“Iranians have long been proud of their ancient history and culture,” Iranian journalist and Middle East analyst Saeid Jafari has written. The Achaemenid empire’s (559-330 BCE) founder, Cyrus the Great, looms particularly large in Iranian memory as a proud symbol of enlightened, tolerant rule, notwithstanding the scorn of modern Iran’s theocratic masters.
“Cyrus’s reign [559-529 BCE] is warmly remembered as the Persian equivalent of Camelot, the mythical English court ruled by King Arthur,” Moment writer Robert S. Greenberger has noted. Iranian expatriate students of ancient Persia have thus enthused online that Cyrus, whose name means “sun-like,” was the “father of the Iranian nation” and the first world leader called “the Great.” He is especially renowned for his eponymous Cyrus Cylinder, among the “most iconic objects of the ancient world,” as the Christian Science Monitor has observed.
This baked-clay cylinder marks Cyrus’ 539 BCE peaceful conquest of politically-divided Babylon with a proclamation by the “king of the universe,” as his Persian empire was the largest then known to the world. Upon entering Babylon, Cyrus proclaimed in an address his intention to “respect the traditions, customs and religions of the nations of my empire.” Thus the “first charter of human rights ever set to paper predates the Magna Carta by some 1,700 years,” Greenberger has written.
The cylinder’s cuneiform inscriptions express a similar message lauded by the Iranian expatriates. “Antedating the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen by more than two millennia,” the cylinder “can also be considered as a world treasure — and the first international declaration of human rights.” British Museum Director Neil MacGregor, who oversaw the cylinder’s current home since its discovery in 1879, has praised that “Cyrus invented a model of how to run a multilingual, multifaith, multicultural society” that “provided 200 years of stability,” albeit “held together by military force.” MacGregor noted that Cyrus was a “guiding light” to American Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson, who reportedly owned two copies of ancient Greek historian Xenophon’s Cyrus biography, Cyropaedia.
For Jews such as those at Moment magazine, it is particularly notable that the tolerant “Cyrus is also sometimes referred to as the world’s first Zionist,” as Greenberger has observed. Cyrus’ overthrow of Babylon “righted the wrong done by King Nebuchadnezzar II 58 years earlier when he captured Jerusalem and Judah, and exiled thousands of Jews.” Cyrus “offered the Jews the opportunity to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple at Persian taxpayer expense. Many accepted,” Greenberger wrote.
The British Telegraph newspaper has correspondingly noted that “Cyrus and the cylinder are regarded with intense national pride” in Iran. “Iranians take a lot of pride in the old civilization started by Cyrus,” Iranian-American Jewish Federation Secretary General Sam Kermanian has stated. The Iranian expatriate students described online the cylinder’s “especial resonance for the Iranian peoples” and “integral part of Iran’s cultural heritage and national identity.”
Before the 1979 Islamic revolution overthrew Iran’s late shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, he capitalized in the 1960s on the cylinder’s popularity to promote his regime worldwide. The shah’s sister gave then United Nations (UN) Secretary General Sithu U Thant a cylinder replica in 1971, and it has hung next to the UN Security Council Chamber in UN headquarters in New York ever since. Dutch historian Jona Lendering has assessed that the “cylinder played an important role in the imperial propaganda” for a shah who “tried to prove that the secular Iran with religious freedom that he wanted to promote had existed before.”
Although wounding to Iranian pride, some historians like Lendering have dismissed the cylinder as, in Josef Wiesehöfer words, a “propaganda inscription,” as Cyrus the “real king was not more or less brutal than other ancient kings of the near east.” Historian Tom Holland denounced the cylinder as “absolute nonsense,” for the “ancient Persians were not some early form of Swedish Social Democrats.” He claimed that the UN, an organization “so Western in its philosophical underpinnings,” promoted the cylinder in order to claim eastern civilizational roots.
Yet the Islamic Republic of Iran’s theocrats have had more negative reactions to Cyrus and his cylinder than international academics. “The history of ancient pre-Islamic Iran is viewed with considerable disdain by the pan-Islamists of Iran,” University of British Columbia historian Kaveh Farrokh has noted. Therefore many regime members “have attempted to write out the history of pre-Islamic Iran (including Cyrus the Great) from the educational curricula of Iran since 1979.” “The main focus of these particular Mullahs is the pan-Islamic discourse which is in fact against the heritage of ancient (pre-Islamic) Iran, India and the west.”
The 2003 Guardian obituary for Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, for example, noted his well-deserved reputation as a “hanging judge…at the forefront of the reign of terror that followed the Iranian revolution in 1979.” In Iran,he was additionally “committed to Islamification at all costs.” Correspondingly, the Iranian internet commentators recalled his book that “smeared” Cyrus as “tyrant, a liar” and how Khalkhali had also claimed that Cyrus’ historical record “was a concoction by the late Shah.”
Tormenters such as Khalkhali rightly fear Iranian memories of Cyrus the Great, however inflated. The ancient king gives modern Iranians not just a national identity apart from Islam, but also a vision of possible tolerant ideological alternatives. The Islamic Republic’s troubled relationship with his legacy thus extends beyond his cylinder to historical sites from his era such as the Achaemenid capital Persepolis. Here the shah in 1971 marked the 2,500 anniversary of Cyrus’ empire in a famously luxurious celebration, complete with his cylinder loaned from the British Museum, as the next article in this series will examine.