The Cyrus Cylinder
The Shah handed a replica to the UN in 1971 and called it the first bill of rights. The cuneiform on it describes a conquest.
Open
A clay cylinder sits in a case in the British Museum with a label calling it the first charter of human rights.
It is forty five lines of cuneiform, in a dead Mesopotamian language, and it does not contain the word right, or freedom, or law.
What it actually says, in the plainest reading, is that a god got angry at one king and chose another. It is a conquest text.
The charter claim was made two thousand five hundred years after the clay was fired, and it has outlasted three governments that needed it to be true.
Scene 1Babylon, the twelfth of October
The Persian army enters Babylon without a fight. Cyrus's general Ugbaru leads the troops in, and Nabonidus, Babylon's own king, has already fled the city.
Seventeen days later Cyrus enters in person. Green branches are spread before him, and the priests of Marduk, Babylon's chief god, receive the invader as a guest.
This is the Nabonidus Chronicle, a record keeping tablet from the very administration Cyrus had just replaced.
· Babylonian chronicle tablet, BM 35382 · c. 539 BCE
“Without fighting, he entered Babylon. The state of peace was imposed upon the city.”
Read that again. The deposed regime's own chronicle calls it peace, not conquest.
Nobody keeping records in Babylon that year describes a battle, because for the people who kept the records, there wasn't one.
Scene 2The Esagila foundations, 1879
Hormuzd Rassam, an Assyrian born archaeologist working for the British Museum, digs into the foundations of the Esagila, Marduk's own temple, in March eighteen seventy nine.
He finds a baked clay barrel, twenty two and a half centimeters long, inscribed with forty five lines of Akkadian cuneiform. The practice was standard: Babylonian kings had been burying building inscriptions in temple foundations for centuries.
It ships to London. Two fragments of the same text surface later at Yale, and are not joined to the main cylinder until two thousand and ten.
The cylinder itself was almost certainly written within months of the conquest, while the arrangement with Marduk's priests was still fresh.
This is the cylinder itself, opening the way Babylonian royal inscriptions had opened for generations, in Cyrus's own voice, in Akkadian, for a Babylonian priesthood, not a Persian one.
· Akkadian inscription, BM 90920 · c. 539 BCE
“I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters of the world.”
Akkadian, not Persian. Addressed to Marduk's priests, in the theology they already used for their own kings.
The cylinder goes on to say Marduk searched every country and chose Cyrus. That is a Babylonian priest's explanation, applied to a foreign conqueror.
Scene 3What the stone claims
In Irving Finkel's translation for the British Museum, the cylinder says Cyrus returned displaced gods to their home cities and let deported peoples go home.
It does not name a people. The words Israel, Judah and Hebrew appear nowhere on the forty five lines.
The exiles it never names numbered an estimated forty thousand to fifty thousand people, out of a Neo Babylonian empire of one and a half to two million.
The Hebrew Bible tells a related story about the same king, composed centuries after the events it describes.
This is the biblical text, the book of Ezra.
· Ezra 1:1-3, Hebrew Bible · c. 5th-4th century BCE
“In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom. Who is there among you of all his people? Let him go up to Jerusalem.”
Two texts, one king, and no line connecting them. The cylinder never confirms the decree Ezra describes, and Ezra never mentions a cylinder.
Both describe the same general policy. Neither proves the other.
Scene 4New York, 1971
The government of the Shah of Iran sends a copy of the cylinder to the United Nations, alongside a new translation it commissioned for the occasion.
The introduction the United Nations printed with that translation makes the claim outright, in the UN's own words.
This is the United Nations, in its own printed introduction.
· Introductory text, 1971 translation · 1971
“This cylinder has historically been considered the world's first charter of human rights.”
The stone had been sitting in London for ninety two years by then. The claim was new. The clay was not.
Five accounts
Five ways of reading forty five lines of cuneiform, and they cannot agree on what kind of document it even is.
victorPersian Imperial / Achaemenid
Persian Imperial Achaemenid case
The first account is the empire's own, and it says the cylinder describes real policy, not decoration.
