User talk:Khoikhoi/Cyrus cylinder


 * The cylinder has also attracted attention in the context of the repatriation of the Jews to Jerusalem following their Babylonian captivity; many have viewed it as corroboration of the account in the Book of Ezra, though the extent to which this is the case remains disputed.


 * 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 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 point 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 maţû, "insignificant".


 * 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, but his decision was not merely a matter of principle. The Persian 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, as he intended. 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]."


 * The cylinder also provides evidence of how Cyrus saw his place as king (or, at least, how he wanted to be seen). In the text, he declares himself to be the king of the world and a king of kings, boasting of how "all the kings of the entire world ... brought their heavy tributes and kissed my feet in Babylon". He emphasizes his pre-eminence as the chosen one of the gods, identifies his son Cambyses as likewise being divinely blessed and implicitly anoints Cambyses as his successor. He restores order in the temples and improves the well-being of the people. He portrays himself as the fulcrum of the Persian empire, highlighting his role as the head of the personal union of Persia and its subject territories. The outcome of Cyrus's conquest is the replacement of tyranny with just rule, of impiety with piety and of suffering with happiness among Marduk's people.


 * Cyrus' conquest of Babylon is presented in the cylinder's text as the culminating moment of his career, leading automatically to the submission of all other rulers. In fact, it is unclear who might have paid homage to Cyrus after his conquest. It is likely that he would have received the submissions of the subject-kings and governors of the overthrown Babylonian Empire, and the cylinder's allusion to kings "who dwell in tents" suggests that he also received the submission of nomadic tribes along the empire's borders. Such groups would have wished to establish good relations with the new regime in order to ensure that their trade routes remained open.


 * The author of the cylinder is somewhat economical with the truth in describing the immediate circumstances of Cyrus's entry into Babylon. The text presents Cyrus as presenting Babylon peacefully and being welcomed by the population as a liberator. While this was technically accurate - the Persians seem to have entered Babylon without serious resistance - the text is careful to avoid mentioning 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.


 * Although it does not mention Judah or the Jews, the last phrase of line 32 has been interpreted as a reference to Cyrus' policy of allowing deportees to return to their original lands. However, this view has been challenged by Amelie Kuhrt, who argued that the people referred to are not deportees but people associated with the returned god images' cult. Diana Edelman has pointed out chronological difficulties that arise when we accept that the Jews returned during the reign of Cyrus, although it has been argued that she based her conclusions on questionable treatments of genealogical lists and unsubstantiated links between various figures in the early Persian period There is no clear independent evidence to confirm the Biblical claim that Cyrus freed the Jews and that God had "charged him to build a temple in Jerusalem". The Cyrus Cylinder does correspond closely to the spirit of the decree described in Ezra, particularly the divinely chosen status of Cyrus. As with other texts from the same period, it credits the god of his intended audience for his success and makes claims of worship, piety and religious tolerance that recall the claims of Ezra. Although it cannot be used to confirm directly the authenticity of the decree cited in Ezra, it suggests that in "restoring" the Temple in Jerusalem, Cyrus acted strategically to grant privileged status to the city to gain the support and cooperation of its people. Israel's sensitive location close to Egypt made it a particularly sensitive area for the Persians, who would have had a strong interest in ensuring that it was firmly in their hands.


 * The Cyrus cylinder is considered by Iran to be "the first declaration of human rights", an assertion that has also been made by a number of writers. This characterization emerged in the early 1970s at the initiative of the then Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who made Cyrus the Great a key figure in government ideology and associated himself personally with the Achaemenids. 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 government made a concerted effort to present the Achaemenid king as a humane and enlightened figure, a theme addressed in the 1971 budget speech of Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveida:


 * "Since the beginning of its glorious history, our country has been famous for peace, friendship and humanity, and this can clearly be proved by studying the methods and measures of the great kings such as Cyrus the Great, whose efforts made possible our celebration next year of the 2500th anniversary of the Iranian monarchy."


 * The 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.


 * The notion 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. Neil MacGregor, the Director of the British Museum, argues 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".


 * It has also been argued that the concept of human rights is an anachronism alien to the historical context. Elton L. Daniel critizes the interpretation of the cylinder as a charter of human rights as being both anachronistic and tendentious. 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 millenia 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."

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 * The Iranian historian Kaveh Farrokh has rejected this interpretation, asserting that it is inconsistent with independent Mesopotamian, Greek, and Biblical sources, as well as archaeological findings.

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). Many scholars have cited one particular passage from the Cylinder to confirm the Old Testament account:


 * (30) ... 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.