Medes

   The Medes were an ancient Indo-European people who spoke an Iranian language related to old Persian, but they left no written records of their own. They flourished from the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE. Under their king Cyaxares, the Medes joined forces with the Babylonians and destroyed the Assyrian Empire in 612 BCE. The Medes then established a large but short-lived empire of their own over areas that are now in western Iran and northern Iraq. Cyrus the Great defeated Astyages, the last Median king, in approximately 550 BCE and established the Persian Empire.

   Many Kurds claim that their nation descended from the Medes. The early-20th-century authority on the Kurds Vladimir Minorsky agreed with this assessment on the basis of historical and linguistic evidence he had gathered. However, D.N. MacKenzie, a later authority on Kurdish languages, challenged this genealogy by showing that the Medes spoke a northwestern Iranian language, while the Kurds speak a southwestern one. Nevertheless, the Medes probably do constitute an important element from which the contemporary Kurds derive.