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Cyrus cylinder
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The Cyrus cylinder, also known as the Cyrus the Great cylinder, is a document issued by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great in the form of a clay cylinder inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform script. The cylinder was created following the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, when Cyrus overthrew the Babylonian king Nabonidus and replaced him as ruler, ending the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The text of the cylinder denounces Nabonidus as impious and portrays the victorious Cyrus as pleasing to the chief Babylonian god Marduk.
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The Cyrus cylinder, also known as the Cyrus the Great cylinder, is a document issued by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great in the form of a clay cylinder inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform script. The cylinder was created following the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, when Cyrus overthrew the Babylonian king Nabonidus and replaced him as ruler, ending the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The text of the cylinder denounces Nabonidus as impious and portrays the victorious Cyrus as pleasing to the chief Babylonian god Marduk. It goes on to describe how Cyrus had improved the lives of the citizens of Babylonia, repatriated displaced peoples and restored temples and cult sanctuaries.
The cylinder was discovered in 1879 by the Assyro-British archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam in the foundations of the Esagila, the main temple of Babylon, where it had been placed as a foundation deposit. It is today kept in the British Museum in London. There have been reports of attempts by the directors of the British Museum and the National Museum of Iran in Tehran to arrange a loan of the Cyrus Cylinder to be temporarily displayed in the National Museum of Iran for a special exhibition.
According to the British Museum, the cylinder "reflects a long tradition in Mesopotamia where, from as early as the third millennium BC, kings began their reigns with declarations of reforms." It is composed in a form that broadly matches long-standing Babylonian styles and themes, although the use of the first person marks a striking departure from this pattern. The cylinder may be seen as an example of Cyrus seeking the loyalty of his new Babylonian subjects by stressing his legitimacy as king, and showing his respect for the religious and political traditions of Babylonia. It has been regarded for over a century as an instrument of ancient Mesopotamian propaganda. In the early 1970s, the Shah of Iran adopted it as a symbol of his reign and celebrating 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy, asserting that it was "the first human rights charter in history",, though historians have criticized this idea as "anachronistic and erroneous". The cylinder has also attracted attention in the context of the repatriation of the Jews to Jerusalem following their Babylonian captivity; it has generally been viewed as corroboration of the Biblical account in the Book of Ezra (see: Ezra 1.1-6, 6.1-5; Isaiah 44.23-45.8; 2 Chronicles 36.22-23).
Description and content
The text consists of two fragments, known as "A" (lines: 1-35, measures: 23 x 8 cm) and "B" (36-45, 8.6 x 5.6 cm). "A" has always been in the British Museum. "B" was reunited with the main fragment in 1971, after being identified as a fragment of the cylinder by P.-R. Berger in 1970. It was originally kept in the Babylonian Collection of Yale University, which acquired it from an antiquities dealer. The inscription has six distinct parts in its 45 lines: first, a introduction reviling Nabonidus, the previous king of Babylon, and associating Cyrus with the god Marduk (lines 1-19); second, a royal protocol and genealogy (lines 20-22); third, a commendation of Cyrus's policy of restoring Babylon (lines 22-34); fourth, a prayer to Marduk by Cyrus on behalf of himself and his son Cambyses (lines 34-35); fifth, a declaration about the good condition of the Persian Empire (lines 36-37); and finally, details of the building activities ordered by Cyrus in Babylon (lines 38-45).
The start of the text is partly broken but from the surviving content, it appears to begin with an attack on the character of Nabonidus; it lists his alleged crimes, charging him with desecration of the temples of the gods and the imposition of forced labor upon the populace. Because of these offences, the writer declares, the god Marduk has withdrawn his support from the Babylonian king. Marduk thus calls upon a foreign king, Cyrus of the Persians, to enter Babylon and become its new ruler with the god's divine blessing:
- "The worship of Marduk, the king of the gods, he [Nabonidus] [chang]ed into abomination. Daily he used to do evil against his city [Babylon] ... He [Marduk] scanned and looked [through] all the countries, searching for a righteous ruler willing to lead [him] [in the annual procession]. [Then] he pronounced the name of Cyrus, king of Anshan, declared him to be[come] the ruler of all the world."
