The Cyrus Cylinder

It is a lump of baked clay the size of a large loaf, cracked, incomplete, and by its own museum's admission of "somewhat slight aesthetic appeal", and very likely the most famous single object of the entire ancient Persian world. The Cyrus Cylinder is a barrel-shaped clay cylinder, about 22 centimetres long and some 10 across at its widest, inscribed around its curved surface with about forty-five lines of Babylonian cuneiform. It was made to be buried, not read: a foundation deposit sealed into the brickwork of the city wall of Babylon after Cyrus II, king of Anshan and of Persia, took the city in the autumn of 539 BCE. For two and a half thousand years no living eye saw it. When it came to light again in the nineteenth century it was read as what it is, a Mesopotamian building inscription in a very old tradition; in the twentieth it was refashioned into something it is not, the world's first declaration of human rights. The gap between those two readings is the whole interest of the object, and the reason it must be read as carefully against its own grain as Behistun against Darius's.

The object: a barrel of clay from a city wall

The cylinder is wheel-made, a cone of clay built up into a barrel and coated with a finer slip before the scribe cut the text and the whole was fired; its core holds unusually large grey stone inclusions, and the British Museum's conservators judge from the making that it was in effect mass-produced, one of a set rather than a unique treasure. Its findspot was Babylon itself, in the mound the excavators called Amran, on or near the temple of Marduk. Barrel- and cylinder-shaped inscribed clay objects of this kind were a standard Late Babylonian vehicle for royal building records, laid in the foundations of a wall or gate so that a later king who rebuilt the structure would find, and honour, the name of his predecessor. The cylinder even describes this very act in reverse: during Cyrus's work on the wall his men uncovered an inscription of Ashurbanipal, the great Assyrian king of two centuries before. The object is thus its own best commentary on what it was for. It was not propaganda broadcast to a living public in the manner of a cliff-relief; it was a pious deposit addressed, first of all, to the gods and to posterity in the fabric of the wall.

The text: Marduk's narrative and the king's voice

The inscription falls into two voices. It opens in the third person, as the god's own account. The last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, is arraigned for his crimes: he has perverted the cult of the city gods, neglected Marduk, and laid a hated labour-service on the free people of Babylon, who cry out; and the gods desert the city. Then Marduk, "lord of the gods", looks through all the lands for a righteous king to set things right, and finds one. In the words the compendium's quote-library carries from Mordechai Cogan's translation of the Babylonian, the god's choice is announced:

"Marduk sought out a righteous prince after his own heart, and took him by the hand: Cyrus, king of Anshan, he called by name to the kingship of the whole world." — the Cyrus Cylinder (paraphrase of the Babylonian text)^[1]

Marduk marches at Cyrus's side, delivers Babylon to him "without a battle", and gives Nabonidus into his hand. From about line twenty the voice changes to the first person, and Cyrus speaks, with a full Babylonian royal titulary claiming not Persia but the ancient style of Mesopotamian world-kingship:

"I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters," — the Cyrus Cylinder, lines 20–21 (trans. Mordechai Cogan)^[1]

The king then guarantees the peace of the country and claims the two acts for which the object is chiefly remembered: the restoration of the neglected cults, and the sending-home of gods and of people whom earlier kings had carried off. Here the cylinder speaks in the plainest terms of the policy later ages would seize upon:

"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 (trans. Mordechai Cogan)^[1]

And the conqueror presents his taking of the greatest city on earth not as a sack but as a deliverance, an entry in peace under the protection of the city's god:

"My vast army marched into Babylon in peace; I did not permit anyone to frighten the people." — the Cyrus Cylinder (paraphrase of the Babylonian text)^[1]

The final lines return to the building work on the wall, Imgur-Enlil, and to the discovery of Ashurbanipal's older inscription, closing the text as a proper foundation record should. The fragment that preserves those last lines (36–45) was not part of the piece found in 1879; it was recognised only in 1971 in the Babylonian collection at Yale, and joined to the cylinder on loan.

