For the last few weeks I’ve been writing extensively about the Assyrian Empire: the first state to dominate the entire Near East, the military colossus whose armies once conquered all lands between Egypt and Iran. We know its kings, its campaigns, its bureaucracy, and its monumental architecture. The stones of Nineveh and Nimrud still bear their names. And yet the man who destroyed Assyria — the one who besieged Assur, helped pull down Nineveh, and ended three centuries of imperial rule — remains almost invisible in the historical record. His name was Cyaxares.
Herodotus presents him as a figure worthy of epic. In the Histories, Cyaxares inherits a Median Empire from his father Phraortes, only to see it fall under Scythian domination. After years of humiliation, he invites the Scythian leaders to a great banquet. It’s a scene easily imagined as a precursor to the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones: lavish food, heavy wine, trusting smiles, and blades hidden beneath cloaks. When the chiefs are drunk, Cyaxares orders them slaughtered and regains control of his people. He then reorganizes the Median army into cavalry, archers, and infantry, creating the disciplined force that would soon march against Assyria.
Herodotus continues with the story of the fall of Nineveh and the later war with Lydia. According to him, the Medes fought the Lydian king Alyattes for years until a solar eclipse suddenly plunged the battlefield into darkness. Both armies, terrified by what they saw as a divine omen, immediately agreed to peace. Modern astronomy confirms that a total eclipse crossed Anatolia on 28 May 585 BCE.
This is the Cyaxares of Greek memory: empire-builder, destroyer of Assyria, one of the last great Near Eastern monarchs before the rise of Persia. But almost none of this can be verified. Herodotus wrote around 450 BCE, long after Media had been absorbed into the Achaemenid Empire. His Median narrative mirrors the structures he saw around him: a prototype of Persia, projected into the past. If we strip away this Greek lens and turn to contemporary sources, the picture changes dramatically.
What the Babylonians actually recorded
The Chronicle of the Fall of Nineveh (BM 21901) is our only near-contemporary source on Cyaxares. Written in Akkadian, it calls him Umakištar and describes the campaigns that destroyed Assyria.
In 614 BCE, Cyaxares gathered a large Median army and marched into the Assyrian heartland. After an unsuccessful attempt on Nineveh, he moved south along the Tigris and attacked Assur, the oldest and most sacred of Assyrian cities. The Chronicle describes how the Medes sacked the city and withdrew with their loot. When Nabopolassar of Babylon arrived shortly afterward “to support the Medes”, he found only bodies and ruins. The two kings then made a strategic alliance on the spot.
Two years later, in 612 BCE, Cyaxares and Nabopolassar marched together on Nineveh. After a long siege, they broke through the defenses, defeated the Assyrian army, plundered the city, and left the ruins smoldering. With that, the Assyrian Empire came to an end.
If we possessed only this Chronicle, Herodotus might seem vindicated. Cyaxares appears as a Great King commanding enormous forces, waging long campaigns, and acting in full diplomatic equality with Babylon. His deeds look imperial. But this single text stands alone. Everything else we would expect from a Near Eastern empire — inscriptions, monuments, archives, palaces, a recognizable capital — is absent. Media, supposedly an empire ruling a vast swath of Iran, left nothing.
This silence is too complete to be accidental. If a Median Empire existed in the form described by Herodotus, it would have left administrative fingerprints everywhere. It did not. The Chronicle shows Cyaxares acting like a conqueror, but nothing else shows him ruling like an emperor. This discrepancy lies at the heart of modern scholarship.
Was there ever a Median Empire?
Beginning in the 1980s, the Dutch historian Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg dismantled the traditional belief in a Median Empire. She demonstrated that the classical picture — a powerful centralized state with a capital at Ecbatana — was derived largely from Greek writers who retrofitted Persian realities onto a pre-Persian past.
The archaeological and textual silence was decisive: a true empire does not vanish without a trace. If Media had bureaucrats, scribes, palaces, and a capital comparable to those of Assyria or Persia, we would see them. The fact that we do not means they likely never existed.
Instead of an empire, Sancisi-Weerdenburg proposed that the Medes were a tribal federation: a loosely organized collection of hill polities capable of powerful military action but lacking imperial administration. This reinterpretation became the foundation of the now-dominant view.
The tribal confederation hypothesis
Once we look at Media as a tribal federation, the pieces fall into place. We know from Assyrian inscriptions that the Medes consisted of many local chieftains. Archaeology shows fortified hilltop settlements, not a unified administrative system. The Nabonidus Chronicle from the 550s BCE refers to “kings” marching alongside Astyages, Cyaxares’ son. The Book of Jeremiah warns that “the kings of the Medes” will come against Babylon: in the plural, not the singular.
