town or village

Ecbatana

• Today Tell Hagmatana

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Events

1. c. 550 BCCyrus defeats Astyages and takes Ecbatana

In ancient writers

• Herodotus, Histories 1.98 — Deioces the Mede made his people build Ecbatana: seven concentric walls on a hill, each rising above the next, their battlements white, black, purple, blue and orange, the innermost two plated with silver and gold.
• Polybius, Histories 10.27.5–10 — Ecbatana, always the royal seat of the Medes and said to surpass all cities in wealth and splendour, has no wall but a citadel of wonderful strength; beneath it stands a palace seven stades around, its timbers once plated with silver and gold.

History

Ecbatana, Old Persian Hagmatana, lies under the city of Hamadan in western Iran, at the foot of Mount Alvand, the ancient Orontes, on the main road from Mesopotamia to the Iranian plateau. It was the chief city of the Medes. Herodotus says that Deioces, their first king, built it with seven walls one within another, their battlements each of a different colour and the two innermost plated with silver and gold. Because the modern city covers the site, little certainly Median has been found; excavations on the mound of Tepe Hegmataneh have chiefly exposed a quarter that is usually dated to the Parthian age, though it has also been taken for Median.

About 550 BC the army of the Median king Astyages mutinied and handed him over to Cyrus, who took Ecbatana and carried its silver and gold to Anshan, as the Nabonidus Chronicle records. Under the Persians it was a royal residence, where, Xenophon says, the king spent the summer. When the Mede Phraortes rebelled, Darius I had him put to death at Ecbatana, as his Bisitun inscription relates. Darius and his son Xerxes cut inscriptions in the rock at Ganj Nameh nearby.

The Book of Ezra tells how the Jews' right to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem was questioned under Darius. A search was made in the archives of Babylon, and at Achmetha, the Aramaic name of Ecbatana, "in the palace that is in the province of the Medes", a roll was found with the decree of Cyrus' first year that the house of God be rebuilt. Darius confirmed it, and the temple was finished.

Alexander the Great reached Ecbatana in 330 BC and had the treasure brought from Persis stored in its citadel; his friend Hephaestion died there in 324 BC. Polybius describes its palace, with beams of cedar and cypress plated with silver and gold, and says that Antiochus III still found enough silver tiles and gold to coin nearly 4,000 talents. Under the Parthians it was a summer residence of the kings, as Strabo records, and as Hamadan it lived on through Sasanian times.

Scripture: Ezra 5:3–17; Ezra 6:1–5; Ezra 6:6–12; Ezra 6:15

Checked against its sources; not yet read by a historian.

Verses (1)

Ezra 6:2

And there was found at Achmetha, in the palace that is in the province of the Medes, a roll, and therein was a record thus written:

King James Version

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