Cyrus the Great

• 1. Introduction

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  Cyrus the Great died around December 530 BC, and the accounts of how he met that death never agreed. One tradition says he fell in battle against the Massagetae along the Syr Darya, and that their queen, Tomyris, dipped his severed head in a vessel of blood. Another, from Xenophon of Athens, says he died peacefully at his capital, Pasargadae, having never fought that final campaign at all. The man at the center of these clashing stories built the largest empire the world had yet seen, stretching from Asia Minor to the Indus River. He was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, a ruler the Greeks called Cyrus the Elder. How does a king conquer the entire civilized Near East yet earn the title "The Father" from the very peoples he subdued? Why would Jewish tradition call a Persian conqueror its only gentile messiah? And why, more than two thousand years later, do millions still gather at his tomb? The answers begin with a name no one can quite agree on.

• 2. A Contested Name

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  The name Cyrus is a Latinized form of the Greek Κῦρος, which itself came from the Old Persian Kūruš. Ancient inscriptions recorded the name across several languages, and ancient scholars never settled its meaning. The historians Ctesias and Plutarch traced it to the Sun, a reading interpreted as "like the Sun" by linking it to the Persian word for sun, khor. Karl Hoffmann proposed something far less flattering: drawing on an Indo-European root meaning "to humiliate", he read "Cyrus" as "humiliator of the enemy in verbal contest". A gentler derivation points to "the young one, child", echoing the Kurdish kur for "son" or "little boy". In Iran the name is written کوروش, and in the Hebrew of the Bible he appears as Koresh. Some scholars doubt the name is even Iranian. They argue Cyrus was Elamite in origin, meaning "he who bestows care", noting that no Elamite text spells it Kuruš, only Kuraš. Old Persian forbade names ending in -aš, so Persian speakers would have had reason to reshape Kuraš into Kuruš, while Elamite scribes would not. Others propose an Indo-Aryan root, honoring the Kuru and Kamboja mercenaries from eastern Afghanistan and Northwest India. There is even a tradition that Cyrus and the legendary king Kay Khosrow of the Shahnameh are one and the same.

• 3. Bloodline And Throne

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  Achaemenes gave the dynasty its name, and Darius the Great, the ninth king of the line, traced his ancestry to him, declaring "for this reason, we are called Achaemenids". Achaemenes built the state of Parsumash in southwest Iran and was succeeded by Teispes, who seized the city Anshan and took the title "King of Anshan". Cyrus I followed, and in 600 BC he was succeeded by his son Cambyses I, who reigned until 559 BC. Cyrus the Great was the son of Cambyses I, named after his grandfather Cyrus I. The Cyrus Cylinder has him call himself "son of Cambyses, great king, king of Anshan". His mother was Mandane, daughter of Astyages, King of Media, and he was born in the period of 600 to 599 BC. The traditional view, resting on the Behistun Inscription and on Herodotus, holds that Cyrus was an Achaemenid. Yet M. Waters has argued the opposite, suggesting Cyrus was unrelated to the Achaemenids or to Darius the Great, and that his family was instead of Teispid and Anshanite origin. His many titles spanned the whole of his realm: The Great King, King of Persia, King of Anshan, King of Media, King of Babylon, King of Sumer and Akkad, and King of the Four Corners of the World. The Nabonidus Chronicle even records the shift in his style from "King of Anshan" to "King of Persia", a change the Assyriologist François Vallat used to date his rise.

• 4. The Shepherd's Secret

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  Astyages, according to Herodotus, suffered two prophetic dreams in which a flood and then fruit-bearing vines emerged from his daughter Mandane and covered the whole kingdom. His advisers read them as an omen that his grandson would one day rebel and take his throne. So Astyages summoned the pregnant Mandane back to Ecbatana and ordered the child killed. His general Harpagus passed the task to a shepherd named Mithradates, who instead raised the boy and gave Harpagus his own stillborn son as proof of the deed. Cyrus grew up in secrecy. At the age of 10, during a childhood game, he had a nobleman's son beaten for refusing his commands. Such defiance from a supposed shepherd's son was unheard of, and Astyages had the boy brought to court, questioned him, and uncovered the truth, sending Cyrus back to his biological parents. His revenge on Harpagus was monstrous. He had Harpagus's son chopped to pieces, roasted and boiled, and served the flesh to his unsuspecting adviser at a banquet. Only afterward did servants bring out the boy's head, hands, and feet on platters, so Harpagus would understand what he had eaten. That betrayal would not be forgotten when the armies finally met.