Cyrus goes on to call himself "king of the world, great king, legitimate king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters (of the earth), son of Cambyses, great king, king of Anshan, descendent of Teispes, great king, king of Anshan, of a family (which) always (exercised) kingship; whose rule Bel and Nabu love, whom they want as king to please their hearts." He describes the pious deeds he performed after his conquest: he restored peace to Babylon and the other cities sacred to Marduk, freeing their inhabitants from their "yoke", and he "brought relief to their dilapidated housing (thus) putting an end to their (main) complaints." He repaired the ruined temples in the cities he conquered, restored their cults, and returned their sacred images as well as their former inhabitants which Narbonidus had taken to Babylon. In the smaller "B" fragment of the cylinder, Cyrus says: "In [the gateway] I saw inscribed the name of my predecessor King Ashurbanipal". The remainder is missing but presumably describes Cyrus's rededication of the gateway mentioned.
The fragmentary nature of the inscription meant that the full text of the cylinder was, for a long time, unclear and incomplete. A partial translation by F.H. Weissbach in 1911 was supplanted by a much more complete transcription after the identification of the "B" fragment; this is now available in German and in English.
Interpretation
As an instrument of legitimizing royal rule
The type and formulation of the cylinder was typically Babylonian and stands in a Mesopotamian tradition, dating back to the third millennium BC, of kings making similar declarations of their own righteousness when beginning their reigns. The cylinder is an example of a specific Mesopotamian literary genre, the royal building inscription, which had no equivalent in Old Persian literature. The text illustrates how Cyrus co-opted local traditions and symbols to legitimize his control of Babylon. Many elements of the text were drawn from traditional Mesopotamian themes; Amélie Kuhrt notes that "such pious examples of temple work were part of a standard process of legitimisation in Babylonia, and thus follow conventional forms". These forms included a number of standard tropes, all of which are visible in the Cyrus cylinder: the preceding king is vilified and he is proclaimed to have been abandoned by the gods for his wickedness; the new king has gained power through the divine will of the gods; the new king rights the wrongs of his predecessor, addressing the welfare of the people; the sanctuaries of the gods are rebuilt or restored, offerings to the gods are made or increased and the blessings of the gods are sought; and repairs are made to the whole city, in the manner of earlier rightful kings.
Two notable points of comparison are the earlier commemorative cylinder of Marduk-apla-iddina II, who seized the Babylonian throne in 722/1 BC, and the annals of Sargon II of Assyria, who conquered Babylon twelve years later. As a usurper, Marduk-apla-iddina faced many of the same issues of legitimacy that Cyrus was later to face as conqueror of Babylon. He declares himself to have been chosen personally by Marduk, who ensured his victory. When he took power he performed the sacred rites and restored the sacred shrines. He states that he found a royal inscription placed in the temple foundations by an earlier Babylonian king, which he left undisturbed and honored. All of these claims also appear in Cyrus's cylinder. Twelve years later, the Assyrian king Sargon II defeated and exiled Marduk-apla-iddina, taking up the kingship of Babylonia. Sargon's annals describe how he took on the duties of a Babylonian sovereign, honoring the gods, maintaining their temples and respecting and upholding the privileges of the urban elite. Again, Cyrus's cylinder makes exactly the same points. The text of the cylinder thus indicates a strong continuity with centuries of Babylonian tradition, as part of an established rhetoric advanced by conquerors and usurpers. As Kuhrt puts it, the cylinder
- "reflects the pressure that Babylonian citizens were able to bring to bear on the new royal claimant ... In this context, the reign of the defeated predecessor was automatically described as bad and against the divine will - how else could he have been defeated? By implication, of course, all his acts became, inevitably and retrospectively, tainted."
Kuhrt observes that "the main significance of the text lies in the insight it provides into the mechanism used by Cyrus to legitimize his conquest of Babylon by manipulating local traditions." The degree of familiarity with Babylonian tropes suggests that the cylinder was authored not by the Persians but by the Babylonian priests of Marduk, working at the behest of Cyrus. The cylinder can be compared with another work of around the same time, the Verse Account of Nabonidus, in which the former Babylonian ruler is excoriated as the enemy of the priests of Marduk and Cyrus is presented as the liberator of Babylon. Both works make a point of stressing Cyrus's qualifications as a king from a line of kings, in contrast to the non-royal ancestry of Nabonidus, who is described by the cylinder as matû, "insignificant". The Verse Account is so similar to the cylinder inscription that the two texts have been dubbed an example of "literary dependence" - not a direct dependence of one upon the other, but mutual dependence upon a common source, characterised by Morton Smith as "the propaganda put out in Babylonia by Cyrus' agents, shortly before Cyrus' conquest, to prepare the way of their lord." This viewpoint has been disputed; as Simon J. Sherwin puts it, the cylinder and the Verse Account are ex eventu compositions which utilise pre-existing Mesopotamian literary themes and do not need to be explained as the product of pre-conquest Persian propaganda.
