The World

Uvaxštra’s army was made up of Medes, Persians and Scythians; the latter were training his young men in their unsurpassed ability to shoot bows on the gallop, skills aided by first the bit, then foot supports, which gradually improved from a length of rope into wooden and eventually iron stirrups. Together these innovations meant they could control their mounts while shooting their bows. But when Uvaxštra insulted these Scythians, they killed the boys, cooked them in a stew and fed them to the king before seeking asylum with Alyattes, who refused to surrender the cannibalistic gourmets. Their armies met in May 585 on the River Halys when suddenly ‘the day became night’ – a solar eclipse – which so amazed both sides that they stopped fighting and made peace: Uvaxštra married his son Rishtivaiga (Spearthrower, Astyages) to Alyattes’ daughter Aryenis.

When both kings died, Rishtivaiga found himself at the centre of a family network as brother-in-law to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and the new king Croesus of Lydia, who boasted that he was the world’s richest king. To keep his tribal federacy together, Rishtivaiga married his daughter Mandana to a Persian khan, king of Anshan, Cambyses (Kabūjiya).^* When their baby, named Cyrus – Koresh – half Mede, half Persian, was born, he was brought up like all Persian khans until he was six by his mother Mandana, who still at this stage churned milk, made bread, spun cloth. Then he was handed over to his father Cambyses to be trained in horsemanship and marksmanship, wearing trousers and leather chaps.^* When Cambyses died, Cyrus donned the cowhide coat, the gaunaka, of kings of Anshan and started to plan the destruction of his grandfather Rishtivaiga, who had alienated his khans by adopting fancy court ritual and bureaucratic controls. One of them, Arbaku, sent an appeal to Cyrus sewn inside the body of a hare: ‘The Median nobles will join you.’ Cyrus extended his power by marrying a khan’s daughter, Cassandane, from the respected Haxamanishiya (Achaemenid) clan, with whom he had two sons. But he also negotiated with the king of Babylon, Nabunid (Nabonidus), against their mutual Median enemy.

When Rishtivaiga cavorted with a concubine, she sang about a ‘lion who had a wild boar in his power but let him into his lair’.

‘Who is this wild boar?’ asked Rishtivaiga.

‘Cyrus,’ she replied. But before Rishtivaiga could break Cyrus, the Persian gathered his khans at Pathragarda, his capital near Shiraz: ‘I’m the man destined to undertake your liberation; you’re the match of the Medes. Fling off the yoke of Rishtivaiga!’ Cyrus marched against his grandfather: in 550 at Pasargadae, the Persians broke before the Median charges, but their women opened their robes and flashed their vulvas at their men, shouting, ‘Where are you off to, quitters? Do you want to crawl back into where you came from?’ The Persians turned and fought, Cyrus seized Rishtivaiga, took his capital Ecbatana and married his daughter.

Next, Cyrus came up against the richest man in the world, Croesus.

CYRUS AND QUEEN TOMYRIS: CONQUEROR TO GOBLET

Croesus claimed he was descended from the Greek god Herakles (Hercules) and regularly consulted the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi – but he was not Greek himself. Yet as master of Eurasian trade, whose currency was widely used, he was as at home with the people of the Aegean as with those of the Euphrates (he was after all brother-in-law of Nebuchadnezzar, cousin of Cyrus). But now Cyrus had to be stopped, so Croesus turned to the Greeks, recruiting two Greek city states, Sparta and Athens, to join Babylon and Egypt.

Croesus’ fixer on Greek matters was an Athenian nobleman named Alcmaeon, descended from the half-divine king Nestor, and member of one of the richest families in the city. Alcmaeon did so well that Croesus offered to pay him as much as he could carry from the Lydian treasury. In a story that illustrated his family’s voracity, Alcmaeon turned up in Sardis wearing loose clothes filled with pockets and wide boots that he filled with Croesian coins, adding to the family fortune. The story of Alcmaeon was not just that of Athens but of the Greeks themselves.