Cyrus the Great

Cyrus II, the Great (Old Persian Kūruš, Greek Kȳros) was the founder of the empire this compendium describes: a king of Anshan in the Persian highlands who, between his accession about 559 BCE and his death in 530, conquered in turn the Median kingdom of his overlord, the Lydian kingdom of Croesus, and the Babylonian empire of Nabonidus, assembling the first world-state of the ancient Near East, from the Aegean to Central Asia. He is the beginning of the story, and in a strict sense its problem, for almost everything told of him comes through the Greeks, who made him a paragon, the peoples he conquered, who made him their deliverer, or Darius I, whose own dynasty had to borrow Cyrus's legitimacy, while Cyrus left, in his own voice, only a handful of terse cuneiform lines. This entry follows the authoritative reconstruction of M. A. Dandamayev in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, marking where legend and record part.

The sources and the shape of the problem

No continuous contemporary account of Cyrus survives, and the traditions that do contradict one another at almost every turn. Four kinds of evidence must be held apart. Cyrus's own inscriptions (the brief Old Persian texts from Pasargadae naming him "the king, an Achaemenid", and the Akkadian Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon) are royal self-presentation, and (for the Old Persian) possibly not even his own words. The Babylonian record (the Nabonidus (Babylonian) Chronicle, the Sippar cylinder of Nabonidus, the Verse Account, business documents) gives the securest chronology but sees Cyrus only from Babylon's edge. The Greek accounts, above all Herodotus (Book 1), the Persika of Ctesias, and Xenophon's Cyropaedia, preserve Persian oral tradition already turned to folklore and romance. And the Hebrew scriptures (Second Isaiah, Ezra, Chronicles), which see him as the instrument of their god. The later Greek stories (Dinon, Diodorus, Strabo, Justin) all trace back to Herodotus and Ctesias, and the Babylonian record is the check on them: a founder more securely dated than described, whose life must be read against the grain of every source that reports it.

Origins and the legend of Astyages

That Cyrus's ancestors had ruled the Persian tribes for generations is clear from his own inscriptions and from the contemporary record. On the Cylinder he names himself "son of Cambyses, the great king, king of Anshan, grandson of Cyrus, the great king, king of Anshan", of "a family that always exercised kingship"; an inscription from Ur styles him "king of the land of Anshan, son of Kambuziya, king of the land of Anshan." He was, that is, the hereditary king of Anshan (the old Elamite name for the highland region of Fārs), and it was from that base, not a Median throne, that he rose. Following the historian Dinon, Cicero reports that Cyrus became king at forty and reigned thirty years; since he died in 530, this puts his birth about 600 and accession about 559 BCE.

The famous story of his birth is Herodotus's, who knew four versions and chose the one he thought least incredible, warning that it too "contains elements of folklore." In it the Median king Astyages, Cyrus's maternal grandfather, dreams that his daughter Mandane's son will supplant him, and when Cyrus is born orders the noble Harpagus to kill the infant; Harpagus instead gives the child to a herdsman whose wife rears him, the boy's royal bearing betrays him, and Astyages, discovering the truth, sends him back to Persia. It is the archetypal exposed-and-returning hero, the shape of the tales of Sargon, Moses and Oedipus, of slight historical value; what it encodes is the claim that Cyrus was of Median royal blood on his mother's side, by which the conquest of Media could be read as legitimate inheritance rather than rebellion. Cyrus married Cassandane, herself an Achaemenid, who bore him two sons, Cambyses II and Bardiya, and daughters including Atossa, through whom, two generations later, the blood of Cyrus would return to the throne in Xerxes.

