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What is the Cyrus Cylinder?

The Cyrus Cylinder or Cyrus Charter is an ancient clay cylinder, now broken into several pieces, on which is written a declaration in Akkadian cuneiform script in the name of Persia’s Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great. It dates from the 6th century BC and was discovered in the ruins of Babylon in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in 1879. It is currently in the possession of the British Museum, which sponsored the expedition that discovered the cylinder. It was created and used as a foundation deposit following the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire was invaded by Cyrus and incorporated into his Persian Empire.

The text on the Cylinder praises Cyrus, sets out his genealogy and portrays him as a king from a line of kings. The Babylonian king Nabonidus, who was defeated and deposed by Cyrus, is denounced as an impious oppressor of the people of Babylonia and his low-born origins are implicitly contrasted to Cyrus’ kingly heritage. The victorious Cyrus is portrayed as having been chosen by the chief Babylonian god Marduk to restore peace and order to the Babylonians. The text states that Cyrus was welcomed by the people of Babylon as their new ruler and entered the city in peace. It appeals to Marduk to protect and help Cyrus and his son Cambyses. It extols Cyrus as a benefactor of the citizens of Babylonia who improved their lives, repatriated displaced people and restored temples and cult sanctuaries across Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the region. It concludes with a description of how Cyrus repaired the city wall of Babylon and found a similar inscription placed there by an earlier king.

The Cylinder’s text has traditionally been seen by biblical scholars as corroborative evidence of Cyrus’ policy of the repatriation of the Jewish people following their Babylonian captivity (an act that the Book of Ezra attributes to Cyrus), as the text refers to the restoration of cult sanctuaries and repatriation of deported peoples. This interpretation has been disputed, as the text identifies only Mesopotamian sanctuaries, and makes no mention of Jews, Jerusalem, or Judea. The Cylinder has also been referred to by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran as the first declaration of universal human rights, a view rejected by some historians as anachronistic and a misunderstanding of the Cylinder’s generic nature as a typical statement made by a new monarch at the beginning of his reign. In contrast there are some historians who accept that the Cyrus Cylinder is an early formulation of human rights] Neil MacGregor, former Director of the British Museum, has stated that the cylinder was “the first attempt we know about running a society, a state with different nationalities and faiths—a new kind of statecraft”. Neil Macgregor also said that the Cyrus Cylinder: “is a very early formulation of human rights. Not individual rights because the Cyrus Cylinder isn’t about individuals, but about the rights of communities which was something that of course was very fundamental to the early phases, particularly the United Nations on how nations and communities be protected.” It was adopted as a national symbol of Iran by the Imperial State which put it on display in Tehran in 1971 to commemorate 2,500 year celebration of the Persian Empire. On October 14, 1971, 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 cylinder “is one of the great expressions of a long human aspiration,” says former British Museum Director Neil MacGregor. He notes that the example of Cyrus was a “guiding light” to the American Founding Fathers, with Thomas Jefferson said to have owned two copies of Xenophon’s book Cyropaedia, a biography of Cyrus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder