The organisation of the country and its division into satrapies:  the satrap, the military commander, the royal secretary; couriers, main roads, the Eyes and Ears of the king—­The financial system and the provincial taxes:  the daric—­Advantages and drawbacks of the system of division into satrapies; the royal guard and the military organisation of the empire—­The conquest of the Hapta-Hindu and the prospect of war with Greece.

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CHAPTER I—­THE IRANIAN CONQUEST

Drawn by Boudier, from the engraving in Coste and Flandin.  The vignette, drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a statuette in terra-cotta, found in Southern Russia, represents a young Scythian.

The Iranian religions—­Cyrus in Lydia and at Babylon:  Cambyses in Egypt —­Darius and the organisation of the empire.

The Median empire is the least known of all those which held sway for a time over the destinies of a portion of Western Asia.  The reason of this is not to be ascribed to the shortness of its duration:  the Chaldaean empire of Nebuchadrezzar lasted for a period quite as brief, and yet the main outlines of its history can be established with some certainty in spite of large blanks and much obscurity.  Whereas at Babylon, moreover, original documents abound, enabling us to put together, feature by feature, the picture of its ancient civilisation and of the chronology of its kings, we possess no contemporary monuments of Ecbatana to furnish direct information as to its history.  To form any idea of the Median kings or their people, we are reduced to haphazard notices gleaned from the chroniclers of other lands, retailing a few isolated facts, anecdotes, legends, and conjectures, and, as these materials reach us through the medium of the Babylonians or the Greeks of the fifth or sixth century B.C., the picture which we endeavour to compose from them is always imperfect or out of perspective.  We seemingly catch glimpses of ostentatious luxury, of a political and military organisation, and a method of government analogous to that which prevailed at later periods among the Persians, but more imperfect, ruder, and nearer to barbarism—­a Persia, in fact, in the rudimentary stage, with its ruling spirit and essential characteristics as yet undeveloped.  The machinery of state had doubtless been adopted almost in its entirety from the political organisations which obtained in the kingdoms of Assyria, Elam, and Chaldaea, with which sovereignties the founders of the Median empire had held in turns relations as vassals, enemies, and allies; but once we penetrate this veneer of Mesopotamian civilisation and reach the inner life of the people, we find in the religion they profess—­mingled with some borrowed traits—­a world of unfamiliar myths and dogmas of native origin.