Cyrus the Great
What the Cyrus Cylinder Says, and What the Sources Show About 8 Famous Stories

Cyrus II, known as Cyrus the Great, founded the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the 6th century BC. He is remembered as a liberator, a friend of every religion and even the author of the world’s first human-rights charter.

Some of that rests on a real object. It is a clay cylinder, written in Babylonian cuneiform after he took Babylon, in which he speaks in the first person. Some of it was added much later.

This page sets out the main sources and what the Cyrus Cylinder says in its own words. Then it looks at eight popular claims. For a shorter entry on Cyrus beside 29 other figures, see The Most Influential People in History.

A short life

His dates. The Encyclopaedia Iranica gives his dates as about 600 to 530 BC. Those dates are worked out backwards from Greek reports.

Cicero, following the Greek historian Dinon, says Cyrus became king at forty and ruled for thirty years. Herodotus has him reign one year short of thirty years. From these, the Iranica puts his accession as king of Persia in 559 BC.

Media and beyond. He rebelled against his overlord, the Median king Astyages. A Babylonian chronicle records that Astyages’ own army rebelled and handed him over to Cyrus. The Iranica dates that entry to 550 BC; some scholars allow a range from 554 to 550 BC.

Cyrus went on to take Sardis, the capital of the Lydian king Croesus in Asia Minor, and lands far to the east.

Babylon. In 539 BC his army met the Babylonians at Opis on the Tigris. In A. K. Grayson’s translation, the Babylonian chronicle says that at Opis “He carried off the plunder (and) slaughtered the people”. Days later his army entered Babylon without battle.

The Assyriologist W. G. Lambert read the Opis line differently. In his reading, Cyrus took plunder and defeated the Babylonian soldiers, with no slaughter of the population. The historian R. J. van der Spek, who quotes that reading, calls it possible but finds it unlikely.

Cyrus himself entered the city on 29 October 539 BC. Herodotus and Xenophon tell a different story, in which the Babylonians put up a determined resistance.

Death. He died in 530 BC. In the Iranica’s account, he was on a campaign against the Massagetae, on the north-eastern edge of his empire. He was buried at Pasargadae, his capital in Pars, the homeland of the Persians, in today’s Iran. How he died is one of the claims below.

The sources, and what each one is

This page draws mainly on five sources, and they are very different kinds of text.

• The Cyrus Cylinder. A clay cylinder inscribed in Akkadian, found in 1879 by Hormuzd Rassam during excavations at Babylon and now in the British Museum. A second fragment, at Yale, was later identified as part of the same text, which runs to 45 lines, with the end incomplete.

  It belongs to a long Mesopotamian tradition of inscriptions buried in the foundations of buildings. It was composed by priests of Marduk, the chief god of Babylon.

• The Nabonidus Chronicle. A badly damaged Babylonian chronicle covering the reign of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, and the rise of Cyrus.

• Herodotus. The Greek historian says he followed some of the Persians: those who wanted to tell the truth about Cyrus rather than glorify him. He also says he knew at least three other accounts of Cyrus besides the one he tells.

• Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. The title means The Education of Cyrus. Its author was an Athenian soldier and writer, born around 430 BC. It portrays Cyrus as an ideal ruler. Claim 5 below looks at what kind of book it is.

• The Hebrew Bible. The Book of Isaiah names Cyrus twice and calls him the Lord’s anointed. Ezra and 2 Chronicles give a decree of his allowing the Jews to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. Ezra preserves two versions of it, one in Hebrew and one in Aramaic.

What the Cyrus Cylinder says

In its own words, the cylinder presents Cyrus as the god Marduk’s choice to rule Babylon.

We quote the translation on Livius.org, which is based on Mordechai Cogan’s and adapted to Hanspeter Schaudig’s edition. The British Museum has published Irving Finkel’s translation, but its website blocks automated readers, so we did not use it.

The text opens in the voice of a narrator. Babylon’s god Marduk is angry with Nabonidus. The king is accused of neglecting Marduk’s worship and of imposing forced labour, the corvée, on the people of Babylon. So Marduk looks for a new king.

he searched everywhere and then he took a righteous king, his favorite, by the hand, he called out his name: Cyrus, king of Anšan (line 12).

