Cyrus the Great

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In the spring of 324 BCE, returning from India, Alexander of Macedon turned aside at Pasargadae to look on a tomb. It stood in a walled garden on the Persian plain — a small gabled chamber of pale limestone set on six receding steps, no taller than a house, austere beside the palaces around it. He found it broken open and stripped: the golden couch hacked apart, the body of its occupant flung from its sarcophagus. The man inside had been dead a little under two centuries, and Alexander, who had spent those years’ inheritance overrunning the empire that man had made, ordered the tomb sealed and restored, the plunderers questioned under torture. Arrian, who tells the story, preserves the inscription the Greeks said it once bore: “O man, whosoever you are and from wheresoever you come, I am Cyrus, who won the Persians their empire. Do not grudge me this little earth that covers my body.”

The founding line

The man in the tomb was Cyrus II, of the house the Greeks called Achaemenid, after a distant ancestor, Achaemenes, whom no contemporary record names and whom the dynasty most likely supplied for itself once it needed a pedigree. What can be fixed is nearer. Cyrus was king of Anshan, an old Elamite seat in the highlands of Fars, son of Cambyses I and grandson of a first Cyrus; the line ruled a small Persian kingdom that owed allegiance to the Medes to the north. His reign is conventionally dated from about 559 BCE. Within thirty years it had swallowed everything from the Aegean to the edge of India and built the Achaemenid Empire, the largest state the ancient world had yet seen.

The expansion began at home, against his overlord. Around 550 BCE Cyrus rose against Astyages, the last king of the Medes — by Herodotus’s telling his own maternal grandfather — and the Median army, mutinying, handed its king over to the rebel. The takeover of Media gave Cyrus the northern plateau, its treasuries, and a tradition of kingship he could absorb whole — the Median priestly caste, the Magi, would pass into Persian service and carry the rites of the western empire for centuries after. The conventional birth-date of the empire is this moment, the swallowing of the power that had ruled him, and it set the pattern of all that followed: Cyrus did not destroy what he took so much as inherit it. He turned west. Croesus of Lydia, whose wealth had become a proverb among the Greeks, crossed the Halys to test the new power and, on the strength of a famously double-edged oracle that a great empire would fall, was driven back to his citadel at Sardis, which fell about 547 or 546 BCE. The empire that fell was his own. With Lydia came its gold, the Greek cities of the Anatolian coast, and a frontier on the Aegean that would draw the Persians and the Greeks into the long quarrel the next century would remember as the Persian Wars.

Then Babylon. The great city on the Euphrates, the cultural capital of the ancient Mesopotamia, was ruled by Nabonidus, a king who had alienated the powerful priesthood of Marduk by his long absences and his devotion to the moon-god Sin. In October of 539 BCE Cyrus’s forces broke the Babylonian army at Opis on the Tigris; days later the city of Babylon itself opened to his general without a fight. The conquest of Babylonia — the last great independent kingdom of the Near East — made Cyrus master of a domain that ran from the Indus to the Mediterranean, and the King of Kings inherited, with the city, the most articulate scribal culture of the age, which now set down his own account of what he had done.

Restoration as policy

That account survives. In 1879 the excavator Hormuzd Rassam, digging in the foundations of Marduk’s great temple at Babylon, turned up a barrel-shaped clay cylinder some nine inches long, covered in forty-odd lines of Akkadian cuneiform. The Cyrus Cylinder, now in the British Museum, is the central document of his reign. Its grammar is telling. It opens in the third person, denouncing Nabonidus as the impious king who neglected the gods and oppressed his people, then shifts to the first person, to Cyrus himself, who credits his bloodless entry into the city to Marduk: the god, it says, sought out a righteous prince, took him by the hand, and called his name to be king over the whole world, and the people of Babylon greeted him with joy. The new king then catalogs his good works — the rebuilding of sanctuaries, the resettlement of displaced communities. I returned the images of the gods, who had resided there, to their places, the text declares of the cult-statues hauled into Babylon by Nabonidus, and I let them dwell in eternal abodes. I gathered all their inhabitants and returned to them their dwellings.