The rival tradition: Ctesias and the Mardian bandit

Against Herodotus stands a wholly different story, the sharpest correction the Encyclopaedia Iranica offers to the popular image. In the version of Ctesias, expanded by Nicolaus of Damascus, Cyrus was neither Astyages's grandson nor even an Achaemenid, but a man of the poor nomad tribe of the Mardi: his father a bandit driven to it by poverty, his mother a goatherd who dreamed while carrying him that her son would be master of Asia. In this telling Cyrus rose as cupbearer at Astyages's court, was sent to put down a revolt, and rebelled instead to seize the throne. Dandamayev is decisive that this account "contradicts not only that of Herodotus but also the cuneiform inscriptions" (which show Cyrus already the hereditary king of Anshan) and that it "is clearly derived from a Median tradition devised to discredit Cyrus", a precursor of Greek romance reliable only in fragments.^[1] The two are not two reports of one event but two ideologies: the Persian-Herodotean, making Cyrus the destined heir of Media; the Median-Ctesian, making him a usurping upstart. That the founder's very ancestry could be a field of propaganda is the first lesson of his sources.

The conquest of Media, c. 550 BCE

Cyrus succeeded his father as king of the Persian tribes and, like him, owed allegiance to Astyages the Mede; about 553 BCE he rebelled. Herodotus tells that Harpagus, whom Astyages had grievously wronged, roused a conspiracy among the Median nobility and urged Cyrus on; when the armies met, Harpagus and much of the Median host deserted, and Astyages, taking the field himself, was defeated and taken. The Babylonian record confirms the core of this in language owing nothing to Greek storytelling. The Sippar cylinder of Nabonidus's third year says Marduk "caused Cyrus, king of the country of Anshan, to rise against the Medes; with a small army he defeated decisively the large troops of the Ummanmanda [the Medes], captured Astyages, king of the Ummanmanda, and brought him in chains to his land." The Nabonidus Chronicle adds that Astyages's own "troops revolted against him and he was taken prisoner", and that Cyrus "transferred booty from Ecbatana to Anshan."^[2] The desertion, then, is not a Greek moralising invention but recorded from Babylon.

The date is a genuine crux. The Chronicle's notice falls where Nabonidus's sixth year, 550 BCE, would stand, the year most often given for the fall of Astyages; but its earlier year-numbers are broken away, and the Sippar cylinder's placement in the third year (553) has led some, such as Robert Drews, to prefer 554–553. Dandamayev's resolution is elegant: a war begun about 553 and won about 550 would reconcile the two documents. However dated, the effect was decisive: Cyrus took the Median empire whole, adopted its royal titulary and court, and so the vassal of Ecbatana became master of the Iranian plateau. The Persians dated their whole ascendancy from this moment:

"Never yet, as our old men assure me, has our race reposed itself, since the time when Cyrus overcame Astyages, and so we Persians wrested the sceptre from the Medes." (Xerxes, in Herodotus 7.8)^[3]

The conquest of Lydia and Croesus, 547 BCE

With Media absorbed, Cyrus turned west against Lydia, the wealthy kingdom of Croesus on the Aegean coast. Herodotus's narrative (1.69–91) is the fullest and among the most storied in ancient literature: Croesus, misreading the Delphic oracle that if he crossed the river Halys he would destroy a great empire (his own, as it fell out), invaded Cappadocia; an indecisive battle on the Halys was followed by his withdrawal to Sardis, which Cyrus, pursuing before a winter campaign was expected, besieged and stormed. The Nabonidus Chronicle appears to fix the year: in Nabonidus's ninth year, 547 BCE, "Cyrus, king of Persia, crossed the Tigris below Arbela" and marched against a country whose king he defeated and whose land he garrisoned, though, as Dandamayev fairly notes, the crucial place-name is damaged, and Jack Cargill has argued the passage may not refer to Lydia at all. The conquest carried Persian power to the Ionian Greek cities of the coast, whose reduction Cyrus left to Harpagus while he returned east. The war's most famous scene is its aftermath in Herodotus: Cyrus set the captured Croesus on a pyre to burn, then, hearing him cry out the name of Solon, who had warned him to count no man happy until his end, relented:

"Cyrus, hearing from the interpreters what Croesus had said, changed his purpose and considered that he himself also was but a man, and that he was delivering another man, who had been not inferior to himself in felicity, alive to the fire; and moreover he feared the requital, and reflected that there was nothing of that which men possessed which was secure." (Herodotus 1.86)^[3]

The episode is Greek moral fable, not Persian record (burning alive would violate Zoroastrian reverence for fire, and Croesus's later career as Cyrus's counsellor is a literary device), but it fixed for the Greeks the image of Cyrus as the conqueror who reads his own mortality in a fallen king, mercy learned from the turning wheel.