Marduk brings him into Babylon without a fight (line 17). Then Cyrus speaks: “I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters” (line 20).

He says he lifted a labour duty from the citizens of Babylon and eased their weariness (line 26). Kings from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea bring him heavy tribute and kiss his feet in Babylon (line 30).

Then comes the passage that made the cylinder famous. It names places: Aššur and Susa, Agade, Ešnunna, Zamban, Me-Turnu and Der, as far as the region of Gutium, “the sacred centers on the other side of the Tigris”.

Cyrus returns the images of their gods to their shrines and says: “I gathered all their inhabitants and returned to them their dwellings” (line 32). He also sends home the gods of Sumer and Akkad. Nabonidus had brought them into Babylon, to the anger of the lord of the gods (line 33).

The text ends with prayers and building work on Babylon’s walls. It also reports finding an older inscription with the name of Aššurbanipal, an Assyrian king (line 43).

Two things stand out.

• It follows an old style. The cylinder is written like earlier Mesopotamian royal inscriptions. In a 2023 study, Zeinab Amiri and Farzaneh Farahzad trace its themes and royal titles to older Assyrian and Babylonian texts.

• It is specific. Van der Spek points out that it focuses on a limited group of named cities. They lie in Mesopotamia and in the lands beyond the Tigris. The text names no Jews, no Judah and no Jerusalem.

1. “The Cyrus Cylinder is the world’s first charter of human rights”

Doesn't hold up The cylinder does speak of sending people and gods home, so the idea has a real starting point. But the label is modern.

Amiri and Farahzad, citing John Curtis, report that it was labelled the First Declaration of Human Rights in the 1960s. Curtis’s own summary puts the start a little earlier. In the late 1950s, he writes, the cylinder began to be described as the First Charter of Human Rights.

In October 1971, during celebrations in Iran of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, the Shah’s sister presented a replica to the UN Secretary-General, U Thant.

The replica is on display at UN headquarters in New York. The UN’s own gift record calls the cylinder “an ancient declaration of human rights” whose texts “indicate that everyone is entitled to freedom and choice”.

Specialists read the cylinder differently. Irving Finkel of the British Museum, speaking at Yale in 2024, said: “There are no human rights in antiquity”. The Yale Peabody Museum’s report of his talk adds that letting exiles return home and allowing local worship could be seen as practical choices rather than generous ones.

Its claims were not new either. Van der Spek dates the Assyrian empire to 745–612 BC, before Cyrus. He notes that the Assyrian king Esarhaddon stressed in his inscriptions that he had Babylon restored and repopulated.

One of those inscriptions, quoted by Amiri and Farahzad, describes Esarhaddon as the king who “returned [the] plundered [god]s of the lands to their (proper) place”.

What is real: the cylinder does announce the return of displaced gods and people to named places. Its modern meaning is real too: Finkel said it has become “a real symbol of human rights”.

That is a fact about how the object has been used since the late 1950s. It is not a fact about what it meant when it was made.

2. “Cyrus freed the Jews from Babylon”

Still argued One part is settled: the cylinder does not mention the Jews. Amiri and Farahzad note that it has no direct reference to Jewish liberation, although lines 30–32 have been read as evidence for it. Van der Spek writes that the cylinder cannot be taken as proof that the Jews were allowed home in 539.

The case for starts with the Bible. Ezra opens in Cyrus’s first year as king of Persia, and presents what follows as the fulfilment of a prophecy by Jeremiah.

It gives a proclamation. Anyone among the Lord’s people may “go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD God of Israel” (Ezra 1:1–3, King James Version).

Ezra 6:3 gives the second version of the decree, and 2 Chronicles 36:22–23 repeats the proclamation. Isaiah 45:1 calls Cyrus the Lord’s anointed.

The Iranica, in Muhammad Dandamayev’s entry, accepts that Cyrus let the Jews return and rebuild their temple. Elias Bickerman argued that both versions of the decree in Ezra are genuine. John C. Reeves, writing in the Iranica in 1999, says most biblical scholars still accept the case that Ezra’s Aramaic decrees, Cyrus’s among them, are essentially genuine.

A 2024 survey by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer notes that scholars later became more hesitant to draw firm historical conclusions from them.