Here the registers must be kept apart. In the twentieth century this document acquired a second life. In 1971, during the Iranian monarchy’s lavish celebration of twenty-five centuries of Persian kingship, the cylinder was proclaimed the world’s first charter of human rights, a replica was presented to the United Nations, and the reading has circulated ever since. The scholarly assessment is colder, and nearly unanimous. The cylinder belongs to a genre two millennia old by Cyrus’s day — the Mesopotamian foundation deposit, in which an incoming king legitimizes himself by branding his predecessor a sacrilegious tyrant and advertising his own restorations. It is written in the voice of Marduk’s chosen, not of a rights-bearing humanity; it concerns the gods of cities and the cult-statues owed them; it grants no general liberty and proclaims no principle. What is genuinely new is not a doctrine but a scale and a method.

The method was rule through the institutions of the ruled. Where the Assyrians before him had governed by deportation and terror, dragging conquered peoples from their lands to break them, Cyrus inverted the instrument: he sent peoples home, restored the temples his predecessors had stripped, and presented himself to each subject nation in its own religious idiom — to Babylon as Marduk’s liberator, to others as the patron of their gods. The titulary he assumed in Babylon is itself the argument: not a Persian conqueror imposing a foreign style but king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters of the world, the ancient Mesopotamian formula worn as if it had always been his. An empire that did not demand that its subjects become Persian, that left the Egyptian his Egyptian gods and the Babylonian his Babylonian ones and asked chiefly for tribute and order, could hold a reach that an empire of forced uniformity could not. The restorations of the cylinder are statecraft before they are mercy. That they could be both at once — that a policy of administrative convenience should read, to those it touched, as deliverance — is the whole of his reputation, and it is what no later conqueror quite managed to counterfeit.

The Cyrus Cylinder, found in the foundations of Marduk’s temple at Babylon in 1879. Its account of restored sanctuaries and returned peoples belongs to a long Mesopotamian genre of royal-foundation texts. — Joyofmuseums, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The anointed of the Lord

Among the peoples Cyrus restored were the Judeans, deported to Babylon a generation before by Nebuchadnezzar when he razed their city and burned their Temple. For their memory Cyrus is no ordinary gentile king. The Hebrew scriptures record an edict — preserved in the opening of the book of Ezra and at the close of Second Chronicles — by which the king of Persia, in the first year of his rule over Babylon, proclaimed that the Lord, the God of heaven, had charged him to build Him a house in Jerusalem and bade the exiles return to do it. So began the restoration that scholars call the Second Temple period, the rebuilt sanctuary and the reconstituted community that would frame Judaism for the next half-millennium.

Within the tradition’s own frame, the act is more than royal favor. The prophet of the exile — the anonymous voice in the latter chapters of Isaiah — names Cyrus directly, decades, the text implies, before his rise. He is the Lord’s shepherd, who shall perform all His pleasure, who shall say of Jerusalem that it be built and of the Temple that its foundation be laid. More startling still, the Lord addresses him as His anointed — mashiah, the word from which messiah descends, the title of the consecrated king of Israel — whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him. No other foreigner in the Hebrew Bible is given that word. The God of Israel takes a Persian who does not know Him by the right hand, as Marduk took him by the hand in the cylinder, and bends the empire to a purpose the king himself cannot see. That two great imperial gods should each claim the same conqueror as their chosen instrument is the deepest irony of his reign, and within each frame it is simply true.

His own piety is harder to fix, and here the record genuinely divides. The cylinder is Marduk’s through and through; in Jerusalem he is the agent of YHWH; whether the Persian king was himself a worshipper of Ahura Mazda and the faith later called Zoroastrian — the religion the prophet Zoroaster preached somewhere in the Iranian east — is debated and probably unanswerable. The Achaemenid kings who followed him invoked Ahura Mazda explicitly; Cyrus, in the documents that survive, speaks the local god’s language wherever he stands. Whether this is conviction or policy — a genuinely Iranian devotion expressed diplomatically, or a ruler with no settled cult at all — the sources do not let one say. It is of a piece with the empire he built that one cannot tell his faith from his statecraft.

