Deioces or
Deiokes (Greek Δηιόκης) was the first king of the
MedesThe Medes were an ancient Iranian people who lived in the northwestern portions of present-day Iran. This area is known as Media...
according to
HerodotusHerodotus of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BC and is regarded as the "Father of History" in Western culture. He was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
. In the late 8th century BC there was an Assyrian named
Daiukku or
Dayukku who was a
MannaeanThe Mannaeans were an ancient people who lived in the territory of present-day Iran, around the 10th to 7th centuries BC...
provincial governor. Perhaps Herodotus uses the name in error.
Herodotus (I: 96ff) says that Deioces, son of Phraortes, was "a man of great ability and ambitious for power" in a time when there was no government in the region; people in his own and other villages chose him to arbitrate disputes, and eventually selected him as their king: "Let us appoint one of our number to rule us so that we can get on with our work under orderly government, and not lose our homes altogether in the present chaos." They built him first a palace and then a capital,
EcbatanaPlease update as needed.Ecbatana is supposed to be the capital of Astyages , which was taken by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great...
(modern Hamadan).
Deioces or
Deiokes (Greek Δηιόκης) was the first king of the
MedesThe Medes were an ancient Iranian people who lived in the northwestern portions of present-day Iran. This area is known as Media...
according to
HerodotusHerodotus of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BC and is regarded as the "Father of History" in Western culture. He was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
. In the late 8th century BC there was an Assyrian named
Daiukku or
Dayukku who was a
MannaeanThe Mannaeans were an ancient people who lived in the territory of present-day Iran, around the 10th to 7th centuries BC...
provincial governor. Perhaps Herodotus uses the name in error.
Deioces in Herodotus
Herodotus (I: 96ff) says that Deioces, son of Phraortes, was "a man of great ability and ambitious for power" in a time when there was no government in the region; people in his own and other villages chose him to arbitrate disputes, and eventually selected him as their king: "Let us appoint one of our number to rule us so that we can get on with our work under orderly government, and not lose our homes altogether in the present chaos." They built him first a palace and then a capital,
EcbatanaPlease update as needed.Ecbatana is supposed to be the capital of Astyages , which was taken by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great...
(modern Hamadan). He established a strict protocol of seclusion and deference as well as a nationwide network of spies, administered justice, and ruled for fifty-three years; his son and successor was
PhraortesPhraortes Phraortes Phraortes (from Old Persian Fravartiš , son of Deioces, was the second king of the Median Empire.Like his father Deioces, Phraortes started wars against Assyria, but was defeated and killed by Ashurbanipal, the king of Assyria....
, father of
CyaxaresCyaxares or Hvakhshathra , the son of King Phraortes, was the first king of Media .He reorganized and modernized the Median Army, then joined with King Nabopolassar of Babylonia...
, who overthrew the Assyrian Empire and established the power of Media.
Rüdiger Schmitt writes:
Herodotus’ account seems to have been based on an oral tradition; from it scholars have deduced that Deioces was the founder of the Median royal dynasty and the first Median king to gain independence from Assyria. But it must be stressed that Herodotus’ report is a mixture of Greek and eastern legends and is not historically reliable. It has also been supposed ... that the Median king on whom Herodotus’ account is centered was actually Deioces’ son Phraortes, and it is therefore impossible to give the exact dates of Deioces’ reign, which probably spanned most of the first half of the 7th century B.C.E.
Daiukku in Assyrian inscriptions
A Daiukku is mentioned several times in inscriptions from the reign of
Sargon IISargon II was an Assyrian king. Sargon II became co-regent with Shalmaneser V in 722 BC, and became the sole ruler of the kingdom of Assyria in 722 BC after the death of Shalmaneser V. It is not clear whether he was the son of Tiglath-Pileser III or a usurper unrelated to the royal family...
(late eighth century BC); he is named as a Mannean provincial governor (
šaknu) ruling a district bordering Assyria. His son was held hostage by the
UrartiansUrartu Urartu Urartu (natively ; , Assyrian: , corresponding to Ararat, or Kingdom of Van was an Iron Age kingdom centered around Lake Van in the Armenian Highland....
, and he supported the Urartian king against the Mannean ruler Ullusunu, but Sargon captured Daiukku and exiled him and his family to Hamath in Syria. "Any connection between the governor mentioned by Sargon and the Median dynasty of later periods is thus only hypothetical; there is not a single authentic cuneiform source to confirm that Sargon’s Daiukku and Herodotus’ Deioces were the same person."
Cultural references
Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry...
refers to him near the beginning of
CantoThe Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
74 (the first of the
Pisan Cantos): "To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the color of stars."
See also
- Nos ancêtres de l'Antiquité, 1991, Christian Settipani
Christian Settipani is the Technical Director of an IT company in Paris and a genealogist and historian ....
, p. 152
External links