Whose voice? A Babylonian priestly composition

The single most important thing to hold about the cylinder, and the thing its modern fame most obscures, is that it is a Babylonian document, not a Persian one. It is written in Babylonian language and script, in the Babylonian city, in the literary manner of the old Mesopotamian royal inscriptions; scholars are agreed that its author took the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, drafted at Babylon two centuries earlier, as a literary model, and Harmatta traced its very phrasing to Neo-Assyrian patterns.^[7] Finkel's own close reading of the script sharpens the picture in two respects. First, the text is not, in fact, written in the deliberately archaizing hand that Late Babylonian kings favoured to lend their monuments the authority of age; where some of Nebuchadnezzar's inscriptions could have been read at sight by Hammurabi a thousand years dead, Cyrus's scribe used a contemporary late Babylonian script. Second, that scribe worked carelessly: the signs are squat and idiosyncratic, the lines wildly uneven (as few as thirty-three signs in one, as many as sixty-five in another, the last spilling over the rim), so that, viewed simply as scribal craft, the Cyrus Cylinder is, in Finkel's blunt judgement, a relatively poor piece of work, far below the finish of the Neo-Babylonian cylinders it emulates.^[9] Its theology is wholly Babylonian: the god who elects Cyrus, marches with him, and blesses his son Cambyses is Marduk, the city-god of Babylon. There is no mention anywhere of Ahura Mazdā, the god in whose name Cyrus's successor Darius would justify a throne; the Iranian religion of the Persian king is simply absent. The text was, on the consensus reading, composed by the priests of Marduk, the very priesthood Nabonidus had alienated and that had every reason to welcome a conqueror who would restore its cult and its revenues.^[4] In the cylinder Cyrus is not the author of a philosophy; he is "the tool of Marduk", exactly as, in the Hebrew scriptures, he is made the anointed instrument of the God of Israel. The composition speaks for the Persian king, but in the borrowed voice of a defeated city's temple, telling that city what it wished to hear about its new master.

The genre: a foundation deposit in a long tradition

Once the cylinder is set among its own kind, its every striking feature turns out to be conventional. The condemnation of the fallen predecessor as an impious neglecter of the gods; the desertion of the city by its offended deities; the god's election of a righteous champion; the peaceful, god-willed entry; the restoration of shrines and return of divine images; the pious rebuilding of the walls: all are the recurring furniture of Mesopotamian royal ideology, and versions of each occur in the inscriptions of Nabonidus himself and of Assyrian kings before him: Nabonidus had made the same charges against his own predecessor, and claimed the same divine favour. The cylinder is a masterpiece within a fixed and traditional form, the building inscription placed as a foundation deposit to commemorate a king's restorations. It is not a manifesto, not a decree promulgated to the empire, not a legal charter, and not, in intention, a statement of policy toward humanity at large. It is a wall-deposit in the idiom that walls had spoken in Mesopotamia for a thousand years.

The proclamation in another format: the duplicate tablet

For as long as it has been famous the cylinder has been thought unique, a one-off buried in a wall; and that uniqueness has always sat uneasily with the plainly public, argumentative message it carries, one far better tailored to a Babylonian readership than to an unreadable object sealed in brick. The uneasiness has now been resolved. At the very end of 2009 and the start of 2010, work among the British Museum's cuneiform collections brought to light two small fragments of a large, flat, conventional oblong tablet inscribed with the same text as the cylinder: the first identified by the Assyriologist Wilfred Lambert on 23 December 2009, the second by Irving Finkel on 4 January 2010. They belong to a mixed collection that reached the Museum from Babylonia in 1881, and now carry the numbers BM 47134 and BM 47176;^[10] the second, from the top edge of its tablet, even supplies words from the badly damaged beginning and end of the inscription. Modest as the scraps are, their implication is the chief new thing this object's study has to report: the proclamation existed in more than one format. Besides the barrel-cylinders made for burial there was at least one flat tablet, of a kind never buried but kept and copied in the ordinary business of a chancery, which means the text was not a single hidden deposit but a document circulated as an act of Persian state politics. Finkel argues from the physical evidence that the tablet came first and the cylinder was copied from it (no one composed a text on a barrel), and that the proclamation was very probably promulgated widely, within Babylonia in the first instance but plausibly across the empire, in Aramaic, Persian and Elamite versions as much as in Babylonian. The new tablet even yields a small human detail the cylinder lacks: a one-line scribal note naming the man who wrote it, one Qīšti-Marduk, "Gift of Marduk", almost certainly a professional of an official scriptorium. This bears directly on the old puzzle of the Book of Ezra, which preserves what purport to be Cyrus's proclamations about the Jews in two versions, Hebrew and Aramaic. If Cyrus's Babylonian proclamation was itself issued in several adapted forms for several audiences, the notion that he issued separate, differently worded decrees to the different peoples of his realm gains a concrete parallel; it was on exactly this ground that David Stronach, introducing Finkel's volume, suggested the flat-tablet discovery could lend new authority to the supposition, drawn from Ezra, that Cyrus addressed separate proclamations to separate parts of Babylon's population. The cylinder in the wall is thus best seen now not as a unique manifesto but as one buried instance of a text that also lived, and was meant to be heard, above ground.

