But little originality was developed.  A stately dress, and a new style of architecture, are almost the only inventions to which the Medes can lay claim.  They were brave, energetic, enterprising, fond of display, capable of appreciating to some extent the advantages of civilized life; but they had little genius, and the world is scarcely indebted to them for a single important addition to the general stock of its ideas.

Of the Median customs in war we know but little.  Herodotus tells us that in the army of Xerxes the Medes were armed exactly as the Persians, carrying on their heads a soft felt cap, on their bodies a sleeved tunic, and on their legs trousers.  Their offensive arms, he says, were the spear, the bow, and the dagger.  They had large wicker shields, and bore their quivers suspended at their backs.  Sometimes their tunic was made into a coat of mail by the addition to it on the outside of a number of small iron plates arranged so as to overlap each other, like the scales of a fish.  They served both on horseback and on foot, with the same equipment in both cases.

There is no reason to doubt the correctness of this description of the Median military dress under the early Persian kings.  The only question is how far the equipment was really the ancient warlike custom of the people.  It seems in some respects too elaborate to be the armature of a simple and primitive race.  We may reasonably suppose that at least the scale armor and the unwieldy wicker shields (yeppa), which required to be rested on the ground, were adopted at a somewhat late date from the Assyrians.  At any rate the original character of the Median armies, as set before us in Scripture, and as indicated both by Strabo and Xenophon, is simpler than the Herodotean description.  The primitive Modes seem to have been a nation of horse-archers.  Trained from their early boyhood to a variety of equestrian exercises, and well practised in the use of the bow, they appear to have proceeded against their enemies with clouds of horse, almost in Scythian fashion, and to have gained their victories chiefly by the skill with which they shot their arrows as they advanced, retreated, or manoeuvred about their foe.  No doubt they also used the sword and the spear.  The employment of these weapons has been almost universal throughout the East from a very remote antiquity, and there is some mention of them in connection with the Medes and their kindred, the Persians, in Scripture; but it is evident that the terror which the Medes inspired arose mainly from their dexterity as archers.

No representation of weapons which can be distinctly recognized as Median has come down to us.  The general character of the military dress and of the arms appears, probably in the Persepolitan sculptures; but as these reliefs are in most cases representations, not of Medes, but of Persians, and as they must be hereafter adduced in illustration of the military customs of the latter people, only a very sparing use