The cylinder describes Cyrus returning to their original sanctuaries the statues of the gods that Nabonidus had brought to the city before the Persian invasion, thus restoring the normal cultic order to the satisfaction of the priesthood. Where the cylinder speaks of temples being restored and deported groups being returned to their homelands, it does not speak of a general empire-wide program but of activities specifically directed at specific places in the border region between Babylonia and Persia, including sites that had been devastated by earlier Babylonian military campaigns. Such locations were of significant strategic importance within the empire. The cylinder indicates that Cyrus sought to acquire the loyalty of the ravaged regions by funding reconstruction, the return of temple properties and the repatriation of the displaced populations. However, it is unclear how much actually changed on the ground; there is no archaeological evidence for any rebuilding or repairing of Mesopotamian temples during Cyrus' reign.
In Cyrus' age, contemporary invaders considered the massacre and enslavement of conquered peoples to be standard practice in warfare. Conquering kings proudly recorded in royal inscriptions their brutality in sacking and destroying the lands that they had invaded. Only a century before, the Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal had massacred Babylonian rebels after a two-year siege of the city. Massacre and pillaging was thus seen as the natural consequence of defeat. Cyrus' conciliatory treatment of the Babylonians broke with this tradition. Some have suggested that the Persians' policy towards their subject peoples, as described by the cylinder, was an expression of tolerance, moderation and generosity; however, others argue that, while his treatment was indeed conciliatory, it was driven by the needs of the Persian Empire, and was not an expression of tolerance by Cyrus. The empire was too large to be centrally directed and Cyrus sought to establish a decentralized system of government, based on existing territorial units. The magnanimity shown by Cyrus won him praise and gratitude from those he spared. The policy of "toleration" described by the cylinder was thus, as Rainer Albertz puts it, "an expression of conservative support for local regions to serve the political interests of the whole [empire]." Alberto Soggin comments that it was more "a matter of practicality and economy ... [as] it was simpler, and indeed cost less, to obtain the spontaneous collaboration of their subjects at a local level than to have to impose their sovereignty by force."
The text presents Cyrus as entering Babylon peacefully and being welcomed by the population as a liberator. While this was apparently accurate - the Persians seem to have entered Babylon without serious resistance - the text does not mention the preceding Battle of Opis, in which Cyrus's forces defeated the army of Nabonidus. As Walton and Hill put it, the claim of a wholly peaceful takeover acclaimed by the people is "standard conqueror's rhetoric and may obscure other facts".
Julye Bidmead also notes that "the [Persian] propaganda regarding Nabonidus' rule is extensive" and the cylinder's claims about his record are not supported by many of the known facts. In contrast to the vilification expressed by the cylinder, the reign of Nabonidus was peaceful, he was recognised as a legitimate king and he undertook a variety of building projects and military campaigns commensurate with his claim to be "the king of Babylon, the universe and the four corners [of the Earth]". Having said that, Nabonidus seems to have been deeply unpopular with the Babylonian priestly elite for his northern ancestry, his introduction of foreign gods and his self-imposed exile which was said to have prevented the celebration of the vital New Year festival.. Professor G. Buchanan Gray opines:"Making all allowance for the natural bias in Cyrus’ own inscriptions, and for the Nabonidus-Cyrus Chronicle written and completed after his success was achieved and he had become king of Babylon, it is clear that Cyrus obtained the throne and empire of Babylon with the acquiescence, not to say on the invitation, of a large part of the population. He cam to free them from a ruler who had forfeited their adhesion: he accepted the throne as the gift of their own god Marduk [p.12] …He was the founder of a new dynasty over a willing people, not a foreign conqueror indifferent to them and their interests [p.12-13]…Cyrus immediately reversed the religious policy of Nabonidus, which had provoked great resentment, and in other respects in his attitude to the Babylonian gods he put himself right with the people. Whereas Nabonidus…had gathered into the capital the images of the gods of from various outlying temples…Cyrus sent back the gods and human beings, also who had been exiled, to their cities and re-established them there. Among the districts to which he sent back the gods were Western Elam…[p.13] ".