The real history behind it: the fall of Babylon, 539 BCE

What the cylinder does witness, and witnesses as a contemporary document, is one of the hinge events of ancient history: the fall of Babylon to Cyrus and the passing of the Near East's last great native Mesopotamian empire into Persian hands. Independent Babylonian sources let us check the outline. The Nabonidus Chronicle, a terse temple record composed by the same Marduk priesthood but in the flat register of a chronicle rather than the high style of a proclamation, tells of the decisive Persian victory at Opis on the Tigris (where it records a massacre of the retreating Babylonians), the fall of Sippar, and then the entry of Cyrus's forces into Babylon, and it, like the cylinder, presents the change of masters as swift and the city as spared a storming.^[2] That the cylinder's "entry in peace" is corroborated by the driest of the chronicles is a point of real weight; that the same chronicle records a bloody battle at Opis is a reminder that the "peace" was that of a city already militarily decided. The cylinder itself does not hide the conquest that underlies the settlement: before Babylon fell, it says, Cyrus had already brought the peoples of the Iranian world under his rule, so that the deliverance of Babylon is the culmination of a career of conquest, not its denial. Behind the propaganda lies a genuine and consequential policy: Cyrus did restore local sanctuaries, did return to their home cities the cult-images Nabonidus had gathered into Babylon, and did, in general, rule the conquered lands by conciliating their gods and their elites rather than by deportation and terror. This was a real reversal of the characteristic Assyrian and Babylonian practice of mass deportation, and it is corroborated, for the return of the cult-statues, by independent administrative tablets. The cylinder is the charter-in-idiom of the tolerationist statecraft that the Achaemenids would practise for two centuries and that Darius inherited when he held the provinces "by the grace of Ahura Mazdā".

The parallel that is not on the cylinder: the return of the Jews

The cylinder's fame in the wider world owes almost everything to a text that is not on it. The Hebrew Bible remembers Cyrus with a warmth granted to no other foreign king: in the Book of Ezra he issues an edict permitting the Judean exiles carried to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple of their God, and the prophet of the second part of Isaiah calls this Persian conqueror the Lord's "anointed", his shepherd.^[3] The parallel with the cylinder is real: in both, Cyrus is the chosen instrument of a god not his own, restoring a cult and sending home a displaced people, and the biblical edict fits exactly the pattern of cult-restoration the cylinder proclaims for the Babylonian gods. But the cylinder itself says nothing of Judah, Jerusalem, or the Jews; the peoples and gods it names being restored are Mesopotamian, from the cities east of the Tigris. Whether the Ezra edict is a genuine Persian document preserved and adapted, a later Judean composition, or some of both, is long debated; the honest position is that the cylinder shows a general policy consistent with such an edict (and, since Finkel's tablet, one demonstrably issued in more than one form) but does not itself prove the biblical episode. To read the return of the Jews into the cylinder, as popular accounts constantly do, is to import into the clay a chapter written elsewhere.

The myth: the "first charter of human rights"

In 1971 the cylinder was lifted out of the study and into world politics. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi made it the emblem of his lavish celebration of two and a half thousand years of Iranian monarchy, and it was proclaimed, in the publicity of that year and after, the world's first charter, or declaration, of human rights. The British Museum lent the original to Tehran for the opening ceremonies; a plaster cast stood in for it at the festival at Persepolis; and a replica was presented to the United Nations, where it was displayed with its text in the six official languages as an ancient declaration of rights. The characterisation has proved almost impossible to kill: it circulates still, often attached to a "translation" that is in fact a modern forgery, adding to the real text a fictitious abolition of slavery, a right of asylum, even something like a minimum wage, and in some versions invoking Ahura Mazdā, a god the cylinder never names. None of that language is on the object. The scholarly verdict on the whole framing is close to unanimous, and has been for decades. Amélie Kuhrt's 1983 study, the reference treatment of the question, showed that the cylinder is a traditional Babylonian text whose "liberating" formulae are the conventional idiom of Mesopotamian kingship, not a novel Persian ethic.^[6] The British Museum's own curators say the same: the cylinder "says nothing of human rights", and the concept would have been "quite alien to Cyrus's contemporaries".^[5] Irving Finkel, who has written the definitive account of the object, puts it bluntly: there were no human rights in antiquity, and the idea is an anachronism. Josef Wiesehöfer catches the political edge of the myth exactly, calling the image of Cyrus as a champion of human rights as illusory as the image of the enlightened Shah who promoted it.^[15] The point is not to belittle Cyrus's policy, which was real and, by the standards of its world, remarkably conciliatory, but to describe it truly: it was pragmatic imperial statecraft in a traditional religious idiom, not a modern doctrine of universal rights.

