Persia from the Earliest Period to the Arab

28 HISTORY OF PERSIA.
or Nomads of whom Astyages was king.
Nabonidos
objected that the Manda surrounded Harran, making
any approach to it impossible ; whereupon the god
assured him that within three years " the people of
the Manda of whom thou speakest, they, their land,
and the kings their allies, shall exist no more. In the
third year when it shall arrive I will cau~e them to
come, and Cyrus, the king of Anzan, their little
servant, with his small army shall overthrow the wide-
spread people of the Manda; Istuvegu the king of
the people of the Manda he shall capture, and bring
him a prisoner to his own country." All which duly
came to pass, and Nabonidos subsequently restored
the great temple of Harran.
It will be noticed that Istuvegu is called king of
the Manda, and not of the Mada or Medes. It is
clear, therefore, that the classical writers, in making
Astyages king of the Medes, have been led into error
by the similarity of the two names Manda and Mada.
In the Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions they are
however distinct from one another. The Mada or
Medes were the tribes, partly Aryan, partly non-
Aryan, who inhabited the mountains of Kurdistan
and the country still further to the east, while the
Manda meant " nomads." Teuspa or Teispes, the
Cimmerian chief who was defeated by Esar-haddon
and forced to march westward, is called a Manda ;
so, too, is a later Cimmerian chief Tuktammu, who
was driven beyond the frontiers of Assyria by the
generals of Assur-banipal, the son and successor of
Esar-haddon. According to Herodotus, the invasion
of Western Asia by the Cimmerians was followed by
that of the Scyths, the Scyths for a while overthrowing