The case against is about timing. Van der Spek writes that whether a return happened under Cyrus is disputed, and that the biblical evidence for it is feeble. In his reading, the actual return and rebuilding seem to have come later, under Darius I and Artaxerxes I, later Persian kings.

He agrees that a return from exile under the Persian empire certainly took place. The disagreement is whether it began with a decree of Cyrus. The sources we read do not settle that, so we leave it open.

3. “Cyrus abolished slavery”

Doesn't hold up The idea comes from a fake translation of the cylinder, not from the cylinder itself. The nearest real line is about forced labour.

Cyrus says the citizens of Babylon had been put to forced labour that was not the gods’ wish and did not befit them. He says he freed them from it (lines 25–26). That is relief from a labour levy in one city, not the end of slavery.

The fake translation has been shared online. Van der Spek lists what that text adds. It brings in the Iranian god Ahura Mazda and an announcement of freedom of religion, “and the abolishment of slavery, none of which is present in the real Cyrus Cylinder”.

Slavery carried on under the Persian kings. Dandamayev writes in the Iranica that under the Achaemenids, in Babylonia and other conquered countries, Persian nobles became large slave owners. He records, for example, a sale in 528 BC, two years after Cyrus died. A slave woman bought in Elam was sold in the Babylonian city of Opis.

4. “Cyrus was tolerant of all religions”

Partly He did restore local cults instead of suppressing them, and that is the true core of the claim. The cylinder has him send gods’ images back to their shrines. And the Babylonian chronicle records that the gods Nabonidus had brought to Babylon returned to their places.

Dandamayev concludes in the Iranica that Cyrus seems generally to have respected the customs and religions of conquered lands. UNESCO’s World Heritage listing for Pasargadae goes further: Cyrus’s empire “is considered to be the first empire that respected the cultural diversity of its different peoples”. His own beliefs are another matter: almost nothing is known about them.

The part that does not hold is the word tolerance. Van der Spek writes that in antiquity, no discourse on religious tolerance existed. He calls Cyrus “a normal conqueror with the usual policy of brutal warfare and harsh measures”.

The cylinder’s message belongs to Babylon. It was written by priests of Marduk, in the style of older royal inscriptions. Its aim was to present Nabonidus as the impious king and Cyrus as the god’s choice. Not every Babylonian text agreed: some Babylonian literary texts condemned Cyrus and glorified Nabonidus.

The chronicle that records the gods going home also records, in the usual reading, that his army plundered and slaughtered the people at Opis. Van der Spek’s summary: “both cruelty and mildness belong to Persian policy since Cyrus”.

5. “Xenophon’s Cyropaedia is a history of Cyrus’s life”

Doesn't hold up The book looks like history at first. Xenophon presents it as an inquiry into Cyrus’s origins, natural gifts and education (1.1.6, Walter Miller’s translation, 1914). But the Iranica entry on the work says: “It is generally agreed that Xenophon did not intend Cyropaedia as history”.

Scholars have called it a historical novel, a romantic history, a teaching treatise and an educational novel. The same entry calls it a partly fictional biography.

Cicero said much the same in a letter to his brother Quintus. Xenophon’s Cyrus, he wrote, was written non ad historiae fidem … sed ad effigiem iusti imperii: not to be faithful to history but as a portrait of just rule (1.1.23, our translation).

Its errors show the difference.

• Xenophon has Cyrus add both Cyprus and Egypt to his empire (1.1.4). But Egypt was conquered not by Cyrus but by his son and successor, Cambyses.

• He has the Median kingdom pass to Cyrus peacefully, through a marriage. The Babylonian sources and Herodotus have Cyrus take it from Astyages by war.

• He gives Cyrus a peaceful death (claim 6).

Some Iranists have argued that the book keeps traces of Persian tradition. Wolfgang Knauth concluded that it should be regarded as reflecting a Persian mirror for princes, a book of advice for rulers. The book has also helped to give Cyrus his reputation as a righteous and tolerant king.

6. “Cyrus died peacefully in his bed”

Still argued The ancient accounts disagree, and the Iranica’s verdict is that the precise facts of his death cannot now be known. There are four main accounts.

• Herodotus: Cyrus fell in battle against the Massagetae. Their queen, Tomyris, filled a skin with human blood, searched the Persian dead for his body, and pushed his head into the skin. Herodotus adds, in A. D. Godley’s 1920 translation: “Many stories are told of Cyrus’ death; this, that I have told, is the most credible” (1.214).

