Historical Dictionary of the Kurds

MEDES

Medes: translation

The Medes were an ancient Indo-European people who spoke anIranianlanguage related to oldPersian, but they left no written records of their own. They flourished from the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE. Under their king Cyaxares, the Medes joined forces with the Babylonians and destroyed the Assyrian Empire in 612 BCE. The Medes then established a large but short-lived empire of their own over areas that are now in westernIranand northernIraq. Cyrus the Great defeated Astyages, the last Median king, in approximately 550 BCE and established the Persian Empire.
Many Kurds claim that their nation descended from the Medes. The early-20th-century authority on the Kurds Vladimir Minorsky agreed with this assessment on the basis of historical and linguistic evidence he had gathered. However, D.N. MacKenzie, a later authority on Kurdishlanguages, challenged this genealogy by showing that the Medes spoke a northwestern Iranian language, while the Kurds speak a southwestern one. Nevertheless, the Medes probably do constitute an important element from which the contemporary Kurds derive.

  1. medes—Medes translationsee Nebuchadrezzar II Necho II Psammetichus I.Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt by Rosalie and Antony E. David...Ancient Egypt
  2. medes—MEDES translation The Medes were a people of IndoEuropean origin who migrated into Iran toward the end of the second millennium B.C. By the eighth century they had consol...Historical Dictionary of Mesopotamia