The Medes Empire - an Empire of The Irano-Aryans

The Medes and The Persians are two tribes of a single nation. The Medes is an Eastern Branch of Indo-European people. It is inculuded in Indo Iranians/Aryans, related to the Persians, who entered northeastern Iran probably as early as the 17th century bc and settled in the plateau land that came to be known as Media."  The Persian King "Cyrus completed immediate task by assimilating the Medes on equal footing with the Persians, forming a composite empire. With the assimilation of the Medes, Cyrus also inherited the remains of the Median empire."

The Medes (old Persian, Maad-ha, مادها) 

were an ancient Iranian people who lived in  in Northern Iran area, known as Media and spoke a Northern Iranian language referred to as the Median language. Their arrival to the region is associated with the first wave of Iranian tribes in the late second millennium BCE(the bronze age collapse) through the beginning of the first millenium BCE.

The Six Median Tribes

Herodotus lists the names of Median tribes. Some of these are similar to tribal names of the Iranian-Scythians, suggesting a definitive link between these two groups :

The Busae group is thought to derive from the Persian term buza meaning indigenous. Whether this was based on an originally Iranian term, or their own name, is unknown.

The second group is called the Paraetaceni, or Parae-tak-(eni) in Persian, and denotes nomadic inhabitants of the mountains of Paraetacene. This name recalls the Scythian Para-la-ti, the people of Kolaxis, believed to represent the common people in general, but whom Herodotus calls the "Royal Scythians."

The third group is called Stru khat.  

The fourth group is the Arizanti, whose name is derived from the words Arya (noble), and Zantu (tribe, clan). 

The fifth group were the Budii, found also among the Black Sea Scythians as Budi-ni. Buddha was of the tribe Budha, the Saka (eastern Scythian) form of the name.  

The sixth tribe were the Magi. They were a hereditary caste of priests of the Zurvanism religion that evolved out of Zoroastrianism. The name Magi implies a link with the Sumerians, who called their language Emegir, over time becoming simplified to Magi. Hungarian tradition also traces pre-European Magyar (Hungarian) ancestry back to the Magi. In time, the Sumerian-influenced religion of the Magi was suppressed in favour of a more purely Iranian form of Zoroastrianism, itself evolved from its somewhat dualist beginnings into the monotheistic faith that it is today (also known as Parsi-ism). 

Herodotus also mentioned that "the Medes had exactly the same equipment as the Persians; and indeed the dress common to both is not so much Persian as Median." 

Old Persian and Avestan are the two oldest known Irano Iranian languages. "They were both spoken several centuries B.C.E. Together they make up the the oldest stratum of the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language group." (Ibid.)  Northern Iranians, known as Medes, and Southern Iranians, known as the Fars, spoke languages that were closely related to Old Persian." Median is a substrate of Old Persian.  Median is attested by a large vocabulary incorporated into Old Persian, presumably as a substrate for the official language of the Persian Achaemenid kings. Persian generally had four separate stages of development:

1.  Old Persian

2.  Middle Persian

3.  Classical Persian

4.  Modern Persian

Old Persian is what the original tribe of the Hakahmaneshinian (Achaemenid هخامنشی) era spoke and they have left for us samples carved on stone in cuneiform script.  This was the language of Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great. In the Behistun Inscriptions of King Darius I of Persia (522-486 BC), Persia and Media are described as provinces of Iran; the army of Iran is referred to as one army: the “Persian and Median Army; and Persians and Medes are referred to as “our family” within a shared Iranian ethnicity. Archeological sites in Iran commonly have inscriptions in several Iranian languages, such as Shapur's inscription at Ka‘ba-i Zartosht, which includes Parthian and Middle Persian texts.  Below is the name of Iran from Ka'ba-i Zartosht, ērānšahr, which means Empire of the Iranians/Irano Aryans.