The 2003 publication of Continuity of Empire (?): Assyria, Media, Persia (ed. G. Lanfranchi, M. Roaf, and R. Rollinger) heralds a renewed focus on the traditional view of the Median Empire in ancient Near Eastern history. The contributions to that volume revisit the central place that the Medes have traditionally held in modern scholarship as an integral component in a continuum of ancient Near Eastern empires from the Neo-Assyrian to the Persian. From that volume’s impetus, here are offered observations on some relevant biblical and Herodotean evi- dence for the history of the critical, yet poorly understood, period c. 650–550 BCE—from the denouement of the Assyrian Empire to the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus, i.e., the apparent zenith of Median power. The traditional view of the Median Empire, dependent prima- rily upon Herodotus’ account of the dynasty founded by Deioces (1.96– 107), is a retrojection of Greek conceptions, often stereotypical, of the Achaemenid Persian Empire at its height. In other words, for Greeks writing in the fifth and fourth centuries, it was reconstruction of the past based on a (mis)understanding of the contemporary.