Cyaxares (Median:   "Good Ruler";  ; Old Phrygian: ;  ; r. 625–585 BC) was the third king of the Medes and the founder of the Median Empire.
Cyaxares freed Media from Scythian rule, collaborated with the Babylonians to destroy the Assyrian Empire, and united most of the Iranian tribes of ancient Iran, thereby transforming the Median Empire into a regional power.Cyaxares (Livius.org)http://global.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/147792/Cyaxares He was one of the great-grandfathers of Cyrus the Great.
Life and reign
thumb|200px|right|Cyaxares' Median Empire at the time of its maximum expansion.
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 twenty-eight years on behalf of the Assyrians, thus starting a period which Herodotus called the "Scythian rule over Asia".
By the 620s BCE, the Assyrian Empire began unravelling 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 and then murdering them all after getting them drunk.
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.
Following the defeat of a joint Assyrian-Mannaean force at Gablinu by the new Babylonian rebel king and founder of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, Nabopolassar, the next year Cyaxares conquered Mannae, which brought the Median armies to the frontiers of Assyria.
In November 615 BCE, six months after Nabopolassar had failed to seize the important Assyrian centre of Aššur, Cyaxares crossed the Zagros mountains and occupied the city of Arrapha.
The next year, in July and August of 614 BCE, the Median armies performed a distractive manoeuvre by ostensibly marching on the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, which prompted the Assyrian king Sin-šar-iškun to go defend the city, after which the Medes marched north along the Tigris and seized Tarbiṣu, following which they crossed the river and marched down its right bank to Aššur, and thereby cut the Assyrian centres of Nineveh and Kalhu from outside help.
The end result of this Median attack was the sacking of Aššur, during which the Medes' forces massacred the city's inhabitants, destroyed its temples, and seized its treasures.
Shortly after the fall of Aššur, the Babylonian king Nabopolassar met Cyaxares at the ruins of the city, and they concluded an alliance against Assyria which was sealed by diplomatic marriages, with Nabopolassar's son Nebuchadnezzar marrying Cyaxares's daughter Amytis, and Cyaxares marrying a daughter or granddaughter of Nabopolassar.
Once the alliance between Cyaxares and Nabopolassar had been concluded, the Median and Babylonian forces acted in concert with each other in the war against Assyria.
In 612 BCE, the Median and Babylonian armies together crossed the ʿAdhaim river at its mouth and marched on the Assyrian capital city, Nineveh, which was taken and sacked by the joint Medo-Babylonian forces after three months of siege.
The Assyrian king Sin-šar-iškun likely died during the fall of Nineveh.
After the death of Sin-šar-iškun, an Assyrian leader who might have been his son, Aššur-uballiṭ II, proclaimed himself the new Assyrian king in Harran, where he ruled with the support of the remnant of the Assyrian army.
In 610 BCE, the pro-Assyrian Egyptian pharaoh Necho II intervened in the Levant in support of the Assyrians, and went to Harran to support Aššur-uballiṭ.
In 610 BCE, Cyaxares and Nabopolassar seized Harran from the Assyro-Egyptian force, which retreated to Carchemish on the west bank of the Euphrates.
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 Empire.
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.
According to older interpretations of the destruction of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, its territory was partitioned between the Babylonians and the Medes, the latter of whom obtained a territory which included Assyria proper and had a southern border which started at Carchemish and passed south of Harran and along the Jabal Sinjār till the Tigris to the south of Aššur, and then along the Jabāl Hamrīn and across the Diyala River valley until the northwestern borders of Elam.
However, according to more recent research, the Neo-Babylonian Empire obtained all of the former territories of the Assyrian Empire except for those on the Zagros mountains which the Assyrians had already lost to the Medes in earlier times, and the role of the Medes in the war against the Assyrians was largely to act as the main fighting force which handed over territory to the Babylonians and returned to Media once these military activities were completed.
thumb|left|upright|Qyzqapan tomb, likely relief of Cyaxares (detail).
Following the destruction of the Assyrian Empire, the relations between the Medes and the Babylonians soon temporarily deteriorated in the 590s, but no hostilities erupted between the two empires.
Instead, the majority of the Scythians were expelled from Western Asia and returned to the Pontic Steppe during that decade, and a war broke out between the Median Empire 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 the Median and Lydian Empires in 590 BCE.
This war lasted five years, until a solar eclipse occurred in 585 BCE during a battle (hence called the Battle of the Eclipse) opposing the Lydian and Median armies, which both sides interpreted 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, and the Halys River was set at the border between the two kingdoms.
Cyaxares died shortly after the Battle of the Eclipse, in 585 BCE itself, and was succeeded by his son Astyages, who was the maternal grandfather of Cyrus the Great through his daughter Mandane.
According to the Russian historian Igor Diakonoff, the tomb of Cyaxares is 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."
See also
History of Iran
Iranian Peoples
Cyaxares II
Medes
Eclipse of Thales
References
Sources
External links
Livius.org: Cyaxares
