ntil about B.C. 850
the Median name was unknown in the world, and that previously, if Medes
existed at all, it was either as a sub-tribe of some other Arian race,
or at any rate as a tribe too petty and insignificant to obtain mention
either on the part of native or of foreign historians. Such early
insignificance and late development of what ultimately becomes the
dominant tribe of a race is no strange or unprecedented phenomenon to
the historical inquirer; on the contrary, it is among the facts with
which he is most familiar, and would admit of ample illustration, were
the point worth pursuing, alike from the history of the ancient and the
modern world.

But, against the conclusion to which we could not fail to be led by
the Arian and Assyrian records, which agree together so remarkably, two
startling notices in works of great authority but of a widely different
character have to be set. In the Toldoth Beni Noah, or "Book of the
Generation of the Sons of Noah," which forms the tenth chapter of
Genesis, and which, if the work of Moses, was probably composed at
least as early as B.C. 1500, we find the Madai--a word elsewhere always
signifying "the Medes"--in the genealogy of the sons of Japhet. The word
is there conjoined with several other important ethnic titles, as Gomer,
Magog, Javan, Tubal, and Meshech; and there can be no reasonable doubt
that it is intended to designate the Median people. If so, the people
must have had already a separate and independent existence in the
fifteenth century B.C., and not only so, but they must have by that time
attained so much distinction as to be thought worthy of mention by
a writer who was only bent on affiliating the more important of the
nations known to him.

The other notice is furnished by Berosus. That remarkable historian,
in his account of the early dynasties of his native Chaldaea, declared
that, at a date anterior to B.C. 2000, the Medes had conquered Babylon
by a sudden inroad, had established a monarchy there, and had held
possession of the city and neighboring territory for a period of 224
years. Eight kings of their race had during that interval occupied the
Babylonian throne, It has been already observed that this narrative must
represent a fact. Berosus would not have gratuitously invented a foreign
conquest of his native land; nor would the earlier Babylonians, from
whom he derived his materials, have forged a tale which was so little
flattering to their nati