Recovery: Rassam, Toma, and the making of a discovery

The circumstances of the find are murkier, and more human, than the tidy phrase "found by Rassam in 1879" allows, and Jonathan Taylor's reconstruction from the British Museum's own archive is among the newer contributions to the object's study.^[11] Hormuzd Rassam, the Mosul-born excavator (1826–1910) who had been Layard's assistant and now led the Museum's work at Babylon, was not present when the cylinder came out of the ground. He had reached the site in February 1879, set gangs digging in several mounds, and left the region at the end of March; the cylinder was excavated between the seventeenth and twenty-third of that month by the team he left under his trusted overseer Daoud Toma, and it appears in Toma's dispatch inventory, tellingly, as a "cylinder unbroken". That it reached London in pieces is a clue in itself: the object was very probably whole when found and broken afterwards, most likely by Toma or the agent Shamas on the road to Baghdad, which is how a sizeable fragment could split off and, decades later, surface on the market and end in the Yale collection. The first to read the text in modern times was not Rassam nor even the famous decipherer but Theophilus Pinches, the Museum's cuneiform curator, who unpacked the crates and had understood the tablet as "an account of Cyrus' taking of Babylon" by 18 September 1879. Only then did Sir Henry Rawlinson, anxious that a rival might beat him to it, take the piece in hand and present it to the Royal Asiatic Society on 17 November 1879 as "the most interesting historical record in the cuneiform character as yet brought to light", wrongly assigning it, to Rassam's indignation, to Borsippa rather than Babylon (Rassam's correcting letter to the keeper Samuel Birch is dated 20 November 1879). Rawlinson published it the next year, and Pinches's careful copy appeared as text 35 in the fifth volume of the Museum's Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia (1880); A. Leo Oppenheim's English translation for the collection of Ancient Near Eastern Texts long served as the standard rendering. The Yale fragment carrying the last lines was recognised and joined only in 1971. Refired for conservation in 1961 and cleaned of old plaster in 2007, the cylinder is displayed in the British Museum's Room 52; it travelled to great crowds in 2010–11 at the National Museum of Iran and in 2013 on a tour of the United States.

The forgeries: Chinese bones and a Victorian crib

A famous object attracts fakes, and the strangest episode in the cylinder's modern story, told in Finkel's own chapter, is the affair of the Chinese bones. In 1983 two fossilised horse bones inscribed with crude cuneiform came to notice in China and are now in the Palace Museum in Beijing; the Assyriologist O. R. Gurney recognised that one carried a version of lines 18 to 21 of the Cyrus Cylinder. For decades their status was genuinely uncertain, and the puzzle was argued out at the Museum's 2010 workshop, where Finkel himself was for a time inclined to think them defective copies of some lost ancient monument rather than plain forgeries. The question was settled only in November 2012, four days before the book went to press, and settled against the bones: they are certain modern fakes. What unmasked them was the tracing of their "crib". The idiosyncratic cuneiform on the bones, whose wedge-heads are cut with a distinctive arrow-like notch found on no genuine tablet, matches exactly the eccentric cuneiform font in which E. A. Wallis Budge printed a specimen of the cylinder's text (lines 15 to 21) in his popular Babylonian Life and History of 1884.^[12] The forger had copied not the object but a Victorian handbook, garbling Budge's printed lines by omitting signs and splitting words; the notched wedges gave him away. How the bones were caught is itself instructive in the long contest between scholarship and forgery. For this compendium the cylinder sits beside Behistun as one of the two indispensable royal texts of the empire's foundation, and as its necessary counterweight: where Behistun is Darius's own Persian voice in a script invented to carry it, the cylinder is the conquered city's voice lent to Cyrus in the oldest idiom of Mesopotamia. Read together they teach the same lesson twice, that the most eloquent statement of a king's virtue is exactly the statement most shaped to serve him.