Old Testament studies
The Bible records that some Jews returned to their homeland from Babylon, where they had been settled by Nebuchadrezzar, to rebuild the temple following an edict from Cyrus (Ezra 1. 1-4). This is also confirmed by the Jewish historian of the first century, Joseph Flavius who provides a more detailed account than the Bible. Many scholars have cited one particular passage from the Cylinder to confirm the Old Testament account:
... From [Babylon] to Aššur and (from) Susa, (31) Agade, Ešnunna, Zamban, Me-Turnu, Der, as far as the region of Gutium, the sacred centers on the other side of the Tigris, whose sanctuaries had been abandoned for a long time, (32) I returned the images of the gods, who had resided there [i.e., in Babylon], to their places and I let them dwell in eternal abodes. I gathered all their inhabitants and returned to them their dwellings.
Although it does not specifically mention Judah or the Jews, the last phrase of line 32 has generally been interpreted as a reference to Cyrus' policy of allowing deportees to return to their original lands, the Jews among them. For example, Dandamayev mentions: "According to the Cyrus cylinder, he permitted foreigners who had been forcibly settled in Babylonia to return to their own lands, including the Jews of the Babylonian captivity, who were also permitted to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. Two versions of his edict on the latter point have been preserved in the Book of Ezra, one in Hebrew, the other in Aramaic." . While most scholars acknowledge that the Cylinder cannot be used as absolute confirmation of the Book of Ezra, it is generally accepted that the text of the Cyrus Cylinder corresponds closely to the spirit of the decree described there.
Lisbet S. Fried, reflecting on the Cyrus cylinder and the priests of Marduk believes that the Deutero-Isaiah: "delivered up to the Persian conquerer the entire theology that had defined the local king. Like his counterparts in Egypt and Babylon, Deutero-Isaiah was convinced that Cyrus was in actuality the genuine Judean king, i.e., YHWH's anointed, his Messiah, because he brought back the status quo ante. He rebuilt the temple, ordered the temple vessels replaced in it, and permitted the Jews to return to worship their God in Zion restored".
As a charter of human rights
The Cyrus cylinder has been called "the world's first declaration of human rights" by some scholars,, a position that was strongly advocated by the pre-1979 Iranian regime. It was first put forward in a 1967 book, The White Revolution of Iran, by the then Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who made Cyrus the Great a key figure in government ideology and associated himself personally with the Achaemenids. A number of contemporary scholars such as Robertson and Merrills (1996), Ramcharan (2008) and Ritmeyer have cited the cylinder as the world's first human rights declaration, a view not shared by all researchers of the domain including Briant.
In his 1971 Nowruz (New Year) speech, the shah declared that 1971 would be "Cyrus the Great Year", during which a grand commemoration would be held to celebrate 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. It would serve as a showcase for a modern Iran in which the contributions that Iran had made to world civilization would be recognized. The main theme of the commemoration was the centrality of the monarchy within Iran's political system, identifying the shah with the famous monarchs of Persia's past, and with Cyrus the Great in particular. The shah looked to the Achaemenid period as "a moment from the national past that could best serve as a model and a slogan for the imperial society he hoped to create."
The Cyrus cylinder was adopted as the symbol for the commemoration, and Iranian magazines and journals published numerous articles about ancient Persian history. The British Museum loaned the original cylinder to the Iranian government for the duration of the festivities; it was put on display at the Shahyad Monument (now the Azadi Tower) in Tehran, where a replica of the cylinder is still on display. The 2,500 year celebrations commenced on October 12, 1971 and culminated a week later with a spectacular parade at the tomb of Cyrus in Pasargadae. On October 14, the shah's sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, presented the United Nations Secretary General U Thant with a replica of the cylinder. The princess asserted that "the heritage of Cyrus was the heritage of human understanding, tolerance, courage, compassion and, above all, human liberty". The Secretary General accepted the gift, linking the cylinder with the efforts of the United Nations General Assembly to address "the question of Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflict". Since then the replica cylinder has been kept at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City on the second floor hallway, and the text has been translated into all six official U.N. languages. A fake translation - affirming, among other things, the right to self-determination - has spread, too, and was even quoted by Shirin Ebadi when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.
