to an age later
than b.c. 1000. Now they connect the Median name with the two countries
of Syria and Colchis, countries remote from each other, and neither of
them sufficiently near the true Median territory to be held from it,
unless at a time when the Medes were in possession of something like
an empire. And, even apart from any inferences to be drawn from the
localties which the Greek Myths connect with the Medes, the very fact
that the race was known to the Greeks at this early date--long before
the movements which brought them into contact with the Assyrians--would
seem to show that there was some remote period--prior to the Assyrian
domination--when the fame of the Medes was great in the part of Asia
known to the Hellenes, and that they did not first attract Hellenic
notice (as, but for the Myths, we might have imagined) by the conquests
of Cyaxarea. Thus, on the whole it would appear that we must acknowledge
two periods of Median prosperity, separated from each other by a lengthy
interval, one anterior to the rise of the Cushite empire in Lower
Babylonia, the other parallel with the decline and subsequently to the
fall of Assyria.

Of the first period it cannot be said that we possess any distinct
historical knowledge. The Median dynasty of Berosus at Babylon appears,
by recent discoveries, to have represented those Susianian monarchs who
bore sway there from B.C. 2286 to 2052. The early Median preponderance
in Western Asia, if it is a fact, must have been anterior to this, and
is an event which has only left traces in ethnological names and in
mythological speculations.

Our historical knowledge of the Medes as a nation commences in
the latter half of the ninth century before our era. Shalmaneser
II.--probably the "Shalman" of Hosea,--who reigned from B.C. 859 to B.C.
824--relates that in his twenty-fourth year (B.C. 885), after having
reduced to subjection the Zimri, who held the Zagros mountain range
immediately to the east of Assyria, and received tribute from the
Persians, he led an expedition into Media and Arazias, where he took and
destroyed a number of the towns, slaying the men, and carrying off the
spoil. He does not mention any pitched battle; and indeed it would seem
that he met with no serious resistance. The Medes whom he attacks
are evidently a weak and insignificant people, whom he holds in small
esteem, and regards as only deserving of a hurried mention. They seem
to occupy the tract now know