Deioces

There are two kinds of source on Deioces and we keep them apart. The first layer is Herodotus’ account (1.96–102), written some two centuries later. Later Greek writers added almost nothing to it. The second layer is the annals of Sargon II of Assyria, which name a man called Daiukku in 715 BCE.

Schmitt says Herodotus’ account may rest on an oral tradition, but it “is a mixture of Greek and eastern legends and is not historically reliable”. So everything from Herodotus is labelled “according to Herodotus” and none of it is marked secure.

We know the founder of the first Iranian state only from a Greek’s story. That is a lesson in itself: beginnings are kept more by legends than by documents.

1. According to Herodotus, Deioces was the son of Phraortes and a notable man in his own town.

2. In a time of lawlessness he became a just judge, and people from other towns came to him too.

3. Then he said judging brought him no advantage and stopped. Robbery and lawlessness increased.

4. The Medes assembled; Herodotus supposes Deioces’ friends did most of the talking. They chose him king.

5. He asked for a bodyguard and a palace; then he built Ecbatana with seven walls.

6. He set up court rules: no one should see the king, all business went through messengers, and laughing or spitting before him was a disgrace.

7. He received pleas in writing, sent his judgments out, and had spies everywhere.

Schmitt says scholars have deduced from this story that Deioces founded the Median dynasty and was the first Median king to break from Assyria; but the story itself is not reliable. He sees the “watchers and listeners” as forerunners of the Achaemenid “king’s eyes” and “ears”.

Herodotus tells the story with deliberate double edges: Deioces was just, but because he wanted power. It is a story about how power is born, not a report of an event.

George Smith noticed in 1869 that the name Daiukku appears several times in the texts of Sargon II. In the annals of the eighth year (715 BCE) and the Khorsabad Display Inscription, Daiukku is governor (šaknu) of a Mannean province. He backed Rusa I of Urartu against Ullusunu, king of Mannea; Sargon captured him and exiled him and his family to Hamath.

Schmitt says the “House of Deioces” (Bit-Daiukku), on which earlier reconstructions relied, never existed: it came from a misreading of “the land of the Medes” in the annals for 713. Any link between this governor and the Median dynasty is “only hypothetical”. Only the name brings the two layers together, and *Dahyuka- remained common later, appearing for various officials in the Persepolis Fortification Tablets.

This section shows how history-writing works: one misreading can create a “house”, and a more careful reading can erase it.

According to Herodotus, Ecbatana had seven concentric walls, each higher than the one outside it. The battlements of five walls were coloured white, black, purple, blue and orange; the two inner walls were coated with silver and gold. The longest wall was about the length of the wall of Athens.

This description comes only from Herodotus. Schmitt identifies the city with Old Persian Hagmatāna and modern Hamadan, but cites no other evidence for the seven walls. So we take it as a literary picture, not the plan of a city.

In Herodotus’ story the king hides behind seven walls so that people think him “different”. The distance between power and people is in the story from the very start.

According to Herodotus, the Medes chose a king so that “the land will be well governed” and they could “attend to our business”. In return the king got a palace, a bodyguard, a city the people built with their own labour, and spies everywhere.

This is our reading: Herodotus’ story is a parable about the origin of the state. People wanted arbitration to keep their property and work safe; a judge who withheld judgment took its price in the form of absolute power. It is a parable, not history.

The story’s question is still alive: how can people have impartial justice without the judge becoming an unchecked ruler?

Name: Greek Dēïókēs, Assyrian Daiukku, Elamite Dayauka; all from Iranian *Dahyuka-, a pet name built on dahyu-, “land”.

According to Herodotus: son of Phraortes, father of Phraortes, and grandfather of Cyaxares.

Successor: his son Phraortes, who according to Herodotus subdued the Persians and died fighting Assyria.

Diakonoff suspects that the king at the centre of Herodotus’ story was really Phraortes. So even the family tree of this dynasty is disputed.

A name that means “land” is a fitting name for the legendary founder of a country.