Since the Medes belonged to the same Aryan family as the Persians, and
had the same language, religion, and institutions, with slight
differences, and lived among the mountains exposed to an uncongenial
climate with extremes of heat and cold, and were doomed to hard and
incessant labors for a subsistence, and were therefore--that is, the
ordinary people--frugal, industrious, and temperate, it will be seen
that what we have said of Persia equally applies to Media, except the
possession by the latter of political power as wielded by the sovereign
of a larger State.

Before a central power was established in Media, the country had
been--as in all nations in their formative state--ruled by chieftains,
who acknowledged as their supreme lord the King of Assyria, who reigned
in Nineveh. Among these chieftains was a remarkable man called Deioces,
so upright and able that he was elected king. Deioces reigned
fifty-three years wisely and well, bequeathing the kingdom he had
founded to his son Phraortes, under whom Media became independent of
Assyria. His son and successor Cyaxares, who died 593 B.C., was a
successful warrior and conqueror, and was the founder of Median
greatness. With the assistance of Nabopolassar, a Babylonian general who
had also revolted against the Assyrian monarch, Cyaxares succeeded,
after repeated failures, in taking Nineveh and destroying the great
Assyrian Empire which had ruled the Eastern world for several centuries.
The northern and eastern provinces were annexed to Media, while the
Babylonian valley of the Euphrates in the south fell to the share of
Nabopolassar, who established the Babylonian ascendency. This in its
turn was greatly augmented by his son Nebuchadnezzar, one of the most
famous conquerors of antiquity, whose empire became more extensive even
than the Assyrian. He reigned in Babylon with unparalleled splendor, and
made his capital the wonder and the admiration of the world, enriching