By five hundred and thirty nine before the common era, Cyrus had already absorbed the Median Empire, Lydia, and the Greek cities of Ionia. Babylon was the last major power left in western Asia.
Darius, his successor, governed twenty three subject peoples through local satraps and left their gods alone. On this reading, the cylinder is the first statement of that approach: accommodation, not forced conversion.
The cylinder's own boast supports it.
“All the kings who sit upon thrones, from the upper to the lower sea, they all brought their heavy tribute before me, and in Babylon they kissed my feet.”
Tribute, not conversion. Nobody paying it was made to abandon a god.
Read the full account
Narrative
The cylinder's own text tells the story Cyrus wanted told. Marduk, Babylon's chief god, grew angry at Nabonidus for neglecting proper worship. The god surveyed the world, found Cyrus, and "called him by name" to deliver Babylon. Cyrus entered not as a foreign conqueror but as a divinely chosen restorer. The text is written in Akkadian, not Old Persian. It is addressed to the Babylonian priesthood in their own language, using their own theological vocabulary.
The conquest of Babylon completed a decade of Persian expansion. Cyrus had already absorbed the Median Empire (550 BCE), Lydia (547 BCE, deposing the proverbially wealthy Croesus), and the Greek cities of Ionia. By 539 BCE, his territory stretched from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush. Babylon was the last major power in western Asia. Its fall gave Cyrus control of Mesopotamia, Syria, and the Levant, including the territory where Judaean exiles from the Babylonian conquest of 586 BCE still lived.
The cylinder describes concrete administrative acts: returning displaced cult statues to their home temples, releasing deported populations, repairing sanctuaries. These policies followed Mesopotamian precedent; earlier conquerors like Marduk-apla-iddina II had claimed similar restorations. But the scale was different. The Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus and his successors governed through a system of satrapies that allowed local customs, religions, and languages to continue under Persian oversight. Darius I's Behistun inscription (c. 520 BCE) lists 23 subject peoples; none were required to abandon their gods. The cylinder, in the Persian imperial reading, represents the founding document of this multicultural administrative approach, not a philosophical treatise on rights but a practical policy of governing diverse populations through accommodation rather than forced assimilation.
The Achaemenid royal ideology combined Zoroastrian concepts (asha, truth/cosmic order) with local religious legitimation. In Babylon, Cyrus served Marduk. In Judah, he served Yahweh; Isaiah 45:1 names him "messiah," the only non-Jew given that title in the Hebrew Bible. In Lydia, he reportedly honored local cults. This was not tolerance in any modern philosophical sense. It was imperial statecraft, the recognition that empires holding dozens of peoples cannot survive if they systematically alienate all of them.
Arguments
- Cyrus was divinely chosen by Marduk to restore proper order (a theological claim, not a secular one)
- The policy of returning deported peoples and cult statues was practical imperial governance, not philosophical humanism
- The Achaemenid system of satrapies allowed local autonomy under Persian oversight; the cylinder is its founding articulation
- Cyrus used each conquered people's own religious language to legitimate his rule
Sources
- The Cyrus Cylinder: The King of Persia's Proclamation from Ancient Babylon
- From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire
- The Persian Empire
academicRevisionist / Assyriological
The Assyriological revision
The second account comes from the people who read the cuneiform for a living, and it says the first account mistakes a genre for an invention.
Marduk-apla-iddina, a Babylonian king two centuries before Cyrus, made the identical claims: restored cult statues, released oppressed peoples, credited the god who chose him. The formula already existed.
Amelie Kuhrt's nineteen eighty three article on the cylinder argued that the Marduk priesthood, not Cyrus, likely composed it, to justify their own collaboration with the man who had just replaced their king.
Kuhrt put it plainly.
“The cylinder is not a declaration of human rights. It is a traditional Mesopotamian royal building inscription.”
Matt Waters, in scholarship paraphrased here, makes the harder version of the same point: the text explains how a priesthood justified a regime change, and nothing about human rights.