The wars of the east

Between the fall of Lydia and the advance on Babylon in 539, Cyrus turned north and east, and here the record thins almost to nothing; both Herodotus and the Babylonian historian Berossus place the eastern conquests in this interval. From the roll of peoples in Darius's Behistun inscription (Parthia, Bactria, Sogdiana, Gandhara, Arachosia and more) and from the fact that Cambyses fought no eastern wars, Dandamayev infers that "Persian rule must already have been extended to Central Asia and the northwestern limits of India in the time of Cyrus." A fortified town in Sogdiana called Cyreschata or Cyropolis, "Cyrus's city", marks his reach to the Jaxartes; Pliny reports he destroyed Capisa in the Hindu Kush, and Arrian records campaigns against the Indians of Gandhara. It was this exposed north-eastern frontier, won in these years, that would eventually kill him.

The fall of Babylon, 539 BCE

The last and greatest conquest was Babylon, ruled by Nabonidus, a king estranged from the powerful priesthood of Marduk, whose long absences at the oasis of Tayma and promotion of the moon-god Sin had left the capital's cult neglected and its elite disaffected. In the spring of 539 the Persian army entered the Diyala valley; in early October it defeated the Babylonians at Opis on the Tigris (a bloody battle, the Chronicle notes a massacre of the retreating), took Sippar on 10 October, and two days later, the Nabonidus Chronicle says, entered Babylon itself without a battle. On 29 October Cyrus made his ceremonial entry. The near-bloodless fall is the Babylonian and Persian version; other traditions dissent, as Dandamayev notes: Berossus called Cyrus's attitude to Babylon hostile, and both Herodotus (with his tale of the diverted Euphrates) and Xenophon report a hard-fought siege. The peaceful entry served the conquerors' propaganda too neatly to take at face value, though the disaffection of Marduk's priesthood makes a swift capitulation plausible.

On the Cylinder Cyrus presents the conquest as the work of Babylon's own god, who sought a righteous king to end Nabonidus's impieties, took Cyrus by the hand, and "went with him as a friend" into the city he entered "without any battle."

The Cylinder, the restoration, and the caution against the modern myth

After taking Babylon, Cyrus adopted the title "king of Babylon, king of the lands", kept the traditional administration, and set about a conspicuous reversal of Nabonidus's policies. The Cyrus Cylinder (a barrel-shaped clay foundation deposit in Akkadian, in the age-old Mesopotamian style, found in 1879 and now in the British Museum) records that he returned to their sanctuaries the divine images Nabonidus had gathered into Babylon, restored ruined temples across Babylonia, Elam and Assyria, and let the peoples deported to Babylon go home:

"I returned the images of the gods, who had resided there, to their places and I let them dwell in eternal abodes. I gathered all their inhabitants and returned to them their dwellings." (the Cyrus Cylinder, lines 31–32)^[4]

Among those peoples, the Hebrew scriptures record, were the Jews of the Babylonian captivity, whom Cyrus permitted to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple, an edict preserved in two versions, Hebrew and Aramaic, in the Book of Ezra. The scriptural authors saw in him the deliverer sent by their own god, and Second Isaiah (written, in the majority reading, by a witness of Babylon's fall about 550–539) twice names him, astonishingly, as the Lord's messiah:

"Thus says the Lord to Cyrus his anointed, Cyrus whom he has taken by his right hand to subdue nations before him... I will go before you." (Isaiah 45:1–2 (as quoted in Dandamayev's Iranica article))^[5]

