Who Were the Medes?

An introduction to the Median people, their language and land, how we know about them, and what the evidence actually says about their link to the Kurds.

The people

  • The Medes were an ancient Iranian people of western Iran. Assyrian and Babylonian sources call them Mādāya, Old Persian Māda. They are first mentioned in writing in the texts of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in 834 BCE. In the 9th–8th centuries BCE they formed independent local principalities and chiefdoms, not one people under a single authority.

When did they settle?

  • Encyclopaedia Iranica states that Median tribes began settling in western Iran at the end of the second millennium BCE and were likely present well before the first Assyrian mention. This date is a scholarly estimate, not a documented one: no text survives from that stage, and it remains unclear how the earliest Medes can be distinguished in the archaeological record.

Geography

  • Media was centred on western and north-western Iran, around the Hamadān plain and the Zagros mountains. Its capital was Hagmatāna, which the Greeks called Ecbatana — modern Hamadān. Media's exact borders changed over time, and published maps of it are approximate, not documented borders.

How do we know about them?

  • Our knowledge of the Medes comes from two kinds of evidence. Textual: Assyrian and Babylonian annals, Darius’s Bisotun inscription, and later Greek writers, chiefly Herodotus. Archaeological: excavations at Median-period sites such as Tepe Nush-i Jan and Godin Tepe. Each has limits: no Median archive has been found and it is unknown whether the Medes had their own writing system; the texts were written by their enemies or neighbours, and Herodotus wrote about a century after their state fell. The sites are assigned to the Median period by date and location, but identifying a site or object as specifically “Median” remains difficult and inconclusive. The picture of the Medes today is therefore scholars’ interpretation of both kinds of evidence together.

Kurdish and Median: what the linguistic evidence says

  • It has not been shown that Kurdish descends directly from Median. Iranica notes that no Median text survives and that any Middle or modern Iranian language descended from Median is unattested and cannot be identified with certainty; nor is any written predecessor of Kurdish known from Old or Middle Iranian times — its earliest known texts date from the 16th century CE. This is a judgement on the limits of the linguistic evidence only: the absence of linguistic proof neither rules out a historical link nor establishes one.

Kurds and Medes: the search for historical origins

  • The question of origins is wider than language: Kurds today live in part of the land the Medes inhabited, and many regard the Medes as ancestors. Scholars approach this through geography, classical sources and the history of groups, not language alone. For example, Rüdiger Schmitt in Iranica considers it plausible that the Cyrtians, whom Strabo places in the mountains of Atropatenian Media, may have been ancestors of the modern Kurds — “plausible”, not certain. MedKurd therefore presents the Median link as an open historical question: neither an established lineage nor a rejected hypothesis.