Read the full account
Narrative
Assyriologists have spent decades dismantling the "first human rights charter" narrative. The cylinder's text belongs to a well-documented Mesopotamian literary genre: the royal building inscription with a legitimation prologue. Dozens of similar texts survive from earlier centuries. Marduk-apla-iddina II of Babylon (r. 722-710 BCE) claimed to have restored cult statues and released oppressed peoples. Ashurbanipal of Assyria (r. 668-631 BCE) described himself as the chosen instrument of the gods sent to restore order. The formula is: previous king offended the gods; the gods chose me; I restored what was broken. Cyrus's cylinder follows this template precisely.
Amelie Kuhrt's landmark 1983 article "The Cyrus Cylinder and Achaemenid Imperial Policy" argued that the cylinder was "not a declaration of human rights" but a piece of Babylonian political propaganda, composed by the Marduk priesthood to justify their collaboration with the Persian conqueror. The priests had reason to welcome Cyrus: Nabonidus had elevated the moon god Sin above Marduk and relocated provincial cult statues to Babylon, acts that threatened the Esagila priesthood's religious authority and economic base (temples were major landowners). The cylinder's denunciation of Nabonidus reads less like Persian policy and more like the grievances of a Babylonian priestly faction that had backed the winning side.
The "human rights" framing emerged not from scholarship but from politics. In 1971, the Shah of Iran organized celebrations at Persepolis to mark what he declared the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy. The cylinder was borrowed from the British Museum and displayed as the centerpiece. The Shah commissioned a new translation and presented copies to the United Nations, where it was described as "the first declaration of human rights" in official publications. The timing was strategic: Iran in 1971 was a U.S.-backed authoritarian state with a secret police (SAVAK) that Amnesty International had already condemned. The cylinder served as a cultural counterweight: evidence that Iran's civilizational commitment to human dignity predated Western Enlightenment by two millennia.
The irony has not been lost on historians. The cylinder was composed as a propaganda text by an ancient conqueror. In 1971 it was repurposed as a propaganda text by a modern autocrat. Both uses involved the same rhetorical operation: claiming divine or civilizational authority to legitimate political power. The object itself (a 22.5 cm clay barrel covered in wedge-shaped marks that fewer than a thousand living humans can read in the original) has become a screen onto which successive political projects have been projected.
The textual evidence, stripped of political overlay, shows a standard Mesopotamian royal inscription that records real administrative decisions (returning cult statues, releasing deportees) within a conventional theological framework (Marduk chose the king). These decisions had precedent. They served Cyrus's political interests. They were not unprecedented, not universal, and not articulated in the language of individual rights. The concept of inherent human rights, rights held by individuals against the state, does not appear in any ancient Mesopotamian text, the cylinder included.
Arguments
- The cylinder belongs to a standard Mesopotamian royal inscription genre with dozens of precedents
- The text was likely composed by Babylonian priests, not by Cyrus himself
- The "human rights" framing was invented by Shah Pahlavi in 1971 for political purposes
- No concept of individual rights against the state exists in the text; it describes royal piety, not human rights
Sources
- The Cyrus Cylinder and Achaemenid Imperial Policy
- The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Concept of Universal Human Rights
- Cyrus the Great: Life and Lore
- Silencing the Past in Achaemenid History: the case of the Cyrus Cylinder
revisionistModern Iranian Nationalist
The Iranian nationalist case
The third account says the correction is beside the point, because the cylinder's meaning to Iranians was never really about the cuneiform.
In October nineteen seventy one the Shah staged celebrations at Persepolis: sixty nine heads of state, a tent city with fifty air conditioned pavilions, an estimated two hundred million dollars spent while rural poverty in Iran ran above forty percent.
He addressed Cyrus directly, at the tomb.
“Sleep in peace, for we are awake.”
The Islamic Republic that overthrew him rejected almost everything the Shah stood for, and kept the cylinder anyway. In two thousand and ten, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called it a source of pride for all Iranians.
For the diaspora, the cylinder argues that Iranian identity predates the Islamic Republic, predates the revolution, and belongs to nobody's government.
