as quite a different sort of being from themselves."

Two or three facts stand out from this legendary background. It is
probable that Deiokes was an actual person; that the empire of the Medes
first took shape under his auspices; that he formed an important kingdom
at the foot of Mount Elvend, and founded Ecbatana the Great, or, at at
any rate, helped to raise it to the rank of a capital.*

* The existence of Deiokes has been called in question by
Grote and by the Rawlinsons. Most recent historians,
however, accept the story of this personage as true in its
main facts; some believe him to have been merely the
ancestor of the royal house which later on founded the
united kingdom of the Medes.

Its site was happily chosen, in a rich and fertile valley, close to
where the roads emerge which cross the Zagros chain of mountains and
connect Iran with the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, almost on the
border of the salt desert which forms and renders sterile the central
regions of the plateau. Mount Elvend shelters it, and feeds with its
snows the streams that irrigate it, whose waters transform the whole
country round into one vast orchard. The modern town has, as it were,
swallowed up all traces of its predecessor; a stone lion, overthrown and
mutilated, marks the site of the royal palace.

[Illustration: 087.jpg STONE LION AT HAMADAN]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Plandin and Coste.

The chronological reckoning of the native annalists, as handed down
to us by Herodotus, credits Deiokes with a reign of fifty-three years,
which occupied almost the whole of the first half of the seventh
century, i.e. from 709 to 656, or from 700 to 647 B.C.*

* Herodotus expressly attributes a reign of fifty-three
years to his Deiokes, and the total of a hundred and fifty
years which we obtain by adding together the number of years
assigned by him to the four Median kings (53 + 22 + 40 +
35) brings us back to 709-708, if we admit, as he does, that
the year of the proclamation by Cyrus as King of Persia
(559-558) was that in which Astyages was overthrown; we get
700-699 as the date of Deiokes' accession, if we separate
the two facts, as the monuments compel us to do, and reckon
the hundred and fifty years of the Median empire from the
fall of Astyages in 550-549.

The records of Nineveh mention a certain Dayaukku who was governor of
the Man