This is the political landscape of a confederation, not an empire. And it explains why Cyaxares could lead massive military operations while leaving no bureaucratic trace. A tribal federation can muster large armies when unified under a charismatic and successful war leader. It can campaign effectively but leaves very little behind when the crisis ends.
Seen in this light, Cyaxares becomes a hegemon rather than an emperor: the strongest and most persuasive figure among the many rulers of the Iranian highlands, able to coordinate joint actions and distribute the spoils of victory.
But some scholars pushed the minimization of Cyaxares’ status even further.
The ‘mercenary leader’ interpretation
Mario Liverani took the logic of minimization to its extreme. He argued that Cyaxares may not even have been the ruler of a coherent tribal confederation, but a mercenary-style war leader of Median troops formerly serving Assyria.
Assyrian kings frequently hired Median fighters, especially as elite guards. Esarhaddon placed Median bodyguards around Ashurbanipal, trusting their loyalty, mobility, and fighting skill. These groups could occupy multiple roles — raiders, allies, clients, or auxiliary mercenaries — shifting with the political winds. Liverani suggested that “Cyaxares” could have emerged from this fluid world: a charismatic commander of Median contingents who turned his followers against their former imperial employer.
Ctesias’ account of Assyria’s fall actually fits this logic remarkably well. In his narrative, Arbakos (clearly Cyaxares) and Belesys (Nabopolassar) are not sovereign kings confronting Assyria from outside, but Assyrian generals commanding ethnic contingents within the imperial army: Arbakos over the Medes, Belesys over the Babylonians. They rebel from inside the system, leading the forces once entrusted to them by the Assyrian king.
Even if Ctesias is unreliable in detail, his structural vision — of the founders of the Median and Neo-Babylonian kingdoms as defecting commanders of ethnically distinct Assyrian units — aligns almost perfectly with Liverani’s thought experiment. In both cases, the “creators” of the new powers emerge as Assyria’s own auxiliaries, figures whose authority originally derived from service within the empire rather than from ruling well-defined states.
But the weaknesses of the “mercenary leader” model still outweigh these resonances.
The Chronicle explicitly calls Cyaxares “king of the Medes,” a title that Babylonian scribes reserved for autonomous rulers. The repeated, multi-year coordination between Median and Babylonian forces is far too complex for a leader of semi-free mercenary bands. And the later prestige of Cyaxares’ dynasty — visible in the Bisotun inscription, where rebels claim descent from him — indicates a recognized royal house, not an accidental warlord.
Thus Liverani’s interpretation functions best as a deliberate reductio: a demonstration of how far Cyaxares’ status can be minimized before the evidence breaks. Ctesias unintentionally reinforces the value of the experiment. His story preserves a distant echo of something real — the ethnically organized, occasionally semi-autonomous nature of Assyria’s auxiliary forces — yet ultimately exaggerates it into fiction.
Seen this way, the “mercenary Cyaxares” and Ctesias’ “general Arbakos” illuminate the same underlying reality even as they distort it: the Late Neo-Assyrian world was a place where local elites could rise quickly and unpredictably. But the confederation model — of a Median coalition evolving into a state — remains the most convincing reconstruction of Cyaxares’ actual role in Assyria’s collapse.
A federation on the cusp of empire
Returning to the tribal confederation hypothesis, there are several indications that Cyaxares’ federation was already evolving into something more than a loose alliance.
The Medes were capable of waging long-distance, multi-year campaigns — something that requires coordination, supply lines, and discipline. The peaceful succession from Cyaxares to Astyages points toward an emerging dynastic principle. The prominence of Cyaxares in later Iranian memory, and the fact that rebels in Darius I’s time claimed descent from him, imply that by the mid-sixth century the Median royal house was already an institution. And the alliances Cyaxares forged, especially with Babylon, have the flavor not merely of tribal diplomacy but of early statecraft.
In other words, Cyaxares ruled a confederation that was becoming an empire, even if it never matured into one. When Cyrus the Great overthrew Astyages, he did not conquer a primitive or fragmented land. He inherited an early state: one whose foundations had been laid by Cyaxares.
Conclusion
In the end, Cyaxares’ obscurity may itself be the most revealing part of the story. The man who destroyed the greatest empire of the age left behind no royal inscriptions, no monumental self-portraits, no bureaucratic archives, but only the traces of military decisions woven into sources written by others. This absence forces us to reconstruct him indirectly, through shadows cast across Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, and Persian traditions. What emerges is not a fixed portrait but a spectrum of possibilities, from mercenary commander to tribal hegemon to architect of a short-lived proto-state.
The real Cyaxares likely stood somewhere between these extremes: a war leader powerful enough to topple Assyria, yet rooted in a political landscape too fluid and decentralized to leave the clear fingerprints of empire. His story reminds us that the ancient Near East was shaped not only by bureaucratic kings and monumental states, but also by leaders who rose in the interstices: men whose impact was enormous even when their own voices are silent.