Read the full account
Narrative
The cylinder occupies a position in Iranian national consciousness that no academic debunking can dislodge. Both the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic, regimes that agree on almost nothing, have claimed it as proof that Iran's civilizational contribution to human governance predates and surpasses European achievements.
The Shah's 1971 Persepolis celebration was the most expensive diplomatic event of the 20th century. Sixty-nine heads of state attended. Three hundred and fifty tons of food were flown in from Maxim's of Paris. A tent city with 50 air-conditioned pavilions was erected in the desert. At the center of the ideological program was the cylinder: Cyrus as the first ruler to codify religious tolerance and freedom from forced labor. The Shah addressed Cyrus's tomb directly: "Sleep in peace, for we are awake." The event cost an estimated $200 million ($1.5 billion in 2025 dollars) while Iranian rural poverty ran above 40 percent. Opposition groups (including Ayatollah Khomeini, then in exile in Najaf) condemned the celebration as idolatrous and obscene.
After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic initially rejected the pre-Islamic past as jahiliyyah (ignorance). But the cylinder proved too useful to abandon. By the 1990s, Iranian textbooks presented Cyrus as a righteous ruler whose policies anticipated Islamic principles of justice. In 2010, President Ahmadinejad attended the cylinder's display at the National Museum of Iran (during its loan from the British Museum) and called it "a reflection of Iranian culture and values." The crowd at the museum was so large that police had to manage the lines. When the British Museum announced the cylinder would return to London, Iranian media treated the departure as a national loss.
For the Iranian diaspora, estimated at 2-3 million worldwide, the cylinder serves a different function. It represents an Iran that existed before the Islamic Republic, before the revolution, before the political crises of the 20th century. Diaspora organizations have used the cylinder's image on protest banners, petitions, and cultural events. "Cyrus the Great Day" (October 29, the date of his entry into Babylon) is observed by diaspora communities in Los Angeles, London, and Toronto. The cylinder is not, for these communities, a Mesopotamian building inscription. It is an argument: that Iranian identity is older than Islam, that Persian civilization invented concepts the West claims to own, that the nation they left behind has a past worth reclaiming.
Iranian historiography of the cylinder blends genuine scholarship with national myth. Scholars like Abdolhossein Zarinkoob (Two Centuries of Silence, 1957) and Ehsan Yarshater (founder of the Encyclopaedia Iranica) have produced rigorous work on the Achaemenid period. But the popular reception of the cylinder in Iran operates on a different register: not academic analysis but civilizational pride. The distinction between "Cyrus practiced religious tolerance" and "Cyrus invented human rights" collapses in popular discourse, and attempts to enforce it are read as anti-Iranian bias.
Arguments
- The cylinder proves Persian civilization pioneered governance principles that Europe later claimed as its own
- Both Pahlavi and Islamic Republic regimes appropriated the cylinder despite opposing ideologies
- The diaspora uses the cylinder as an identity anchor, pre-Islamic Iran as a counter-narrative to theocracy
- Western scholarly critique of the "human rights" framing is perceived as cultural dismissal
Sources
- Two Centuries of Silence: An Account of Events and Conditions in Iran during the First Two Hundred Years of Islam
- Encyclopaedia Iranica (Achaemenid Dynasty entry)
- The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A New Beginning for the Middle East
- Persepolis: The Archaeology of Parsa, Seat of the Persian Kings
vanquishedBabylonian / Conquered Population
The Babylonian population
The fourth account belongs to the people the cylinder was actually addressed to, and it was not all of Babylon.
It was addressed to the priesthood of the Esagila, who controlled its land and its offerings, and who had specific grievances against Nabonidus. He had promoted the moon god Sin above Marduk, moved provincial cult statues into Babylon, and spent years at the Arabian oasis of Tayma instead of performing the New Year festival the priesthood needed him to perform.
A Babylonian poem composed after the conquest, likely by that same priesthood, states their case even harder.
“He did not know the rites, he ruined the regular offerings. He did evil against Marduk's city.”
For ordinary Babylonians, farmers and traders rather than priests, the record shows continuity: land sales and loan contracts kept being written the same way, with a new king's name at the top.
