In his "History of Media" I.M. Diakonoff wrote that "till the middle of the last century the state of our knowledge of Media was approximately the same as of any other land of the Ancient Near East; only scant, fragmented, almost legendary pieces of evidence preserved by the Greek authors were available on Media, as well as on the neighbouring countries" [Diakonoff, 1956, p. 9]. Since that time scholars have acquired a vast amount of new materials, first of all cuneiform and ...