The interpretation of the cylinder as a "charter of human rights" has been criticized by a number of scholars and characterized as political propaganda on the part of the Pahlavi regime. Josef Wiesehöfer comments: "Cyrus can be viewed as a human rights pioneer just as little as the Shah can be viewed as an enlightened and philantropic ruler." Neil MacGregor, the Director of the British Museum, writes that the cylinder was used by the Shah as "a mantra of his newly constructed national identity" and remarks that the assertion that Iran was the birthplace of human rights "must have startled many who had tried to assert their human rights under his regime." He comments that the cylinder is "in no real sense an Iranian document, but is part of a much larger history of the ancient Near East, of Mesopotamian kingship, and of the Jewish diaspora." C.B.F. Walker, writing in the immediate aftermath of the Shah's commemorations, comments that the cylinder "is a normal building inscription within the Assyrian-Babylonian tradition, and can certainly not be regarded as some declaration of human rights". Bill T. Arnold and Piotr Michalowski comment: "Generically, it belongs with other foundation deposit inscriptions; it is not an edict of any kind, nor does it provide any unusual human rights proclamation as is sometimes claimed."
One study by Hirad Abtahi on the interpretation of Cyrus cylinder as the first charter of human rights notes the paradox emerged from denying such interpretation; one the one hand (the universalistic view that) human rights, as advocated, are universal and thus should be applied by all members from different cultures of international community and on the other hand (the relativistic view that) this universal value is seen as an exclusive emanation of one selected cultures, that is the one linking itself to the Athenian democracy. Moreover any other interpretation of Cyrus cylinder like "an instrument of legitimizing royal rule" fails to be justified as Cyrus issued the document and granted those rights when he was at the height of his power and there was no popular opposition nor any danger to cause his empire to break up so that issuing such document could be viewed as a last-choice compromise to save his reign.
Cyrus's policies toward subjugated nations were certainly different from those of the Assyrians and Babylonians, who had treated subject people harshly; he permitted the resettling of those who had been previously deported and sponsored the reconstruction of religious buildings. However, it has been argued that interpreting this in the context of human rights is an anachronism alien to the historical context. Elton L. Daniel criticizes recent scholarship for its emphasis on Cyrus' tolerance, and his championing of "human rights", describing such scholarship as "rather anachronistic" and tendentious. T.C. Mitchell's view is that such an interpretation of the cylinder as 'the first charter of human rights' "reflects a misunderstanding." Curtis, Tallis, and Salvini note that despite the Cylinder's reference to a just and peaceful rule, and reporation of deported people, the modern concept of human rights would have been quite alien to Cyrus's contemporaries and is not mentioned by the cylinder. But return of the Jews and other deportees was a significant policy reversal of earlier Assyrian and Babylonian Kings.
MacGregor points out that "Comparison by scholars in the British Museum with other similar texts showed that rulers in ancient Iraq had been making comparable declarations upon succeeding to the [Babylonian] throne for two millennia before Cyrus" and notes "it is one of the museum's tasks to resist the narrowing of the object's meaning and its appropriation to one political agenda". Cyrus has often been depicted as a particularly humane ruler, based on his characterization by ancient sources such as Persian texts, the Old Testament of the Bible and Herodotus, but as M.A. Dandamaev points out, "almost all the texts ... which praise Cyrus have the character of propagandistic writings and demand a very critical approach ... by accepting everything said in the texts which were composed by Babylonian priests, we ourselves become the victims of Cyrus' propaganda."
Arguing in favour of the "human rights charter" viewpoint, Reza Shabani asserts that the cylinder "discusses human rights in a way unique for the era, dealing with ways to protect the honor, prestige, and religious beliefs of all the nations dependent to Iran in those days."
Literature
Editions and translations
The latest edition of the Akkadian language text is:
- Hanspeter Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros' des Großen, samt den in ihrem Umfeld entstandenen Tendenzschriften. Textausgabe und Grammatik. (2001 Münster, Ugarit-Verlag) ( with English translation based on Cogan 2003).
Older translations and transliterations:
- Rawlinson, H.C., & Th.G. Pinches, A Selection from the Miscellaneous Inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia (1884, 1909 London: fragment A only)).
- Rogers, Robert William: Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (1912), New York, Eaton & Mains (: fragment A only).
- Pritchard, James B. (ed.): Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET) (1950, 1955, 1969). Translation by A. L. Oppenheim. (fragment A and B).
- P.-R. Berger, "Der Kyros-Zylinder mit dem Susatzfragment BIN II Nr.32 und die akkidischen Personennamen im Danielbuch" in: Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 65 (1975) 192-234
- Mordechai Cogan's translation, in W.H. Hallo and K.L. Younger, The Context of Scripture vol. II, Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World (2003, Leiden and Boston) ( with Schaudig's transliteration)
- Brosius, Maria (ed.): The Persian Empire from Cyrus II to Artaxerxes I (2000, London Association of Classical Teachers (LACT) 16, London.
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