Continuity is not consent. Within two generations, under Xerxes, Babylonian revolts were crushed twice, and part of the Esagila itself was damaged.
Read the full account
Narrative
The cylinder's text was addressed to Babylonians, but not to all of them. It was addressed to the Marduk priesthood: the temple administrators, the astronomers, the scribes who controlled the Esagila complex and its massive landholdings. These were the people who had reason to oppose Nabonidus and welcome Cyrus. Their grievances were specific: Nabonidus had promoted the moon god Sin, relocated provincial cult statues to Babylon (disrupting local temple economies), and spent years at the oasis of Tayma in Arabia rather than performing the New Year's festival in Babylon, a ritual that required the king's personal participation and whose omission struck at the priesthood's ceremonial authority.
The Verse Account of Nabonidus (a Babylonian poetic text almost certainly composed after Cyrus's conquest) amplifies these charges. It describes Nabonidus as a madman who "did not know the rites" and who forced corvee labor on the citizens. The text reads as a companion piece to the cylinder: both were produced by the same faction, the Marduk priesthood, to justify the same political transition. The consistency of the propaganda campaign suggests coordination.
For ordinary Babylonians (farmers, traders, artisans, the laboring majority), the evidence is thinner. The Nabonidus Chronicle records that Cyrus's army entered "without fighting" and that "the state of peace was imposed on the city." Economic tablets from the years immediately following the conquest show continuity: land transactions, loan agreements, and commercial contracts continued with minimal disruption. Temple workers at the Eanna complex in Uruk noted the change of king in their dating formulas and continued their routines.
But continuity is not the same as contentment. The Achaemenid administration extracted tribute from Babylonia. The satrap Gobryas (not the same Ugbaru who led the initial invasion) governed the province, and Persian officials occupied key administrative posts. Babylonian scribal culture continued to produce astronomical diaries, mathematical texts, and literary works, but the political center had shifted permanently to Susa and Persepolis. By the reign of Xerxes (486-465 BCE), Babylonian revolts had been crushed twice, and Xerxes reportedly destroyed part of the Esagila complex and removed the golden statue of Marduk. The accommodation that the cylinder promised lasted, at most, two generations.
The Babylonian perspective on the cylinder, to the extent it can be reconstructed, is one of a conquered people who collaborated with the conqueror because the alternative was worse, and who lost their political autonomy permanently. Babylon remained a great city for centuries. But it was never again the capital of its own state.
Arguments
- The cylinder was addressed to the Marduk priesthood, not the Babylonian population at large
- The priests had specific economic and religious motives to support Cyrus over Nabonidus
- Ordinary Babylonians experienced administrative continuity but permanent loss of political sovereignty
- Achaemenid tolerance lasted at most two generations; Xerxes crushed Babylonian revolts and desecrated the Esagila
Sources
- Babylon: City of Wonders
- Babylonia under Achaemenid Rule
- The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon, 556-539 BC
revisionistPostcolonial / Museum Repatriation
The Museum repatriation case
The fifth account is about where the object sits now, not what it says.
Hormuzd Rassam excavated it in Ottoman controlled territory under a British Museum permit, and it went to London without anyone from Babylon, Baghdad, or Tehran being consulted.
Rassam was born in Mosul in eighteen twenty six to a Chaldean Catholic family, and had already excavated at Nimrud, Nineveh, and Sippar for the museum before he reached Babylon.
When Wallis Budge, the museum's Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, published translations of tablets Rassam had excavated, he put his own name on them. Rassam sued for defamation in eighteen ninety three, and lost.
The British Museum's stated position, repeated in a two thousand and two declaration signed by eighteen institutions, is that such objects belong in collections that can preserve and study them for everyone.
“Objects are safest in institutions that have the resources and expertise to preserve them.”
Iran has asked for the cylinder back at least three times since nineteen seventy nine. Iraq, whose claim is arguably stronger, since the object is Babylonian rather than Persian in both language and genre, has not formally asked at all.
The museum has loaned the cylinder to Tehran twice, in nineteen seventy one and two thousand ten, and taken it back to London both times.
