A literary history of Persia

THE MEDES 19now enter is, unfortunately, much less sure than that whichwe have hitherto traversed the ; problems which we shallencounter are far more complicated, and their solutions are,inmany cases, uncertain and conjectural.The oldest Persian dynasty, the Achaemenian, with whichwe began our retrospect of Persian history, rose by the fall ofa power not less famous than itself, that ofdes 'the Medes, whom from our earliest days weare accustomed to associate with the Persians. In themodern sense of the term, indeed, they were Persians, but ofthe West, not of the South, having their centre and capital atEcbatana (Hagmatana of the Old Persian inscriptions, nowH.amadan\ not at Persepolis (Sasanian Istakhr^ near Shirdz, thepresent chief town of Fars). The actual boundaries of Mediacannot be precisely defined, but, roughly speaking,it extendedfrom the Mountains of Azarbayjdn (Atropatene) on the northto Susiana (Khuzistdn) on the south, and from the ZagrosMountains on the east to about the line of the modern Tihran-Isfahdn road, with a north-eastern prolongation including thewhole or part of Mdzandardn.In modern phraseology,therefore,it comprised Kurdistan, Luristan the northern part ofKhuzistan, the western part of 'Iraq-i-'Ajami, and the southernpart of Azarbdyjdn. Amongst the hardy mountaineers of thiswide region arose the Medic power. The name of Media doesnot, like that of Persia,still survive in the land to which itoriginally belonged, but, as has been shown by de Lagarde andOlshausen, it continued, even in Muhammadan times, underthe form Mah (Old Persian Mdda) to enter into certain placenames, such as Mdh-Khfa, Mali-Basra, Mdh-Nahdwand. 11Already, however, in A.D. 1700, the celebrated Cambridge scholar andpupil of Abraham Wheelock, Dr. Hyde, who in later life became attachedto the University of Oxford as Professor of Hebrew, Laudian Professor ofArabic, and Keeper of the Bodleian Library, had recognised the identityof Mdh with Mdda (see Vet. Pers. Rclig. Hist., ed. 1760, p. 424).