lens. The first one is once more the city of Harran in Syria. Nabonidus claims that the Babylonians were unable to rebuild the temple Ehulhul of the moon god Sîn, allegedly destroyed by Medes during the final struggles of the Neo‐Assyrian Empire in 609 BCE, because the Medes were supposedly still “roaming around” for more than 50 years. This is clearly an ideologically biased view where an allegedly permanent Median presence in Syria during the first half of the sixth century BCE is made accountable for Babylonian inactivity to rebuild the temple. In the same way, the Medes are presented as archetypical temple destroyers, an uncoordinated and destructive mass of people, and thus as true barbarians. This also goes for the second event, when Nabonidus looks back on the fall of the Neo‐Assyrian Empire and describes the Medes as a destructive flood that ruined not only Assyria but also Mesopotamian cultic rites and cult centers. The third event is contemporaneous to Nabonidus, when he focuses on the end of Median dominance in the central Zagros area. In this context another Median leader is introduced 60 years after Umakištar. His name is Ištumegu (Astyages in Greek). The event in question is also addressed by the so‐called Nabonidus Chronicle originating in Persian times, although inscription and chronicle are not in accordance concerning the dating of the event (553 vs. 550 BCE). Ištumegu seems to have ruled a political entity of medium size around its center, Hagmatana (Agbatana or Ekbatana in Greek; Hamadan in modern times), which controlled a territory no larger than the central Zagros region. He is not presented as a relative of the former Umakištar, and his political and especially military instruments appear to have been much less developed than those of his predecessor. He is in control neither of northwestern nor of southwestern Iran. He is not characterized as suzerain and superior of the king of Anshan, i.e. later Cyrus the Great. Rather, it was the latter who took the initiative and campaigned against his northern neighbor and rival, whom he quickly overthrew, and plundered Hagmatana (Rollinger 1999, 2010, 2020).
With this event the Medes do not disappear from cuneiform sources. Media has a coda in Darius' Bisitun inscription (Rollinger 2005). It figures as a kind of supra‐regional entity reaching from eastern Anatolia to central western Iran and farther to the east, and as far as the southern Caspian Sea. At first glance, one may take this as evidence for the extension of a former Median “empire.” But a closer look reveals that this is still a politically fragmentary and heterogeneous area, where several individual uprisings with different usurpers took place, only one claiming to be a descendant of the already legendary Umakištar. This evidence is thus best explained as a reflection of the reach of a very short‐termed confederation that owes its brief existence mainly to the special historical circumstances around the fall of the Neo‐Assyrian Empire.
The persistence of local traditions in a politically still fragmented landscape in these areas during early Persian times is also demonstrated by a much‐disputed passage of the so‐called Nabonidus Chronicle (ii 16) (Rollinger 2009; Rollinger/Kellner 2019). The passage deals with a campaign of Cyrus the Great in 547 BCE (the ninth year of king Nabonidus) toward a land which cannot be defined with absolute certainty because the text is partly broken. Only traces of the country's first sign are preserved rather badly, and it has been argued for about 100 years how to read this sign (Rollinger 1993: pp. 188–197). The discussion is characterized by the fact that such readings/interpretations have nearly always been presented as a “fact,” the tablet's bad state of preservation and the many different readings put forward notwithstanding. From the very beginning there was a mainstream opinion that the first sign of the country has to be read as Lu‐[xxx] and the country thus to be interpreted as Luddu, i.e. Lydia. This is the main reason for dating Cyrus' conquest of Lydia in 547 BCE. Divergent opinions concerning the reading of the sign have always been pushed aside, and this is also true in current discussions. In this context, astonishingly, it has been totally ignored that this discussion should not be based solely on the reading of the sign in question. Obviously the many differing opinions expressed on this problem in the last 100 years more than clearly demonstrate that the tablet's state of preservation is simply not sufficient to claim that the problem can be definitely solved by presenting this or that solution (cf. van der Spek 2014: pp. 256, n. 184; more cautiously: Payne and Wintjes 2016: p. 14 with n. 6). Rather, one has to contextualize the problem and look at the whole passage in question. There it is stated that
King Cyrus (II) of Parsu mustered his army and crossed the Tigris downstream from Arbēla (Erbil) and, in the month of Iyyar, [march]ed to X [???]. / He defeated its king (or: put its king to death), seized its possessions, [and] set up his own garrison [there]. After that, the king and his garrison resided there
(Nabonidus Chroncile ii 15–18; Grayson 2000: p. 107).