Read the full account
Narrative
Hormuzd Rassam found the cylinder in March 1879 during excavations funded by the British Museum at the site of ancient Babylon, in territory then controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Rassam himself was born in Mosul in 1826 to a Chaldean Catholic family; he had worked as an assistant to the legendary Austen Henry Layard at Nineveh in the 1840s and later excavated independently at Nimrud, Nineveh, Sippar, and Babylon. His career was shaped by the asymmetries of 19th-century archaeology: he did the fieldwork, the British Museum held the objects, and European scholars took the credit. When Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, published translations of tablets Rassam had excavated, he credited himself. Rassam sued for defamation in 1893 and lost.
The cylinder's journey from Babylonian temple foundation to British Museum vitrine follows a pattern replicated across thousands of objects: extraction during the age of European imperial expansion, housed in metropolitan institutions that present themselves as custodians of universal heritage. The British Museum's position (articulated in its 2002 Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums, co-signed by 18 institutions) is that objects like the cylinder serve humanity best in collections where they can be studied and displayed alongside objects from other cultures. The counter-position, articulated by Iraq, Iran, and a growing number of scholars and cultural institutions, is that "universal" access is a euphemism for colonial possession: the cylinder was taken from Ottoman Mesopotamia under a firman (permit) negotiated between imperial powers, without any consultation with the people whose ancestors created it.
The repatriation question gained urgency after the 2003 Iraq War. The looting of the Iraq Museum in April 2003 (15,000 objects stolen, of which roughly 7,000 have been recovered) highlighted the vulnerability of cultural heritage in conflict zones. Defenders of Western museum holdings cited the looting as evidence that objects are safer in London or New York. Critics responded that the instability was itself a product of Western intervention, creating a circular argument: we destabilize your country, then cite the instability as proof you cannot protect your own heritage.
Iran's claim to the cylinder is complicated by the object's own identity. It was made in Babylon (modern Iraq), written in Akkadian (a Mesopotamian language), in a Mesopotamian literary genre, for a Mesopotamian audience. Cyrus was Persian, but the object is Babylonian. Iraq has a stronger archaeological claim than Iran, though Iraq has not formally requested the cylinder's return. The British Museum's loan of the cylinder to Tehran in 1971 and again in 2010 (carefully limited, time-bound, and returned to London each time) enacts the colonial dynamic in miniature: the former imperial power permits the colonized to view their own heritage on a temporary visa.
Arguments
- The cylinder was extracted during 19th-century imperial archaeology under Ottoman permits; no local consent was obtained
- The British Museum's "universal museum" defense rebrands colonial possession as cosmopolitan stewardship
- Iran's claim is complicated; the object is Babylonian in language and genre, not Persian
- Temporary loans reproduce the power dynamic; the colony must borrow from the metropole to see its own heritage
Sources
- Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities
- Asshur Is King! Asshur Is King! Religion in the Exercise of Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire
- The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum
- Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums
The turn
And what none of them will say outright.
The Persian imperial account leaves out the military campaigns that preceded Babylon: the destruction of Sardis, the subjugation of Ionia, missing entirely from a text about a divinely gentle king.
From the record
Military campaigns that preceded Babylon (the destruction of Sardis, subjugation of Ionia)The text is a standard Mesopotamian royal inscription genre, not a unique innovationForced tribute and labor obligations that continued under Achaemenid ruleCyrus's death in 530 BCE fighting the Massagetae on the eastern frontier, the empire-builder killed by a people who refused to be governedThe Assyriological account is correct about the genre, and that correctness lets it treat the deported peoples going home as a footnote to propaganda rather than a fact about their lives.
From the record
The possibility that even conventional propaganda can reflect real policy decisions with real humanitarian outcomesThe Jewish exile community's experience, which aligns with the cylinder's claims about returning deporteesThe comparative significance of Achaemenid religious tolerance, even if it was pragmatic rather than principledThe Iranian nationalist account spent two hundred million dollars celebrating a text written in Akkadian, for a Babylonian audience, in the same year Iran's own secret police was arresting people for saying the wrong thing.