The four-winged figure on a doorjamb of Gate R at Pasargadae. A vanished inscription once read “I, Cyrus, the king, an Achaemenid,” and the relief was long taken for his portrait, though the identification is now doubted. — Pentocelo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Pasargadae and the end

The capital Cyrus raised for himself was Pasargadae, on the plain where, tradition held, he had won his decisive battle against the Medes — a scatter of palaces and gardens, the earliest of the great Achaemenid royal sites, before Persepolis and the cliff-tombs of Naqsh-e Rostam that his successors would build. There he set his own tomb, the stepped chamber Alexander would later restore. It still stands.

The death itself is contested, and the contest is old. Herodotus, the earliest full account, sends Cyrus on a last campaign into the far northeast against the Massagetae, a nomad people beyond the Oxus ruled by a queen, Tomyris. Cyrus took her son by a stratagem and the prince killed himself in shame; the queen, in the battle that followed, destroyed the Persian army and Cyrus with it. Herodotus gives her a terrible epitaph for the conqueror who could never be sated with blood: she sought his body on the field, plunged its head into a skin filled with human blood, and bade the dead man drink his fill. Other traditions disagree. Xenophon, writing a philosophical romance, lets him die old and at peace in his bed, delivering a deathbed homily to his sons. Ctesias has him fall against a different people altogether. What the accounts share is the date — about 530 BCE — and the fact that the empire passed intact to his son Cambyses, who would carry it into Egypt.

The Tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae. Alexander found it plundered in 324 BCE and ordered it restored; no inscription survives on it today. — A. Davey, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Afterlives

Few founders have been so generously remembered by those they conquered, and the memory has taken three durable shapes. The first is Greek, and idealized. In the fourth century BCE Xenophon, an Athenian who had soldiered for a Persian prince, wrote the Cyropaedia — the education of Cyrus — a long and only loosely historical portrait of the founder as the perfect ruler, just, self-mastering, generous, binding subjects by affection rather than fear. It is a mirror for princes more than a chronicle, and as such it had an immense afterlife: read through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as a manual of statecraft, owned and annotated by readers as various as the framers of new republics, who took from it a usable myth of the benevolent monarch. The Cyrus of European political thought is in large part Xenophon’s invention, and it has often eclipsed the harder figure of the inscriptions.

The second is scriptural. For the Jewish tradition Cyrus remained the gentile deliverer, the foreign king whom God had raised up — the proof, carried down through the centuries, that the Lord could work His restoration through hands that did not know Him. The pattern outlived its first occasion: the anointed shepherd of Isaiah became a template for reading later powers, and the figure of the foreign liberator chosen for Israel’s sake recurs wherever the scriptures are read. It is a delicate honor. The word mashiah would, in later centuries, swell into the messianic hope of a redeemer to come, an Israelite king who would gather the exiles for good; that the prophet should have spent it first on a Persian who sacrificed to Marduk is a measure of how completely the exile reordered what deliverance could look like. The God who had let His city burn now worked through an empire’s logistics, and the prophet asked his hearers to see, in a foreign king’s repatriation decree, the hand that had taken Cyrus by the right hand.

The third is modern and Iranian. The plain tomb at Pasargadae, the cylinder in its London case, the king of the inscriptions — these were gathered, in the twentieth century, into a national founding-story, a lineage running from the first King of Kings to the present. The 1971 celebration that crowned the cylinder a charter of human rights was the state’s contribution; but the figure has long since outgrown any regime, and the date of his death draws Iranians to the tomb on the plain to lay flowers at the steps Alexander once ordered mended. The conqueror who ruled by giving each people back its gods became, at the last, a god of sorts to one — the rare empire-builder whose name a subject nation would choose to keep.

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