• 5. Empire By Conquest

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  The Nabonidus Chronicle records that Astyages launched an attack against Cyrus, "king of Ansan". Astyages placed Harpagus in command of the Median army, but Harpagus contacted Cyrus and urged his revolt, then defected with part of the nobility and the army. The hostilities lasted at least three years, from 553 to 550 BC, ending in the capture of Ecbatana and of Astyages himself, whose life Cyrus spared. The Lydian conquest came next, falling between the overthrow of Media in 550 BC and the capture of Babylon in 539 BC. King Croesus of Lydia first struck the city of Pteria in Cappadocia, and the Battle of Pteria ended as a bloody stalemate. Cyrus pushed into Lydian territory and besieged Croesus in his capital, Sardis. Before the Battle of Thymbra, Harpagus advised placing dromedaries in front of the warriors, knowing the Lydian horses would panic at their smell. The trick routed the Lydian cavalry, and Cyrus took Sardis in 546 BC. He then turned east, between roughly 545 and 540 BC, striking Bactria, Arachosia, Sogdia, Saka, Chorasmia, and Margiana. A first attempt on Gedrosia ended in decisive defeat. In 533 BC he crossed the Hindu Kush and collected tribute from the Indus cities. The greatest prize remained the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and its fall would echo far beyond Mesopotamia.

• 6. The Fall Of Babylon

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  By 540 BC, Cyrus had captured Elam and its capital, Susa. The Nabonidus Chronicle notes that the Babylonian king Nabonidus ordered cult statues from outlying cities brought into the capital, a sign the conflict had likely begun in the winter of 540 BC. Just before October 539 BC, Cyrus fought the Battle of Opis on the Tigris north of Babylon and routed the Babylonian army. On the 10th, Sippar was seized without a fight, and around the 12th the Persian general Gubaru entered Babylon, again without resistance, and detained Nabonidus. Herodotus tells how the Persians diverted the Euphrates into a canal until the water dropped to the height of a man's thigh, letting them march through the riverbed at night. On the 29th, Cyrus entered the city. He then proclaimed himself "king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four corners of the world" in the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay cylinder placed in the foundations of the Esagila temple dedicated to Marduk. The text denounces Nabonidus as impious and casts Cyrus as the favorite of Marduk who repatriated displaced peoples and restored temples. Discovered in 1879, the cylinder is kept today in the British Museum in London. In the 1970s the Shah of Iran called it "the first human rights charter in history", and the United Nations has described the relic as an "ancient declaration of human rights" since 1971. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, called it "a new kind of statecraft", while the museum itself frames it as "an instrument of ancient Mesopotamian propaganda".

• 7. The Only Gentile Messiah

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  The Book of Ezra has Cyrus proclaim, "All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah." After the Persian conquest of Babylon, Cyrus issued the Edict of Restoration, ending the Babylonian captivity and sending displaced Jews back to what had been the Kingdom of Judah, an event the Hebrew Bible calls the return to Zion. His support enabled work on the Second Temple in the province of Yehud, where Solomon's Temple had stood before its destruction. In the Book of Isaiah he is anointed by Yahweh and explicitly called "messiah", the only non-Jewish figure revered in that capacity, even though Isaiah says he does "not know" Yahweh. The decree of Ezra set the temple's dimensions at 60 cubits high and 60 cubits wide, with its cost paid from the royal treasury and the looted gold and silver vessels returned. The first-century historian Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, claimed Cyrus read Isaiah's prophecy of his own name and was seized with ambition to fulfill it. Not all the tradition is praise. After Cuthites accused the returning Jews of plotting rebellion, construction was halted, and the temple was not completed until 515 BC, during the reign of Darius I. Modern scholars have challenged the decree's authenticity. Professor Lester L Grabbe argues there was no formal decree but a policy, and that the return was a "trickle" reaching perhaps 30,000 people. Mary Joan Winn Leith reads the appeals to Marduk and to Yahweh alike as "the Persian tendency to co-opt local religious and political traditions in the interest of imperial control."

• 8. The Long Afterlife

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  Plutarch recorded the epitaph said to mark his tomb: "O man, whoever you are and wherever you come from, for I know you will come, I am Cyrus who won the Persians their empire. Do not therefore begrudge me this bit of earth that covers my bones." That limestone tomb at Pasargadae, built around 540 to 530 BC, still stands, and is recognized with Pasargadae as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Strabo and Arrian described it from the eyewitness report of Aristobulus of Cassandreia, who visited twice at Alexander the Great's request. After the defeat of Darius III, the tomb was broken into and looted, and the horrified Alexander ordered Aristobulus to restore it, even as he had earlier sacked Persepolis in 330 BC. Cyrus governed through a satrapy system across four capital states, Pasargadae, Babylon, Susa, and Ecbatana, and built an army that included the Immortals, a unit of 10,000 highly trained soldiers. He loved gardens, and excavations at Pasargadae revealed the four-quartered "Paradisia", with over 1000 meters of carved limestone channels feeding basins every 16 meters. He founded a postal system of relay stations called Chapar Khaneh, and made the Croeseid the standard gold coin of his empire, at a reduced weight of 8.06 grams. His admirers reach across the centuries, from Alexander and Julius Caesar to Thomas Jefferson, who owned two copies of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, one marked heavily on its facing Greek and Latin pages. In the 19th century, scholars including Syed Ahmad Khan proposed that Cyrus is the figure the Quran calls Dhu al-Qarnayn, who travels to the setting and rising places of the Sun. Today his tomb still draws millions, and the Shah, like Alexander before him, reached for that legacy during his celebration of 2,500 years of monarchy.