• Ctesias, as summarised in the Iranica: Cyrus was wounded by an Indian spear while fighting the Derbici and died several days later.

• Berossus, a Babylonian writer, as summarised in the Iranica: he died in battle with the Dahae.

• Xenophon: he came home to Persia as a very old man and was warned of his death in a dream. He said farewell to his sons, covered himself, and died (8.7).

The evidence leans away from the peaceful version, for two reasons.

• The count. Three of the four accounts put his death on campaign. The Iranica treats it as known that he was not only defeated but also killed fighting the Massagetae in 530 BC.

• The source. Xenophon’s deathbed comes from a book scholars do not read as history (claim 5). The scholar Arthur Christensen, as the Iranica reports, observed that it closely resembles the deathbed scenes and farewell speeches in the Persian Shahnameh.

A document from Kish in Babylonia is still dated by his reign on 4 December 530 BC. That suggests the battle came at the very end of that year.

Some scholars do believe Xenophon’s version is rooted in Persian tradition, which is why this stays disputed. None of the sources we read disputes that Cyrus was buried at Pasargadae. The Iranica notes that this sits awkwardly with Herodotus’s story, unless the body was recovered from the enemy.

7. “The Cyrus quotes shared online are his words”

Doesn't hold up Very little of Cyrus’s own voice survives, and none of it as sayings. Many of the speeches given to him in Greek writing were written by Xenophon, for the Cyropaedia.

The cylinder speaks in his name but was composed by priests of Marduk. The rest comes through Greek writers. The deathbed line “if you do good to your friends, you will also be able to punish your enemies” (8.7.28) is Xenophon’s Cyrus, in a book that is not history.

One line often shared as his, “Diversity in counsel, unity in command”, we could not find in Herodotus, the Cyropaedia, Arrian or the cylinder. We searched G. C. Macaulay’s translation of Herodotus, H. G. Dakyns’s of the Cyropaedia and E. J. Chinnock’s of Arrian, and could not trace where the line first appeared.

Longer texts credited to Cyrus about freedom of religion or the end of slavery come from the fake translation described under claim 3. A line with no book and section number has, so far, no source. Our guide to spotting a fake quote shows how to check one.

8. “His tomb at Pasargadae bears his epitaph”

Doesn't hold up The tomb survives, and ancient writers did report an epitaph on it, so the story has real roots. But no such inscription has been found, and it may never have read as reported.

His tomb is a small stone monument about 1 km south-west of the palaces of Pasargadae. It is identified as his tomb because it matches descriptions by Alexander the Great’s companions. Arrian, following Aristobulus, who visited the tomb with Alexander, reports an inscription in Persian letters.

O man, I am Cyrus, son of Cambyses, who founded the empire of the Persians, and was king of Asia. Do not therefore grudge me this monument. (Arrian, Anabasis 6.29, E. J. Chinnock’s translation, 1884)

The wording changes with the reporter.

• Strabo gives Aristobulus’s version, here in H. L. Jones’s translation. It reads: “O man, I am Cyrus, who acquired the empire for the Persians and was king of Asia; grudge me not, therefore, my monument” (15.3.7).

• Onesicritus, another companion, recorded a different text, which Strabo also gives: “Here I lie, Cyrus, king of kings”.

• Plutarch gives a longer version (Alexander 69, in Bernadotte Perrin’s 1919 translation). It begins: “O man, whosoever thou art and whencesoever thou comest, for I know that thou wilt come, I am Cyrus, and I won for the Persians their empire”.

Antigoni Zournatzi writes in the Iranica: “The epitaph mentioned in the texts is not attested on any of the extant structures in the vicinity of Pasargadae”.

She notes that Aristobulus is said to have reported it from memory. She adds that epitaphs appear not to have been the rule in Achaemenid tombs. She suggests the remembered wording may have been modelled on other inscriptions found at Pasargadae.

The tomb had already been robbed by the time Alexander returned to it. Since the early Islamic period it has been known locally as the tomb of the mother of Solomon.

Our reading

The Cyrus of the sources is a conqueror who took Babylon. He then presented himself as a Babylonian king chosen by Marduk. He sent displaced gods and people back to named places. He also fought hard wars, including Opis, where the chronicle in its usual reading records a slaughter.

