[Gutenberg 17329] • History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12)

The Iranian religions--Cyrus in Lydia and at Babylon: Cambyses in Egypt

\--Darius and the organisation of the empire._

The Median empire is the least known of all those which held sway for a

time over the destinies of a portion of Western Asia. The reason of this

is not to be ascribed to the shortness of its duration: the Chaldæan

empire of Nebuchadrezzar lasted for a period quite as brief, and yet the

main outlines of its history can be established with some certainty in

spite of large blanks and much obscurity. Whereas at Babylon, moreover,

original documents abound, enabling us to put together, feature by

feature, the picture of its ancient civilisation and of the chronology

of its kings, we possess no contemporary monuments of Ecbatana to

furnish direct information as to its history. To form any idea of

the Median kings or their people, we are reduced to haphazard notices

gleaned from the chroniclers of other lands, retailing a few isolated

facts, anecdotes, legends, and conjectures, and, as these materials

reach us through the medium of the Babylonians or the Greeks of the

fifth or sixth century B.C., the picture which we endeavour to compose

from them is always imperfect or out of perspective. We seemingly

catch glimpses of ostentatious luxury, of a political and military

organisation, and a method of government analogous to that which

prevailed at later periods among the Persians, but more imperfect,

ruder, and nearer to barbarism--a Persia, in fact, in the rudimentary

stage, with its ruling spirit and essential characteristics as yet

undeveloped. The machinery of state had doubtless been adopted almost

in its entirety from the political organisations which obtained in the

kingdoms of Assyria, Elam, and Chaldæa, with which sovereignties the

founders of the Median empire had held in turns relations as vassals,

enemies, and allies; but once we penetrate this veneer of Mesopotamian

civilisation and reach the inner life of the people, we find in the

religion they profess--mingled with some borrowed traits--a world of

unfamiliar myths and dogmas of native origin.