Cyaxares

Cyaxares was the third king of the Medes. He ascended to the throne in 625 BC, after his father Phraortes lost his life in a battle against the Assyrians, probably Ashurbanipal. Assyrian allies, the Scythians then ruled Media for 28 years before Cyaxeres overthrew Scythian domination and became king.

Cyaxares collaborated with the Babylonians to destroy the Assyrian Empire, and united most of the Iranian peoples of ancient Iran, thereby transforming Media into a major power.

Name The name is the Latinised form of the Greek , which was itself the Hellenisation of the Median name , meaning "good ruler."

The Greek author Diodorus Siculus named Cyaxares as , which is the Hellenisation of the Median name , meaning "spear bearer." This name is similar to the Median form of his son Astyages's name, , meaning "spear thrower."

Life and reign Scythian rule According to Herodotus, Cyaxares was the son of the Median king Phraortes. In the middle of the 7th century BCE, Phraortes led the Medes in a revolt against Assyria and was killed in battle, either against the Assyrians under their king Ashurbanipal, or against the Assyrians' Scythian allies, whose king Madyes invaded the Medes and imposed Scythian hegemony over them for almost three decades years on behalf of the Assyrians, thus starting a period which Herodotus called the "Scythian rule over Asia".

Following the Scythian invasion, Cyaxares succeeded his father Phraortes as king of the Medes under the suzerainty of the Scythians.

By the 620s BCE, the Assyrian Empire began to weaken after the death of Ashurbanipal: in addition to internal instability within Assyria itself, Babylon revolted against the Assyrians in 626 BCE. The next year, in 625 BCE, Cyaxares overthrew the Scythian yoke over the Medes by inviting the Scythian rulers to a banquet, getting them drunk, and then murdering them all, including possibly Madyes himself.

After freeing the Medes from the Scythian yoke, Cyaxares reorganised the Median armed forces in preparation for a war with Assyria: whereas the Medes previously fought as tribal militias divided into kinship groups and each warrior used whatever weapons they were the most skilled at, Cyaxares instituted a regular army modelled on the Assyrian and Urartian armies, fully equipped by the state and divided into strategic and tactical units. Cyaxares might also have forced the Scythians into an alliance with the Medes after overthrowing their rule, since from 615 BCE onwards the Babylonian records mention the Scythians as the allies of the Medes.

War in Parthia At some point during his reign, Cyaxares conquered the countries of Hyrcania and Parthia, which were located to the immediate east of Media.

According to Diodorus Siculus, at one point the Parthians revolted against Cyaxares and entrusted their country and their capital city to the Sacae At the end of this war, the Parthians accepted Median rule,

Diodorus's account suggests that the region of Parthia was influenced by both the Medes to their west, and by the Saka nomads of the region of the Caspian and Aral Seas.

Conquest of Urartu In 609 BCE, the Medes attacked the capital of the kingdom of Urartu in the Armenian Highlands. The attack on Urartu might have been carried out in alliance with the Babylonians, since Babylonian records mention a joint Medo-Babylonian attack on Bit Hanunia in Urartu in 608 BCE, and a splinter Scythian group likely joined the Medes and participated in their conquest of Urartu. This invasion did not result in the destruction of Urartu, but in it becoming a subject kingdom of the new Median state. Median contingents might have helped the final Babylonian victory against the joint Assyrian-Egyptian force at Carchemish in 605 BCE, at which point the Medes' military collaboration with the Babylonian campaigns ended, and Median forces did not participate in any of the consequent Babylonian campaigns in Syria and Palestine.

War against the Lydians

Following the destruction of the Assyrian Empire, the majority of the Scythians were expelled from Western Asia and into the Pontic Steppe during the 600s BCE, and the relations between the Medes and the Babylonians soon temporarily deteriorated in the 590s. The deuterocanonical Book of Judith describes a battle in 593 BC. between King Nebuchadnezzar II and Arphaxad (thought to be another name for Cyaxares).

Later, a war broke out between Media and another group of Scythians, probably members of a splinter group who had formed a kingdom in what is now Azerbaijan. These Scythians left Median-ruled Transcaucasia and fled into the kingdom of Lydia, which had been allied to the Scythians. After the Lydian king Alyattes refused to accede to Cyaxares's demands that these Scythian refugees be handed to him, a war broke out between Media and the Lydian Empire in 590 BCE.

This war lasted five years, until a solar eclipse known as the Eclipse of Thales occurred in 585 BCE, during which a battle was fought between the Lydian and Median armies. Hence, this battle became known as the Battle of the Eclipse. Both sides interpreted the eclipse as an omen to end the war. The kings of Babylon and Cilicia acted as mediators in the ensuing peace treaty, which was sealed by the marriage of Cyaxares's son Astyages with Alyattes's daughter Aryenis.

The border between Lydia and Media was fixed at a yet undetermined location in eastern Anatolia; the Graeco-Roman historians' traditional account of the Halys River as having been set as the border between the two kingdoms appears to have been a retroactive narrative construction based on symbolic role assigned by Greeks to the Halys as the separation between Lower Asia and Upper Asia as well as on the Halys being a later provincial border within the Achaemenid Empire.

Death Possible Tomb of Cyaxares, Qyzqapan, Sulaymaniyah. Iraqi Kurdistan

Cyaxares died a short time after the Battle of the Eclipse in 585 BCE, and was succeeded by his son Astyages. The Russian historian Igor Diakonoff has tentatively suggested that the tomb of Cyaxares might be located at the place now called Qyzqapan, in the mountains of present-day Iraqi Kurdistan in Sulaymaniyah.

Legacy After Darius I seized power in the Achaemenid Empire, rebellions erupted claiming Cyaxares's legacy. After these were defeated, Darius noted two in the Behistun Inscription: "Another was Phraortes, the Mede; he lied, saying: 'I am Khshathrita, of the dynasty of Cyaxares.' He made Media to revolt. Another was Tritantaechmes, the Sagartian; he lied, saying: 'I am king in Sagartia, of the dynasty of Cyaxares.' He made Sagartia to revolt."

One of the options that has sparked deep debate regarding the reign of Cyaxares is Zoroastrianism. The question of when the prophet Zoroaster lived and to which years the Avesta belongs still awaits an empirical answer.