Later readers added the rest. The Bible made him the Lord’s anointed, Xenophon made him the model king, and the 20th century made his cylinder a human-rights charter. Each picture tells you something real about the people who drew it.

The cylinder is worth reading for what it is. It is a late example of an old Mesopotamian kind of text. In texts like it, a conqueror explains to his new subjects why they should accept him.

Why it matters

Three questions help with any text like the cylinder, and they are the ones this page asked.

• Who wrote it? Here, priests of Marduk.
• Whom was it written for? The people of Babylon.
• What does it name, and what does it leave out? It names Mesopotamian cities, and no Jews, no slaves and no rights.

Sources

The Cyrus Cylinder and Babylon

• “Cyrus Cylinder Translation”, Livius.org, based on Mordechai Cogan’s translation in W. W. Hallo and K. L. Younger (eds), The Context of Scripture, vol. II (2003), adapted to Hanspeter Schaudig’s edition.
• “ABC 7 (Nabonidus Chronicle)”, Livius.org, translation by A. K. Grayson with later changes.
• M. A. Dandamayev, “Cyrus iv. The Cyrus cylinder”, Encyclopaedia Iranica.
• R. J. van der Spek, “Cyrus the Great, Exiles, and Foreign Gods: A Comparison of Assyrian and Persian Policies on Subject Nations”, in M. Kozuh et al. (eds), Extraction and Control: Studies in Honor of Matthew W. Stolper (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2014), pp. 233–64.
• Zeinab Amiri and Farzaneh Farahzad, “The Cyrus Cylinder: A Journey through Translation”, inTRAlinea 25 (2023).
• John Curtis, “The Cyrus Cylinder: Discovery and Creation of an Icon”, abstract, symposium “The Legacy of Cyrus the Great: Iran and Beyond”, Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian.
• W. G. Lambert, “Cyrus’ Defeat of Nabonidus”, Nouvelles assyriologiques brèves et utilitaires 2007/14 (archived copy).
• Steven Scarpa, “Superstar Assyriologist Dispels Myths About Cyrus Cylinder”, Yale Peabody Museum, 6 May 2024.
• John C. Reeves, “ʿEzrā, Book of”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (1999); M. A. Dandamayev, “Bickerman, Elias Joseph”, Encyclopaedia Iranica.
• Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, “The Cyrus Cylinder in Biblical Scholarship”, Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 89 (2024), pp. 118–47.
• United Nations Gifts, “Replica of ‘Edict of Cyrus’”.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Pasargadae”.

Cyrus’s life, death and tomb

• M. A. Dandamayev, “Cyrus iii. Cyrus II the Great”, Encyclopaedia Iranica.
• Antigoni Zournatzi, “Cyrus v. The Tomb of Cyrus”, Encyclopaedia Iranica.
• M. A. Dandamayev, “Barda and barda-dari i. In the Achaemenid period”, Encyclopaedia Iranica.
• Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, “Cyropaedia”, Encyclopaedia Iranica.

Ancient texts

• Herodotus, Histories, trans. A. D. Godley (Loeb, 1920), 1.95, 1.214 (Perseus); and trans. G. C. Macaulay, vol. 1 and vol. 2 (Project Gutenberg).
• Xenophon, Cyropaedia, trans. Walter Miller (Loeb, 1914), 1.1.4, 1.1.6, 8.7.1, 8.7.28 (Perseus); and trans. H. G. Dakyns, Project Gutenberg.
• Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, trans. E. J. Chinnock (Hodder and Stoughton, 1884), book 6, ch. 29, Project Gutenberg.
• Strabo, Geography 15.3.7, trans. H. L. Jones (Loeb, 1932), LacusCurtius.
• Plutarch, Life of Alexander 69, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb, 1919), LacusCurtius.
• Cicero, Letters to his brother Quintus 1.1.23, Latin text (The Latin Library); the English is ours.
• The Bible, King James Version: Ezra 1 and 6, 2 Chronicles 36, Isaiah 45, Project Gutenberg.

The British Museum’s pages on the cylinder, including Irving Finkel’s translation, block automated readers, and we did not get round that block. Short quotations from translations still in copyright are credited where they appear.

Checked October 2026.