This is the material behind Cyrus's modern reputation as a founder of tolerance, and it demands a precise caution, one this compendium presses because it is so widely got wrong. The Cylinder is a Babylonian building-inscription in a conventional genre: its formulae of divine election by Marduk, restoration of neglected cults, and vilification of the deposed predecessor are entirely standard, and the same technique appears in the contemporary Babylonian Verse Account.^[6] The policy it announces was pragmatic statecraft, winning local elites by restoring the cults their old king had slighted, not a modern ethic. It is emphatically not "the first charter of human rights", a claim promoted by the Pahlavi monarchy in the 1960s and 70s and rejected by essentially every specialist; Josef Wiesehöfer judged the image of Cyrus as a human-rights champion "as illusory as the image of the humane and enlightened Shah of Persia" (a separately circulating expanded "translation", proclaiming the abolition of slavery and the like, is a modern forgery).^[7] Two correctives from the Iranica article keep the picture honest: the tolerance was neither universal nor uncontested ("in some Babylonian literary texts Cyrus was condemned and Nabonidus glorified"), and it served empire, which is why the same policy under Darius would coexist with the impaling of rebel leaders. What is true, and remarkable enough, is that Cyrus governed a multi-ethnic empire through its own institutions and gods, and was remembered with gratitude by the peoples he conquered.

The religion of Cyrus

What Cyrus himself believed is nearly unknowable, and the question of whether the founder was a Zoroastrian is among the most debated in the field. Xenophon reports that in religious matters Cyrus followed the guidance of the Magi at his court; his titulary honours Marduk in Babylon and, in the biblical edict, Yahweh in Jerusalem, exactly as imperial policy required. Mary Boyce argued forcefully that Cyrus was himself a Zoroastrian, heir to a Mazdā-worship reaching back through his Anshanite forebears to the seventh century, pointing to the fire-holders and tomb at Pasargadae and to Greek notices of magi in authority at his court. Against this, as Dandamayev records, "many scholars do not believe that Cyrus was a Zoroastrian" (he cites Widengren), and the honouring of Marduk and Yahweh shows at least a supple imperial religiosity rather than a confessional one. The prudent statement is that Cyrus "may have been a worshiper of Ahura Mazdā, but almost nothing is known about his personal beliefs", and that he initiated the policy of religious freedom that became an Achaemenid signature. The fuller argument, and its bearing on the whole dynasty, is treated on the Ahura Mazdā entry, which frames Boyce's continuity thesis as the leading but contested position.

The death of Cyrus and the divergence of the sources

In 530 BCE Cyrus marched to the north-eastern frontier to secure it against the nomad Massagetae, and there, in Dandamayev's summary, "was not only defeated but also killed", the one great reverse of his career, and its end. A business tablet from Kish, dated to Cyrus's ninth regnal year in a month corresponding to early December 530, shows the campaign ran to the very end of that year. Beyond the bare fact of a fatal defeat on the steppe, the sources scatter into legend, and Herodotus says plainly that many versions circulated. In his own celebrated telling (1.201–214), Cyrus destroyed one detachment of the Massagetae by leaving a camp stocked with wine for the abstemious nomads; their queen Tomyris, whose son Spargapises he thus took and drove to suicide, gathered her main force, destroyed his army, and avenged her son on the conqueror's corpse. Her oath is one of the great speeches Herodotus gives to the enemies of Persia:

"I swear to thee by the Sun, who is lord of the Massagetai, that surely I will give thee thy fill of blood, insatiable as thou art." (Herodotus 1.212)^[3]

Other traditions dissent wholesale: Berossus had Cyrus die fighting the Dahae; Ctesias, against the Derbices, wounded by an Indian spear and dying days later; Xenophon, in the Cyropaedia, discarded the battlefield entirely and had Cyrus die peacefully in his bed, delivering a serene deathbed oration and asking that his body be given plainly to the earth. As Dandamayev observes (after Sancisi-Weerdenburg), it is "not possible now to discern the precise facts of Cyrus's death"; what is certain is that he was buried at Pasargadae, which suggests his body was recovered from the steppe, as Ctesias indeed says. That the founder of the world-empire should fall at last on its wildest edge, and to a woman he had wronged, was a moral the ancients did not miss.

