In brief. Cyrus II founded the Achaemenid empire in the middle of the 6th century BCE and conquered Babylon in 539 BCE. The Cyrus Cylinder, found in Babylon in the 19th century, is a text of that conquest. Its meaning has been argued over ever since.
Cyrus II, called Cyrus the Great, built the first Persian empire in a single generation. In 539 BCE his army took Babylon, the largest city of the ancient Near East. Soon afterwards, a text was written on a clay cylinder and buried in the foundations of the city’s walls. Archaeologists found it in 1879, and it is now in the British Museum.
What the text says
The Cylinder is written in Akkadian, the language of Babylon, in the style of Babylonian royal inscriptions. It is not a speech by a Persian conqueror in Persian terms. It tells the story that Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, was angry with the previous king, Nabonidus, and chose Cyrus to restore order. Cyrus is shown as a king who enters the city peacefully, honours Marduk, repairs sanctuaries and returns the images of gods to their shrines. It says he gathered the people who had been settled elsewhere and let them return to their homes.
The surviving text describes Cyrus restoring cult images to their sanctuaries and allowing displaced communities to return, in the voice of a legitimate Babylonian king.
What it does not say
The Cylinder does not mention Jerusalem or the Jewish exiles, and it does not use the language of rights in any modern sense. Biblical books describe a separate decree allowing the return of exiles from Babylon; the two texts are sometimes connected, but they are different sources.
A document that was reused
In the 20th century the Cylinder became a symbol. In 1971 it was central to the celebrations of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, and a replica was presented to the United Nations. Admirers described it as the world’s first declaration of human rights.
Many historians see the Cylinder as a typical royal foundation text in a long Mesopotamian tradition, where a new ruler presents himself as the god-chosen restorer of order. On that reading it is propaganda in the ordinary sense, not a charter, and it is valuable evidence of how Cyrus chose to be seen.
Whether the Cylinder reflects a real policy of tolerance across the Persian empire, or only the way Cyrus presented himself in Babylon, is debated. Other sources show the Persians ruling many peoples in many ways.
Reading it well
Used with care, the Cylinder is a precious document. It shows that Cyrus understood local traditions and used them, and it shows how an empire spoke to a conquered city. It is less reliable as a source of modern values. A good test for any claim about it is to ask which line of the text is being quoted, and by whom, and for what purpose.
Notes and sources
- Irving Finkel (ed.), The Cyrus Cylinder: The King of Persia's Proclamation from Ancient Babylon (I.B. Tauris, 2013).
- Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (Routledge, 2007) (translation of the Cylinder).
- Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Eisenbrauns, 2002).
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