomats such as the Assyrian “magnates” mentioned in the governors’ leters. Although we have few surviving examples from this earlier period, the columned hall was one of the defining features of Median communities. In the narrative relief sculpture 51 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES in the palace of Sargon II, where artists went to some trouble to pepper their illustrations with local detail, the Median “city” of Ḫarḫar is clearly depicted with a columned structure at its center (Figure 6), presumably a distinctive feature of Median architecture and the precursor to the later Persian columned halls at Pasargadae, Persepolis, and Susa (Gunter 1982). Interestingly, smaller versions of these halls have been found very far from Median influence on the Oman peninsula of Arabia, and we have to imagine that the form was more widespread than archaeology has so far revealed (Magee 2001, Boucharlat and Lombard 2001). I have suggested elsewhere (Gopnik 2010) that the proliferation of the columned hall in the mid-first millennium BCE is not tied to the spread of a specific ethnic group, aesthetic trend, or architectural technique—roofing a large space with columns would require no particular technical expertise and the idea is a simple one—but rather to the peculiar efectiveness of these halls as places of congregation. Architectural structural elements (e.g., columns, piers, and arches) are usually used to define and shape people’s experience of the space that lies between or among them. In a cathedral for example the piers divide the nave from the aisles, creating a focal axis on the altar as well as drawing the visitor’s eye upward to the soaring space of the vaulted ceiling (an allusion to the heavenly sphere). The evenly spaced columns of the Iron Age columned halls, however, seem to deliberately confuse the space of the hall so that it is dificult to assess the overall size of the room, or even the number of people crowded into the space. The columns emphasize structure over space, and instead of leading the visitors in a single direction as did the uniaxial throne rooms of Mesopotamian monarchs, the axes of vision and movement are multiplied to the point of disorientation. Although this seems like an odd layout for a throne room—and indeed it is seldom used in world architecture in spite of the obvious technical ease of roofing a large room in this way— it is a particularly efective means to express the power of congregation (Khatchadourian 2016). If the goal of these halls was to demonstrate the strength in numbers of the community who supported the local bēl-āli, and the Assyrian governors’ leters indicate that this was indeed a large measure of their power, then the multiple rowed columned halls may have been designed to reinforce the impression of the crowd. In fact the columns themselves may have been intended to represent the assembled masses; this visual metaphor became a central part of the visual program of the later Achaemenid Persian Empire, as seen for example in Darius’s tomb at Naqsh-i Rustam where the subjects of the empire are depicted as columns supporting his throne. Archaeological Surveys Although several archaeological surveys have been conducted in Media over the past fity years (Young 1975, Levine 1987, Howell 1979, Stronach and Roaf 2008) so far none have found any architectural remains or ceramic sherd concentrations that might suggest the presence of anything remotely resembling a city. The largest sites identified measure only about 3-4 hectares—the size of a small village. At the same time, monumental architecture identified on surface surveys and excavated at Nush-i Jan, Godin, Gūnespān (Naseri et al. 2016), and Ozbaki Tepe seems to be reserved for single-purpose sites rather than constructed within a larger setlement. It is dificult to reconcile this archaeological picture with the bēl-ālāni system of “city leaders” we read about in the Assyrian documents. The most likely The Median Confederacy 52 explanation for this disjuncture is that the Assyrians themselves just didn’t get it. Faced with a political system of regional leaders who didn’t fit their models of kings or tribal chiefs (for whom they reserved the term nasīkāni), the Assyrians looked to the city as a local political system that was familiar to them. If the Medes organized themselves as congregations of people who came to central locations for decision-making and negotiation, then these