From the record
The cylinder is written in Akkadian for a Babylonian audience; it is not a "Persian" document in language or genreThe Persepolis celebrations' cost ($200 million) amid widespread povertyAchaemenid imperial violence, the destruction of Miletus (494 BCE), Xerxes's burning of Athens (480 BCE)SAVAK's documented human rights abuses during the very period when the Shah promoted the cylinder as a rights charterBabylonian / Conquered Population
The Babylonian account can describe the priesthood's motives in exact detail, and it has nothing to say about whether Achaemenid rule was better, on balance, for the scribes and astronomers who kept working under it.
From the record
The possibility that the conquest genuinely improved conditions for some BabyloniansThe contributions of Babylonian astronomy and mathematics under Achaemenid ruleThe cylinder's wider context of returning deported peoples, the humanitarian outcomes, regardless of motivePostcolonial / Museum Repatriation
And the repatriation account has no answer for the argument it records itself: that handing the object to Iran would make a Mesopotamian object, made in Iraq, into the property of one nation's ideology rather than a shared inheritance.
From the record
The British Museum's genuine conservation expertise and public access recordThe political instability that has endangered heritage in Iraq and the broader Middle EastThe risk that repatriation to Iran would make the object an instrument of one nation's ideology rather than a shared Mesopotamian heritageThe cylinder's scholarly accessibility in London; cuneiform researchers worldwide use the British Museum collection
Close
The cylinder sits today in room fifty two of the British Museum, catalogued as BM ninety thousand nine hundred and twenty.
It toured five American museums in two thousand thirteen and drew two million visitors, most of whom could not read a single line of it.
Cyrus died nine years after taking Babylon, in five hundred and thirty before the common era, fighting the Massagetae, a people on his eastern frontier who refused to be governed.
The clay is still in one piece. You can stand in front of the case and read all forty five lines yourself, in whichever translation the museum has printed that year, and decide.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 539 BCE
- Killed
- N/A. Cyrus's conquest of Babylon in 539…
- Displaced
- 1.5-2MPopulation of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, estimated…
- Place
- Babylonia (modern Iraq)
Key figures
- Cyrus II (Cyrus the Great)Founder of the Achaemenid Empire; conquered Babylon 539 BCE; ruled from approximately 559-530 BCE-600 to -530
- NabonidusLast king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire; deposed by Cyrus; his heterodox religious policies alienated the Marduk priesthood-556 to -539
- Hormuzd RassamAssyrian-born archaeologist; discovered the cylinder in March 1879 during British Museum excavations at the Esagila temple, Babylon1826 to 1910
- Mohammad Reza Shah PahlaviShah of Iran 1941-1979; made the cylinder the centerpiece of the 2,500-year celebration of Persian monarchy at Persepolis in 19711919 to 1980
- Ugbaru (Gobryas)Persian general who led the actual entry into Babylon on October 12, 539 BCE; died weeks later-600 to -539
Primary sources
· Akkadian cuneiform inscription, translated by Irving Finkel (British Museum) · c. 539 BCE
“He [Marduk] searched all countries, looking for a righteous ruler to take his hand. He called Cyrus, king of Anshan, and nominated him to rule over everything.”
· Akkadian cuneiform inscription · c. 539 BCE
“I returned the gods to the sacred cities on the other side of the Tigris, whose sanctuaries had long been in ruins, to their places, and I let them dwell in eternal abodes.”
· Ezra 1:1-3 (Hebrew Bible / Old Testament) · c. 5th-4th century BCE (composition date debated)
“In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom — Who is there among you of all His people? Let him go up to Jerusalem.”
· Introductory text for 1971 UN translation of the Cyrus Cylinder · 1971
“This cylinder has historically been considered the world's first charter of human rights.”
Threads
- The Conquests of AlexanderHe named 20 cities after himself and one after his horse.
- The Rise of IslamWithin 100 years of the first revelation, Islam stretched from Spain to the borders of China. The Byzantine and Sassanid empires were gone.
- The Creation of Israel and the NakbaOn May 14, 1948, one people declared independence. On May 15, 750,000 of another people became refugees. Same land.