Before the archaeological discovery of the Assyrian royal palaces and cuneiform archives, in the mid 19th century, the history of the Near Eastern civilizations in the period before the Achaemenid Empire was based on the classical and biblical sources only. The Medes, like the Assyrians and the Babylonians were known from information contained in the works of Herodotus and of later historians, who had no direct knowledge on those peoples and empires, but collected information in the learned circles of the Achaemenid empire itself. This information was neither direct nor coeval, nor even based on sound archival or historical materials. No wonder that the fresh evidence coming from the archaeological discoveries of the past century ---both in Assyria and in Babylonia--- resulted in a complete reassessment of the history of those countries. If we compare now the histories of Assyria and Chaldea written before the mid 19th century, with those current nowadays, we have to admit that they do not resemble each other at all. In other terms: the information available to Herodotus and to his heirs had no reliability, and is now used in order to reconstruct Greek historiography and not Assyrian or Babylonian history.