Astyages (r. c. 585–550 BCE), son of Cyaxares and grandfather of Cyrus the Great through his daughter Mandane, was the final sovereign of the Median throne—a ruler who inherited a plateau-spanning power and sought to hold it by diplomacy as much as by steel. He married Mandane into the Achaemenid house of Anshan to bind Persia to Media, yet in the lore preserved by Herodotus, ominous dreams and a fateful misjudgment of his general Harpagus set destiny against him. When Cyrus rose in revolt, Median ranks fractured; the royal city of Ecbatana fell, and with it the independent Median kingdom was folded into the new Persian order. Astyages endures in memory as the hinge between empires: the monarch whose lineage legitimated Cyrus and whose fall cleared the stage for the Achaemenid world to rise. As King of Spades he is the somber herald of succession—an ending that became a beginning, the final cut before a grander hand was dealt.