centers may have seemed to be the defining feature of government to the Assyrians. The Median bēl-ālāni seem to have derived their authority from a variety of socio-political arenas including religion, dispute regulation, military force, and trade, and each ruler may have had a diferent power base. It is likely that one of their primary sources of power, as well as vulnerability, was dealing with the imperial demands of the Assyrians; it is possible, in fact, that the structure of the Median polities developed in part in direct response to imperial pressures. Anthropologist James C. Scot (2010) has argued that in Southeast Asia, highland groups deliberately adopted a non-literate, shiting setlement patern in order to avoid or obstruct the encroaching lowland states around them. Given the Assyrians obvious dificulties in controlling the Medes using the imperial tactics of deportation and tribute, it seems likely that the Medes were able to exploit the bēl-ālāni system of on-demand government to dodge rather than confront the Assyrian imperial administration. The location of the few Median congregational centers that we can identify—and there must have been many more judging from the number of Median “cities” mentioned in the texts—seems to support the notion of a diversified base for the bēl-ālāni’s authority; all are located on the edge of valleys where they would be accessible to both lowland agriculturalists and highland pastoralists, and on travel routes where they could be both accessible to and in control of the trade through the mountains. The Malayer valley, for instance, has four identified centers (Nush-i Jan, Gūnespān, and two found on survey) (Stronach and Roaf 2008), located at the four entry points into the valley. Was there ever a Median Empire? Finally, we return to the question of the Median Empire. Is it possible that so disjointed a people—Liverani’s “destructive and untamable force”—were capable of forming an empire of their own as Herodotus claimed? New archaeological evidence may contribute to our understanding of this issue. New research at the Urartian site of Erebuni (Stronach et al. 2010, Deschamps et al. 2011), located in southwestern Armenia, has shown that a columned hall that had been dated to the Achaemenid Persian period by the original excavators, was probably actually built toward the end of the seventh century, during the exact period ater the fall of Assyria when the Medes would have begun their expansion northward according to Herodotus. A similar columned hall at Altıntepe, a site in eastern Turkey, may also be dated to this period (Karaosmanoğlu and Korucu 2012). The spread of the columned hall form before the advent of the Achaemenid Empire suggests some form of influence from Media in the late seventh or early sixth centuries BCE, but the nature of that influence depends very much on the nature of Median polities at that time. The last mention of Median bēl-ālāni comes from an inscription of Ashurbanipal 53 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES that recounts a campaign of 656 BCE, in which three Median bēl-ālāni rebelled and were captured and brought back to Nineveh (Radner 2003). If Herodotus’s version of the rise of the Median Empire is essentially correct, then Deioces’s transition to kingship would have to have occurred in the final decades of the Assyrian empire when Assyrian power was on the wane (Tuplin 2004). This does not leave space for the succession of Deioces’s son Phraortes nor for the Scythian interlude before the rise of the historically atested Cyaxeres/Umakištar. Presumably, something was lost in the transmission of this story. It is possible that the Deioces story had been passed down as an account of the political structure of Media— authority through arbitration and consensus (however manipulated)—and that Herodotus transformed it into the rise of a single king in order to create a Median dynasty. Deioces, Phraortes, and Cyaxeres may have instead been contemporaneous bēl-ālāni, whether allied or competing. If, however, the political structure of Media that relied on negotiation, multiple spheres and sources of authority, and periodic congregation was partly developed to resist Assyrian imperial demands, we can posit that the withdrawal of that threat may have encouraged the abandonment of these tactics in favor of centralization. As it became conceivable for a united Media to defeat Assyria and assume her mantle of