Tomyris

Tomyris (ˈtɒmᵻrɪs; Saka: ; Tomuris; Tomyris) also called Thomyris, Tomris, or Tomiride, reigned over the Massagetae, an Iranian Saka people of Central Asia. Tomyris led her armies to defend against an attack by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire, and, according to Herodotus, defeated and killed him in 530 BC. The name is the Latin form of the Ancient Greek name Tomuris (Τομυρις), which is itself the Hellenisation of the Saka name , meaning "of family" derived from a cognate of the Avestan word () and of the Old Persian word (), meaning "seed," "germ," and "kinship." Tomyris was the widowed wife of the king of the Massagetae, whom she succeeded as the queen of the tribe after he died. When the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, Cyrus, asked for the hand of Tomyris with the intent of acquiring her kingdom through the marriage, she understood Cyrus's aims and rejected his proposal. On the advice of the Lydian Croesus, Cyrus responded to Tomyris's rejection by deciding to invade the Massagetae. When Cyrus started building a bridge on the Araxes river with the intent of attacking the Massagetae, Tomyris advised him to remain satisfied with ruling his own kingdom and to allow her to rule her kingdom. Cyrus's initial assault was routed by the Massagetae, after which he set up a fancy banquet with large amounts of wine in the tents of his camp as an ambush and withdrew. The Massagetae, led by Tomyris's son and the commander of their army, Spargapises, who primarily used fermented mare's milk and cannabis as intoxicants like all Iron Age steppe nomads, and therefore were not used to drinking wine, became drunk and were easily defeated and slaughtered by Cyrus, thus destroying a third of the Massagetaean army. Spargapises had been captured by Cyrus, and, once he had become sober and understood his situation, he asked Cyrus to free him, and after Cyrus acquiesced to his pleas, he killed himself.