The Medes and Persians— The kingdom of the Medes seems to have been but of short duration: it probably had its name of Media from מדי Madi, the third son of Japhet; but its first establishment into a kingdom is dated about 150 years before the reign of Cyrus. Sir Isaac Newton reckons up only five kings. Herodotus (lib. 1:) tells us, the first was Dejoces, a man of great prudence, and who reigned a long time. Phraortes his son succeeded him, whom Calmet judges to have been the Arphaxad of the book of Judith, but Prideaux is of a different opinion: see Conn. p. 1: b. 1. This monarch was followed by Cyaxares, a prince who widely extended the empire over Asia, and left it to his son Astyages, the father, according to Xenophon, of Cyaxares the second, or Darius Medus. Pliny, in his Nat. Hist. p. 100., settles the geography of Media in this manner: it had the Caspians and the Parthians on the east, the Lower Assyria, called Sitacene, Susiana, and Persis, on the south; on the west Adiabene or the middle parts of Assyria, that is to say, Diarbek; and Armenia on the north. Virgil, in his 2nd Georg. calls it "ditissima terra," a most fertile country, and celebrates it for the production of the Malum Medicum or the Citron. Polybius also, lib. 5:, takes notice of its great abundance in corn and cattle, and of a multitude of cities and towns in the plains amid the mountains which divide it from east to west. Its capital Ecbatane was a very spacious and opulent city, which the Persian kings used for a summer-residence; and is said to have been fifteen miles in circumference, to have had walls seventy cubits high, and fifty broad. Judith, chap. Daniel 1:2. This place is also much noticed in the book of Tobit, as where his son Tobias was married, to which he retired from Nineveh, and ended his days in it.
Persia, whose capital is Persepolis, situated on the south of Media, gives name to the gulph below, which receives the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. It consisted of three parts, Persis, Elymais, from whence the Elamites of Scripture, and Susiana, unless the latter should be considered as a distinct region, having had Susa for its capital. But Susiana was added to Persia by Cyaxares the first. This whole tract, together with Media and Assyria or Babylon, as also Lydia and other countries, were all united under Cyrus, who was the first monarch of this Persian empire, as Darius Codomannus was the fourteenth and last.