The Historical Identity of the Medes or Cimmerians; Manda in the First Millennium BCE

In the first half of the first millennium BCE, the invasion to Manai, Urartu, Media, and Assyria by two large military forces was one of the most significant events in the West Asian region. This invasion is reflected in both the inscriptions of the Assyrian court and the texts of later Greek authors. This is significant because with the arrival of these emerging groups, new cultural materials infiltrated the conquered territory, and the previously established border equations were disrupted. Concerns have been expressed regarding the population from which these invaders originated, their ethnicity, and their cultural background. While examining these aspects, leading research also addresses where Assyrian cognition and later Persian descriptions of Gimeri/Cimmerian identity originated and how they were created. The present study shows that the two terms “umman-man-da / ma-an-da / man-du” and “ÈRIM/N-man-da / ma-an-da / man-du” in the first millennium BC, in particular, carry both the Medes identity and the prevailing mentality among the kings and court scribes, its expression was specific to the Medes, which, of course, along with them, other forms and sounds have also been used in the mentioned texts. The fact that the name manda was first applied to the land of the Medes in the mentioned millennium is a fundamental point that is discussed in this article.