The document's geographical perspective reveals an important dimension of argumentation, although this crucial point is generally nearly totally ignored, for the alleged statement that Cyrus crossed the Tigris and marched toward Lydia is very difficult to explain. According to Google Maps, the distance between Erbil and Sardis is 1739 km, calculating the shortest route through upper Mesopotamia crossing the Euphrates at Birecik and continuing via Gaziantep to the west. But, Cyrus could not have taken this short route, for most of the area was, at least at that time, controlled by the Babylonians (Jursa 2003; Rollinger 2003a). If the reading Lu‐[???] is supposed to be correct, he must have taken a route via eastern Anatolia that was about 2000 km in length. This is slightly less than the distance between Cologne and Moscow (about 2300 km). From this perspective, such an interpretation becomes hardly tenable. It is as if a nineteenth‐century central European chronicle on Napoleon's campaign against the Tsar had described the event as follows: “The French emperor crossed the river Rhine below Cologne and marched against Moscow.”2 Lydia is therefore not really an option, whereas the reading Ú‐[???] is still a very attractive one. But even if this reading cannot be proven definitively, it is clear that Cyrus marched against a still independent country in the immediate reach of a route along the Tigris, and a region in eastern Anatolia is a very good candidate. Thus the chronicle becomes an important testimony also for Median history, for it proves that Cyrus' conquest of Ekbatana did not mean that he was also in control of eastern Anatolia. Apparently, there still existed an important political entity in this area that was only conquered by Cyrus in 547 BCE. There is further indirect evidence for this.
We know that Darius I and Xerxes set up inscriptions not only in their favorite residences, like Persepolis and Susa, but also in residences of those former political entities that were conquered by Cyrus and in which the early Achaemenids presented themselves as true and legitimate successors of their Teispid predecessors (Rollinger 2015: pp. 118–120). This is true for Hamadan and Babylon, for example, but also for Van. The inscription placed at a steep rocky flank of the former Urartian capital was obviously tremendously important, for Xerxes explicitly mentions that his father Darius already intended its construction, but only he was able to achieve this. The inscription only makes sense, however, if the choice of the location commemorates the former capital of a substantial political entity that ended through Teispid conquest. Together with the evidence from the Nabonidus Chronicle, this means that in the first half of the sixth century BCE the Medes cannot have been in permanent control of eastern Anatolia. Their power was mainly limited to the central Zagros area.
This now brings the Classical sources into play, for there is, for example, Herodotus' testimony that during an eclipse generally dated to 585 BCE, the Medes and the Lydians met at the river Halys in central Anatolia to forge an alliance. Although many historians still treat Herodotus as sourcebook, simply used like a quarry to rephrase history, it is increasingly clear that he has to be dealt with as a literary work completed during the Peloponnesian War, presenting a view on the past, first and foremost, through a Greek lens of around 420 BCE. In his Histories he skillfully elaborates ancient Near Eastern history as a sequence of empires, where empire is modeled according to the Persian‐Achaemenid empire of Herodotus' own time (Bichler 2000; Rollinger 2003c, 2014; Rollinger et al. 2011). This is also the guiding principle of Ctesias' work, which survived only in fragments, developing Herodotus' concept of a Median “empire” even further (Wiesehöfer et al. 2011; Waters 2017). It is Herodotus, and especially Ctesias, who formed the basis for later Classical sources that structured world history