Pasargadae and the tomb

Cyrus built his capital at Pasargadae, in the Persian homeland of Fārs, on the site (Herodotus says) of his victory over Astyages: a dispersed complex of palaces and pavilions set in a formal walled garden with axial stone watercourses, the earliest surviving royal garden of its kind, excavated by David Stronach, though not the fourfold chahār-bāgh later tradition read back onto it. Its enduring monument is the tomb, a gabled stone chamber of six receding steps in great sandstone blocks, standing today on the plain of Murghab. Alexander's companions saw it intact and later plundered: Arrian and Strabo, drawing on those eyewitnesses, describe the golden coffin, the purple-draped couch, and the royal garments, arms and jewels within, and report the epitaph the Greeks brought home. Its shorter form, on Onesicritus's telling, is stark:

"Here I lie, Cyrus, king of kings." (the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae, Strabo 15.3.7)^[8]

The fuller version Arrian and Aristobulus report opens "O man, I am Cyrus, son of Cambyses, who founded the empire of the Persians and was king of Asia; grudge me not, therefore, this monument", the founder of the largest state on earth asking only for a little ground and to be left in it. Whether the inscription was genuinely Cyrus's is doubtful; and there is a further irony the compendium keeps in view. The Old Persian texts at Pasargadae that name him "Cyrus, the king, an Achaemenid" are, in the leading scholarly view, most likely not the founder's own: the Old Persian cuneiform script itself was probably invented under Darius, and the inscriptions added to Cyrus's monuments afterward, very possibly to make Cyrus an "Achaemenid", that is, of Darius's own line, and so to shore up the new king's contested claim to the throne^[9] (see the Cyrus Cylinder and the accession of Darius). The founder's first-person voice at his own capital may thus have been carved by the successor who most needed his blessing.

Reputation and afterlife

Cyrus's memory was extraordinary in its reach across the very peoples he had subdued. "The Persians themselves called him their father", Herodotus reports (3.89), against the harsher Cambyses ("the master") and the calculating Darius ("the huckster"); the priests of Babylon knew him as the chosen of Marduk, the Jews as the messiah of Yahweh, and the Greeks (his enemies' descendants) as a model of kingship. Plato ranked his reign among the best-governed (Laws 3), and Xenophon made him, in the Cyropaedia, the ideal ruler of a treatise on statecraft, an idealised "education of Cyrus" that contradicts Herodotus at many points and is, as scholars agree, a mirror for princes rather than a life. Its Cyrus dies counselling his heir in words that catch the founder's remembered art of binding men:

"Your kingdom is not guarded by this golden sceptre, but by faithful friends; their loyalty is your true staff, a sceptre which shall not fail." (Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.7)^[10]

For the dynasty, Cyrus was the indispensable founder whose legitimacy every successor claimed: Darius, of a collateral line, married his daughters and had his genealogy carved back to a shared Achaemenes; Xerxes ruled as Cyrus's great-grandson through Atossa; and the last Darius, watching the empire break under Alexander, is made by Plutarch to pray that if Persia must fall, none but a worthy man should "sit upon the throne of Cyrus." In the modern era the Pahlavi state made Cyrus the emblem of a 2,500-year monarchy, pressing his tomb and Cylinder into nationalist and, mistakenly, human-rights symbolism; the scholarly Cyrus, more modest and more interesting, is the highland king who out-generalled three empires, ruled the peoples he took through their own gods and laws, and founded the state whose bind between the King of Kings and his great servants is the subject of all that follows here.