power in the region, the impetus to unite may have been stronger than the competitive forces dividing the bēl-ālāni. The peaceful abandonment of both Godin and Nush-i Jan may have been tied to this move toward centralization under one king—whether Deioces, Phraortes or Cyaxeres/Umakištar— with the early capital city at Ecbatana (Hamadan) simply buried and/or destroyed by the substantial subsequent occupation of the site. In this case, the spread of the columned hall to Erebuni and Altıntepe could have been a form of direct imperial control—the establishment of secondary courts and throne rooms in two critical regions. If instead, Herodotus invented the story of unification to fit his model of successive empires, we are let with Cyaxeres/Umakištar as a general and a leader, but perhaps only the nominal head of an alliance of Median bēl-ālāni—regional rulers who far from being “untamable” were in fact experts at the power of negotiation (Waters 2011). Certainly our present models of “empire” would normally require a single governing authority, if not a king then a unified central government, but if we think of empire instead—as we do in the modern model of the “American Empire”—as the deliberate export of cultural ideas in order to exert control over a wider sphere, we can reconstruct a Median “empire” that never moved fully to kingship but rather retained its tradition of alliances and congregational authority while reaching out to a wider world. The columned halls outside the center might then have been built by other regional leaders with their own power bases, seeking alliance with the by this time large and militarily powerful Median league. The Medes present us with a challenge to traditional historical models. They were a nation without a country, and an empire without a king. They built new forms of government based on consensus and negotiation yet let a legacy in one of the largest and most powerful empires the world has ever known. The Assyrians didn’t understand them, the Greeks conjured them with Greek images, and modern scholarship has tried to fit them into conventional models of leadership. It is only by stretching boundaries and remaining flexible, as the Medes did, that we may be able to understand the Median phenomenon. 55 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES Figure. 1. Najafabad Stele, Sargon II. Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum. The Median Confederacy Figure. 2. Reconstruction of Temple at Nush-I Jan. Courtesy of David Stronach. Figure. 3. Plan of Godin Tepe 56 57 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES Figure. 4. Arrowslots at Godin Tepe showing successive lines of plaster Figure. 5. Reconstruction of the Godin Tepe columned hall 59 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES Further Reading Gopnik, H. 2011. ‘‘The Median Citadel of Godin Period II.’’ In On the High Road: The History of Godin Tepe, Iran, edited by H. Gopnik and M. Rothman, pp. 285–364. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Khatchadourian, L. 2016. Imperial Mater: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires. Oakland CA: University of California Press. Radner, K. 2003. ‘‘An Assyrian View on the Medes.’’ In Lanfranchi et al. (Eds.), Continuity of Empire (?)Assyria, Media, Persia: 119-130. Padova: S.a.r.g.o.n. Editrice E Libreria. Stronach, D. and M. Roaf. 2008. Nush-i Jan I: The Major Buildings of the Median Setlement. London: British Institute of Persian Studies. Waters, M. 2011. ‘‘Notes on the Medes and their “Empire” from JER 25:25 to HDT 1.134’’ In G. Frame (Ed.), A Common Cultural Heritage: Studies on Mesopotamia and the Biblical World in Honor of Barry L. Eichler: 243-253. Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press. Bibliography Boucharlat, R. and P. Lombard. 2001. ‘‘Le Bâtiment G De Rumeilah (Oasis d’Al Ain). Remarques Sur Les Salles À Poteaux De L’âge Du Fer En Péninsule d’Oman.’’ Iranica Antiqua 36: 213-238. Brown, S. 1986. ‘‘Media and Secondary State Formation in the Neo-Assyrian Zagros: An Anthropological Approach to An Assyriological Problem.’’ Journal of Cuneiform Studies 38: 107-119. Crawley, R. and J. Gavorse. 1934. The Complete Writings of Thucydides : The Peloponnesian War. New York: Modern Library. Deschamps, S., F. de Clairfontaine, and D. Stronach. 2011. ‘‘Erebuni: The Environs of the Temple of Haldi During the 7th and 6th Centuries BC.’’ Aramazd 6 (2): 121-140. Fales, F. M. 2012. Ater Ta‘Yinat : The New Status of Esarhaddon’s Adê for Assyrian Political The Median Confederacy 60 History. Revue d’Assyriologie 106: 133-158. Fuchs, A. and S. Parpola. 2001. The Correspondence of Sargon II, Part III: Leters from Babylonia and the Eastern Provinces (State Archives of Assyria, 15). Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Gopnik, H. 2003. ‘‘The Ceramics From Godin II in the Late 7th to Early 5th Centuries BC.’’ In Continuity of Empire (?) Assyria, Media, Persia. Edited By G.B. Lanfranchi, 249-267. Padova: History of the Ancient Near East Monographs V,. Gopnik, H. 2005. ‘‘The Shape of Sherds: Function and Style at Godin II.’’ Iranica Antiqua 40: 249-270. Gopnik, H. 2010. ‘‘Why Columned Halls?’’ In J. Curtis and S. J. Simpson (Eds.), The World of Achaemenid Persia: History, Art and Society in Iran and the Ancient Near East: 195–206. London: I.B. Tauris. Gopnik, H. 2011. ‘‘The Median Citadel of Godin Period II.’’ In On the High Road: The History of Godin Tepe, Iran, edited by H. Gopnik and M. Rothman, pp. 285–364. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Grayson, A. K. 2000. Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (Texts from Cuneiform Sources). Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Grayson, A. K. 1996. Assyrian Royal Inscriptions. Vol. 3: Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (858-745 B.C.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Greene, D. (Trans.). 1987. The History, Herodotus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gunter, A. 1982. ‘‘Representations of Urartian and Western Iranian Fortress Architecture in the Assyrian Reliefs.’’ Iran 20: 103-111. Howell, R. 1979. ‘‘Survey of the Malayer Plain,’’ Iran 17: 156-57. Huf, D. 2005. ‘‘From Median to Achaemenian Palace Architecture.’’ Iranica Antiqua 40: 371-396. Karaosmanoğlu, M. and Korucu, H. 2012. ‘‘The Apadana of Altıntepe in the Light of the Second Season of Excavations.’’ In A. Çilingiroğlu and A. Sagona (Eds.) Anatolian Iron Ages 7: The Proceedings of the Seventh Anatolian Iron Ages Colloquium Held at Edirne, 19–24 April 2010: 131-148. Leuven: Peeters. Khatchadourian, L. 2016. Imperial Mater: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires. Oakland CA: University of California Press. Lanfranchi, G., M. Roaf, and R. Rollinger (Eds.). 2003. Continuity of Empire (?): Assyria, Media, Persia. Padova : S.a.r.g.o.n. Editrice e Libreria. Lanfranchi, G. 2003. ‘‘The Assyrian Expansion in the Zagros and the Local Ruling Elites.’’ In Lanfranchi et al. (Eds.), Continuity of Empire (?)Assyria, Media, Persia: 79-118. Padova: S.a.r.g.o.n. Editrice E Libreria. Leichty, E. 2011.The Royal Inscriptions of Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (680-669 BC) Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 4. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Levine, L. D. 1972. Two Neo-Assyrian Stelae from Iran. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum . Levine, L. D. 1973. Geographical Studies in the Neo-Assyrian Zagros. Iran 11: 127. Levine, L.D. 1987. ‘‘The Iron Age.’’ In Hole, F. (Ed.), The Archaeology of Western Iran. Setlement and Society from Prehistory to the Islamic Conquest. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. 61 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES Liverani, M. 1995. ‘‘The Medes at Esarhaddon’s Court.’’ Journal of Cuneiform Studies 47: 57-62. Liverani, M. 2003. ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Media.’’ In Lanfranchi et al. (Eds.), Continuity of Empire (?)Assyria, Media, Persia: 1-12. Padova: S.a.r.g.o.n. Editrice E Libreria. Luukko, M. 2013. The Correspondence of Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II from Calah/Nimrud (State Archives of Assyria, 19). Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Magee, P. 2001. ‘‘Excavations at the Iron Age Setlement of Muweilah 1997-2000.’’ Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 31:115-130. Majizadeh, Y. 2000. ‘‘Excavations at Ozbaki: First Preliminary Report 1998.’’ Iranian Journal of Archaeology and History 13: 57-81 Majizadeh, Y. 2001. ‘‘Excavations At Ozbaki: Second Preliminary Report 1999.’’ Iranian Journal of Archaeology and History 14: 38-49. Mcintosh, S.Keech. 1999. ‘‘Pathways to Complexity: An African Perspective.’’ In Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Medveskaya, I.N. 1992. ‘‘The question of the identification of 8th-7th century Median sites and the formation of the Iranian architectural tradition,’’ Archaologische Miteilungen aus Iran 25: 73-79. Naseri, R., M. Malekzadeh, and A. Naseri. 