or Bikan, a distant province of Media, “whereof the kings his fathers had never heard the name;” and, attacking the cities of the region one after another, forced them to acknowledge his authority.  The country was held by a number of independent chiefs, each bearing sway in his own city and adjacent territory.  These chiefs have unmistakably Arian names, as Sitriparna or Sitraphernes, Eparna or Orphernes, Zanasana or Zanasanes, and Eamatiya or Ramates.  Esar-haddon says that, having entered the country with his army, he seized two of the chiefs and carried them off to Assyria, together with a vast spoil and numerous other captives.  Hereupon the remaining chiefs, alarmed for their safety, made their submission, consenting to pay an annual tribute, and admitting Assyrian officers into their territories, who watched, if they did not even control, the government.

We are now approaching the time when Media seems to have been first consolidated into a monarchy by the genius of an individual.  Sober history is forced to discard the shadowy forms of kings with which Greek writers of more fancy than judgment have peopled the darkness that rests upon the “origines” of the Medes.  Arbaces, Maudaces, Sosarmus, Artycas, Arbianes, Artseus, Deioces—­Median monarchs, according to Ctesias or Herodotus, during the space of time comprised within the years B.C. 875 and 655—­have to be dismissed by the modern writer without a word, since there is reason to believe that they are mere creatures of the imagination, inventions of unscrupulous romancers, not men who once walked the earth.  The list of Median kings in Ctesias, so far as it differs from the list in Herodotus, seems to be a pure forgery—­an extension of the period of the monarchy by the conscious use of a system of duplication.  Each king, or period, in Herodotus occurs in the list of Ctesias twice—­a transparent device, clumsily cloaked by the cheap expedient of a liberal invention of names.  Even the list of Herodotus requires curtailment.  His Deioces, whose whole history reads more like romance than truth—­the organizer of a powerful monarchy in Media just at the time when Sargon was building his fortified posts in the country and peopling with his Israelite captives the old “cities of the Medes”—­the prince who reigned for above half a century in perfect peace with his neighbors, and who, although contemporary with Sargon, Sennacherib, Esar-haddon, and As-shur-bani-pal—­all kings more or less connected with Media—­is never heard of in any of their annals, must be relegated to the historical limbo in which repose so many “shades of mighty names;” and the Herodotean list of Median kings must at any rate, be thus far reduced.  Nothing is more evident than that during the flourishing period of Assyria under the great Sargonidae above named there was no grand Median kingdom upon the eastern flank of the empire.  Such a kingdom had certainly not been formed up to B.C. 671, when Esar-haddon reduced the more distant Medes, finding them still under the government of a number of petty chiefs.  The earliest time at which we can imagine the consolidation to have taken place consistently with what we know of Assyria is about B.C. 760, or nearly half a century later than the date given by Herodotus.