Cyrus the Great: Founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire
The tomb of Cyrus II at Pasargadae is the smallest royal tomb I know of in the ancient world. A single stone chamber, about 6.1 by 5.9 metres on plan, set on a six-stepped platform of white limestone, with a steeply pitched gable roof. No reliefs, no inscription carved on the building itself. The chamber was undecorated; the sarcophagus, of polished stone, was designed to receive the body of Cyrus laid out in the simple dress of a Persian tribesman, with a bow at his side. The Greek inscription recorded by Strabo on the platform — “Passer-by, I am Cyrus, who gave the Persians an empire, and was king of Asia. Do not begrudge me this monument” — is generally thought to be Hellenistic or later, but the austerity of the building is genuine Achaemenid. The modern consensus is that it was built c. 540–530 BCE and that the architect was a Lydian or Greek craftsman working to a Persian programme. Stronach’s Pasargadae (1978) is the standard publication; David Stronach excavated the site in the 1960s, and his reading of the building is what most of us still work from.
The tomb is the beginning of Cyrus, in the sense that it is the most concrete thing about him that survives. The rest of Cyrus — the man, the king, the empire — we have to reconstruct.
What we know, and what we don’t
The principal modern accounts of Cyrus are Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander (2002), chapter 7, which is the indispensable Achaemenid synthesis; Maria Brosius’s The Persian Empire from Cyrus II to Artaxerxes I (2020), with its strong Babylonian evidence; Amélie Kuhrt’s The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (2007) for the primary sources in translation; and Josef Wiesehöfer’s Ancient Persia (1996). Margaret Cool Root’s The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (1979) is essential on the visual evidence, and Christopher Tuplin’s articles on the Persian court (collected in Xenophon and his World, 2004) are the place to look for the recent sceptical work on the Greek sources.
The Greek sources on Cyrus are of mixed quality. Herodotus is our principal narrative source and is generally reliable on the chronology, less reliable on the personalities, and useless on the numbers. Ctesias, the Greek physician at the Persian court in the late fifth century, is the worst kind of source: he claims to have read the royal archives, he puts the Behistun inscriptions in the wrong order, and almost everything he reports is wrong. Strabo, who transmits the tomb inscription, is more careful but uses Ctesias for the geography. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia is a partly historical, partly philosophical idealisation, and should be read as such. The Babylonian evidence — the Cyrus Cylinder, the Babylonian Chronicle, the Nabonidus inscriptions — is contemporary, and the Jewish evidence in Ezra and Isaiah is roughly contemporary for the events of 539 BCE. The Achaemenid inscriptions of his successors, including the Behistun Inscription of Darius I, are the only Achaemenid sources, and they are mostly silent on Cyrus.
The upshot is that Cyrus is known to us mostly through Greek and Babylonian eyes, and the two traditions do not always agree. The Cyrus of Herodotus is a figure of romance; the Cyrus of the Cylinder is a Mesopotamian-style king. The Cyrus of Ezra is the anointed of the Lord. None of these is the historical Cyrus, and all of them are.
The Median inheritance and the Persian claim
Cyrus came to the throne of the small kingdom of Anshan in 559 BCE. Anshan was a vassal of the Median Empire, ruled by the Achaemenid clan of the Pasargadae tribe. The kingdom was strategically placed in the corridor between the Iranian plateau and the Mesopotamian lowland, and it was heir to the older Elamite political traditions of the region. The capital, Pasargadae — some 40 km north of Persepolis — was founded by Cyrus himself, on a fertile plain watered by the Pulvar River. The garden, the palace, and the tomb are all on the same site, and they were all, I think, intended as a single statement: that the king who lived here is the king of Persia, and that the new Achaemenid state is grounded in Persis.
Cyrus’s claim to legitimate rule over a wider Iran came through his mother Mandane, daughter of the Median king Astyages. The Achaemenid–Median marriage was, in the dynastic logic of the time, a tie that would be exploited in 550 BCE when Cyrus marched against his grandfather. Whether Cyrus planned the conquest from the start, or stumbled into it as the Median court began to fracture, is one of the unresolved questions. Wiesehöfer is sceptical of the Herodotian court-intrigue narrative and treats the conquest of Media as the consequence of a long power struggle between Persian and Median factions; I think he is right, but the evidence is thin.
The Median army was defeated in 550 BCE, Astyages was taken prisoner (and, against the prevailing custom of the ancient Near East, not killed), Cyrus was acclaimed as successor to the Median kings, and the transition was remarkably smooth. Cyrus married a daughter of the Median royal family and incorporated the Median nobles into his own court. Ecbatana became a seasonal residence of the Achaemenid dynasty. The Median tradition of statecraft — its use of the horse, its developed administration, its close ties with the Mesopotamian world — became part of the inheritance.
The empire takes shape
The second great external conquest was Lydia, the wealthy kingdom of western Anatolia ruled by Croesus. Croesus, alarmed by the rise of Persia and egged on by the Delphic oracle, attacked the new Achaemenid state in 547 BCE, crossed the Halys River, and met Cyrus in a battle at an unknown location in eastern Anatolia. The result was clear: Croesus was defeated, Sardis was captured, and the Lydian kingdom was absorbed. Cyrus delegated the conquest of Ionia to Harpagus the Mede, who completed the subjugation of the Ionian Greek cities without, according to Herodotus, sacking the towns or destroying the temples. The pattern of minimal disruption in the early stages of conquest was a feature of Cyrus’ practice, and one that distinguished Achaemenid rule from the Assyrian model that preceded it. The conquest of Lydia brought the Achaemenid state into direct contact with the Greek world and with the gold of the Lydian mines. The daric that Darius later introduced was based on the Lydian gold standard.
