Both Media and Persia were ancient kingdoms in what is now Iran. The Medes emerged as a unified kingdom during the period of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. They formed an alliance with the Babylonians to capture Nineveh (612 BC) resulting in the collaspe of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Median Empire had dominance over the kingdom of Persia until Cyrus, king of Persia, rebelled against Asytages, king of Media, and claimed the throne of Media. The empire under Cyrus is sometimes known as the Medo-Persian Empire or as Achaemenid Persian Empire.
List of the Kings of the Median Empire (Wikipedia)
List of the Kings of the Persian Empire (Wikipedia)
Daniel 8:1-4 represents Media and Persia as the two horns of a ram. One horn came up second and grew higher than the first horn. This matches the history of Media and Persia, where Media originally was the dominate kingdom but ultimately Persia became the greatest empire.
Thank you for the information. I am reading Herman Melville’s 1849 novel “Mardi, and a Voyage Thither” – his unappreciated novel that inspired him to write the glorious “Moby-Dick” -, wherein a ruler of the Mardi archipelago, fictional I guess, somewhere around Polynesia, is named “King Media” throughout the the majority of the novel, in which he takes part. I didn’t think much of it – actually, I was thinking it was a silly name – til I was reading today, for Lent, the Book of Daniel, and came upon the vision of the ram and the he-goat.