THE MEDES AND PERSIANS.
With the rise of the Medes and Persians the Aryan race makes its first appearance in Western Asia. These nations inhabited that portion of the table-land of Iran which lies between the Per sian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. The part taken by the Medes in the overthrow of the Assyrian monarchy has been already mentioned (p. 142). But their place was soon occupied by the Persians, who, though still more inferior to their Semitic neighbors in most of the elements of culture, retained an inherent vigor and vitality which enabled them not only to seize the supremacy for which the Assyrians and the Babylonians had so long contended, but to establish a more complete and extensive dominion than either of these bad possessed. Their religious and ethical concep tions also were of a purer and higher order, and their attainment of power was hailed by the Jews, to whom it brought deliverance from captivity, as the advent of a new era. But their contact with the far more numerous subject-nations tended rather to arrest their own development than to infuse fresh life into an effete civilization. The empire founded by Cyrus and organized by Darius, while superior to those that had preceded it in the system of rule and administration and the consequent preservation of internal peace and order, was essentially of the same Oriental type—a congeries of alien populations held together and controlled by an un limited despotism, devoid of a common national life and sentiment, and unstirred by any progressive impulses. The title of "king of kings" or "great king," by which the Persian monarch was commonly designated in the West, seemed not inapplicable to a ruler whose sway extended over a multitude of states and races, and whose court was a scene of corre sponding splendor and magnificence. But the hollowness of this vaunted power was instantly revealed when the great Macedonian led a small but well-disciplined army against it and shattered it at a blow. The whole duration of the Persian empire was scarcely more than two centuries (538-330 n. c.), and its place in the history of civilization is in most respects unimportant.
General knowledge of Median and Persian civil ization is based almost exclusively on the reports of Greek writers: Media itself has left us scarcely any noteworthy memento. The ruins of Per sepolis, besides their particular importance in reference to architecture, furnish information in their sculptures, which resemble those found in the excavations of Nineveh. Both Medes and Persians were receptive rather than creative, as may be inferred from the few productions left to us, and both were subject to the influence of the Assyrians as well as of the Egyptians. A relief figure on a pilaster in the old palace of Pasar 151 ga&e, which some consider an image of Cyrus, and which represents a king with a long cloak and the insignia of an Egyptian Pharaoh on his head, exhibits all the peculiarities of Assyrian workmanship. Their fer tile country and mild climate soon rendered the Medes effeminate; while the generally severe character of the Persian territory maintained its inhabitants longer in their vigor, but longer also in the incipient stage of civilization.
dress of skins which is characteristic of nomadic peo ples, and of which we no longer find traces elsewhere, was distinctly noticeable in Persia, and still prevails in its mountainous districts. It became, in the well-known fur caps, a distinctive part of the national cos tume. According to Herodotus, the earliest Persian dress (p1. 15, figs. II, 12) consisted, for the men, of a belted coat, trousers—which we here meet for the first time in the Old World—a covering for the head, and shoes. As early as the time of Cyrus, who formed his court according to the Median pattern and borrowed also the Median costumes (figs. 13, 14), the style of the dress helped to distinguish the rank of the wearer in the manner we have observed in other states. It may, however, be presumed that the great mass of the people retained their ancient mode of dress, and that the costumes represented on monuments are those either of the king himself or of the highest classes.