The most consequential conquest was Babylon in 539 BCE. The Neo-Babylonian Empire, founded by Nabopolassar in 626 BCE, was the dominant power of Mesopotamia, and Babylon itself was the largest and most magnificent city of the ancient Near East. The last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, had alienated the priesthood of Marduk by his promotion of the moon god Sin — though modern scholarship, starting with the work of A. K. Grayson and continuing in Beaulieu and Waerzeggers, is more divided on Nabonidus’ religious policies than the older accounts suggested. Cyrus entered Babylon, by his own account in the Cyrus Cylinder, “without battle or bloodshed.”
The Cyrus Cylinder, a small clay barrel about 23 cm long with 45 lines of Babylonian cuneiform, was discovered by Hormuzd Rassam in 1879 in the ruins of the Marduk temple in Babylon. It is now in the British Museum. It is a document in the standard Mesopotamian genre of royal inscription: Cyrus presents himself as the chosen of Marduk, called by the god to restore order after the impieties of Nabonidus, and declares his intention to “return the images of the gods who had lived there to their places, and to let them dwell in eternal abodes.” The cylinder is best read as a Mesopotamian-style proclamation of royal piety, not — as the UN General Assembly’s 1971 citation of it as “the first declaration of human rights” suggested — a precursor bill of rights. Irving Finkel’s recent re-reading (2013) of the cuneiform is the most important modern philological work on the text, and it is more conservative than the older tradition. Finkel reads the cylinder as standard Babylonian royal rhetoric, with the standard Babylonian royal rhetoric’s claims to religious piety and political legitimacy, and he is right to do so.
The conquest of Babylon brought the Achaemenid state into possession of the wealthiest and most populous region of the ancient world. The Jewish exiles deported to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BCE now found themselves under a king whom the Hebrew Bible presents as the divinely chosen instrument for ending the captivity. Ezra 1 records a decree of Cyrus authorising the exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple — the foundation of the Second Temple period. Whether the decree is historical in its specific form is debated, but the policy of allowing deported populations to return was real, and was part of the broader Achaemenid technique of integrating subject peoples.
The eastern frontier and the death
Cyrus spent the last years of his reign on the eastern frontier, campaigning against the peoples of the eastern Iranian plateau and the Central Asian steppe — Bactrians, Sogdians, Gandharans, and the peoples of the Indus Valley. The eastern campaigns gave Achaemenid authority over the rich caravan routes of Central Asia and brought Indian mercenaries and elephants into the Achaemenid military establishment.
The final campaign was against the Massagetae, a nomadic people of the Central Asian steppe. Herodotus places them east of the Caspian; modern identifications vary. The Greek tradition is unified on the outcome: Queen Tomyris of the Massagetae warned Cyrus against the invasion, Cyrus ignored the warning, and his army was destroyed in a battle in which Cyrus himself was killed. The basic fact of the death is confirmed by the Achaemenid inscriptions, which date the death of Cyrus to the summer of 530 BCE. The location — east of the Caspian, in the territory of the modern Central Asian republics — is consistent with what we know of Cyrus’ later campaigns. The body was brought back to Pasargadae and interred in the chamber on the stepped platform where it now lies, or rather where a copy now lies; the original sarcophagus was empty when Alexander visited, and has been empty since.
Why the reputation is favourable
The reputation of Cyrus in the ancient world was almost uniformly positive, which is unusual for any ancient ruler. Herodotus and Xenophon (the Cyropaedia is a partly historical, partly philosophical idealisation) present him as a model of just kingship. The Hebrew Bible, in Ezra and Isaiah, presents him as the anointed of the Lord. The Babylonian tradition, in the Cyrus Cylinder, presents him as the chosen of Marduk. The Achaemenid inscriptions of his successors treat him as the founder of the dynasty and the model of the pious and just ruler.
In the modern world, Cyrus has been a focal point of Iranian national memory, claimed by the Zoroastrian community as a great patron of the faith, and exhibited in the British Museum and at the United Nations as a kind of proto-liberal ruler. The judgment of history, in the older sense, has been favourable. The figure on the U.N. plaza in New York, with the cuneiform inscription on the gold-leaf replica of the cylinder, is the Pahlavi-era Iran reading of Cyrus, and it is a particular reading. Cyrus’ political and military gifts were real, but his genius was the genius of an empire-builder who understood that ruling wisely in victory is harder than winning the war. The Achaemenid administrative system that he and his successors constructed was strong enough to survive his death by two centuries, and to shape the administrative practice of every later Iranian empire.
Whether Cyrus deserves the adjective “Great” — the title the Greeks gave him and that we have kept — is a question I have come to think is the wrong one. The right question is what the Achaemenid state would have looked like without him, and the answer is: smaller, more Median, less ambitious, and almost certainly absorbed by something else within a generation. Cyrus is “the Great” because the empire he founded lasted long enough to be worth studying in its own right, and that is something he could not have guaranteed.
Reading
Briant (2002) is the place to start. Brosius (2020) for the Babylonian context. Kuhrt (2007) for the primary sources. Stronach (1978) for the tomb and the capital. Wiesehöfer (1996) for the German scholarly tradition, which is sometimes more sceptical of Herodotus than the English-language tradition. The most useful single article on the Cyrus Cylinder is Finkel (2013); for the older reading, see Smith (1924), and for the political use of Cyrus in modern Iran, see Abdi (2001).