2016. Gūnespān: A Late Iron Age Site in the Median Heartland. Iranica Antiqua 51: 103-139. Parpola, S. 2003. ‘‘Sakas, India Gobryas and the Median Royal Court.’’ In Lanfranchi et al. (Eds.), Continuity of Empire (?)Assyria, Media, Persia: 339-350. Padova: S.a.r.g.o.n. Editrice E Libreria. Radner, K. 2003. ‘‘An Assyrian View on the Medes.’’ In Lanfranchi et al. (Eds.), Continuity of Empire (?)Assyria, Media, Persia: 119-130. Padova: S.a.r.g.o.n. Editrice E Libreria. Radner, K. 2013. Assyria and the Medes. In D. Pots (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733309.013.0032 Rollinger R. 2003. The Western Expansion of the Median ‘‘Empire’’ In Lanfranchi et al. (Eds.), Continuity of Empire (?)Assyria, Media, Persia: 321-326. Padova: S.a.r.g.o.n. Editrice E Libreria. Rossi, A. 2010. ‘‘Elusive Identities in Pre-Achaemenid Iran: The Medes and the Median Language.’’ In C.G. Cereti (Ed.), Iranian Identity in the Course of History: 289-330. Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e L’Oriente. Root, M. 1997. The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979. Scurlock, J. 2012 ‘‘Geting Smashed at the Victory Celebration, or What Happened to Esarhaddon’s So-called Vassal Treaties and Why.’’ In N. May (Ed.) Iconoclasm and Text Destruction in the Ancient Near East and Beyond: 175-186. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scot, J. C. 2010. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series). New Haven: Yale University Press. Starr, I. 1990. ueries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria (State Archives of Assyria, 4). Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Stronach, D., H. Thrane, C. Gof, and A. Farahani. 2010. ‘‘Erebuni 2008–2010.’’ Aramazd: Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies 5(2): 98–133. The Median Confederacy 62 Stronach, D. 2003. ‘‘Independent Media, Archaeological Notes from the Homeland.’’ In Lanfranchi et al. (Eds.), Continuity of Empire (?)Assyria, Media, Persia: 233-248 . Padova: S.a.r.g.o.n. Editrice E Libreria. Stronach, D. and M. Roaf. 2008. Nush-i Jan I: The Major Buildings of the Median Setlement. London: British Institute of Persian Studies. Tadmor H. and S. Yamada. 2011. The Royal Inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727 BC) and Shalmaneser V (726-722 BC), Kings of Assyria. Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 1. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Tuplin, C. 2004. ‘‘Medes in Media, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia: Empire, Hegemony, Domination or Illusion?’’ Ancient West & East 3 (2): 223-251. Venturi, R. 1977. ‘‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.’’ New York: Museum of Modern Art,. Waters, M. 2011. ‘‘Notes on the Medes and their ‘‘Empire’’ from JER 25:25 to HDT 1.134’’ In G. Frame (Ed.), A Common Cultural Heritage: Studies on Mesopotamia and the Biblical World in Honor of Barry L. Eichler: 243-253. Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press. Witzel, M. 2013. ‘‘Iranian Migration.’’ In D. Pots (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran online. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733309.013.0050. Young, T. C. Jr. 1967. ‘‘The Iranian Migration into the Zagros.’’ Iran 5: 11-34. Young, T. C. Jr. 1975. ‘‘An Archaeological Survey of the Kangavar Valley.’’ In F. Bagherzadeh (ed.) Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium on Archaeological Research in Iran: 23-30, Tehran. Zadok, R. 2002. ‘‘The Ethno-Linguistic Character of Northwestern Iran and Kurdistan in the Neo-Assyrian Period.’’ Iran 40: 89-151. 227 KING OF THE SEVEN CLIMES Contributors (in alphabetical order) Kamyar Abdi Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies, UC Irvine, USA 7 Omar Coloru Archéologie et Sciences de l’Antiquité, Nanterre FRANCE 105 Touraj Daryaee Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies, UC Irvine, USA 155 Hilary Gopnik Department Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies, Emory University, USA Leonardo Gregorati Department of Classics & Ancient History, Durham University, UK Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones Department of Ancient History, Cardif University, Wales, U.K. Khodadad Rezakhani Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, Princeton University, USA 39 125 63 155, 199