Cyrus the Great: Founder of the Achaemenid Empire and Architect of the First World State

Few figures in the ancient world cast so long a shadow across the history of subsequent civilizations as Cyrus II of Persia, known to the Greeks as Cyrus the Great and to the Hebrew prophets as the anointed of the Lord, who in the space of less than three decades in the middle of the sixth century before the common era transformed a small and obscure people of the Iranian highlands into the masters of the largest empire the world had yet seen, an empire that stretched from the Aegean coast of Asia Minor in the west to the borders of India in the east, from the Caucasus Mountains and the steppes of Central Asia in the north to the deserts of the Arabian peninsula in the south, and that established, in its administrative structure, its religious policy, its treatment of subject peoples, and its conception of legitimate rule, a model of imperial governance whose influence can be traced through the Hellenistic kingdoms of the successors of Alexander, through the Roman Empire, through the Sassanian and Islamic empires of the Near East, and through the political imagination of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the constitutional theory of the modern world. He was the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty under whose authority Persia would rule the Near East for more than two centuries until its overthrow by Alexander of Macedon in 330 BCE; he was the conqueror of the Median kingdom of Ecbatana, of the Lydian kingdom of Sardis, and of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nabonidus, three of the four great powers of the late ancient Near East whose absorption into a single political structure constituted the principal political fact of the sixth century; he was the liberator of the Jewish exiles whose return from Babylon to Jerusalem he authorized and whose rebuilding of the Temple he subsidized in a series of decrees preserved in the books of Ezra and Chronicles; and he was, in the testimony of writers as varied as the Greek historian Herodotus, the Athenian philosopher Xenophon, the prophets Isaiah and Daniel, and the Babylonian priestly chroniclers of his own day, a ruler of unusual personal qualities whose tolerance of religious diversity, whose respect for the customs of conquered peoples, and whose capacity to win the loyalty of his former enemies set him apart from the more brutal conqueror-kings of his age and made his memory an object of admiration in cultures whose own traditions had little reason to flatter the founder of a Persian imperial power.

The empire which Cyrus created between his accession to the throne of Anshan in approximately 559 BCE and his death on the eastern frontier in 530 BCE was, in conception and in execution, the first political structure in human history that could plausibly claim the title of a world empire. It was not merely larger than the kingdoms of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Hittite kings of Anatolia, the Assyrian monarchs of Nineveh, and the Neo-Babylonian sovereigns of Babylon that had preceded it; it was qualitatively different from them in its administrative ambitions and in its ideological self-understanding. Where the Assyrians had governed their conquests through systematic terror, mass deportation, and the demonstrative destruction of the religious symbols of subject populations, Cyrus governed his through a policy of conciliation, religious tolerance, and the preservation of local political and cultic institutions. Where earlier Mesopotamian rulers had styled themselves king of the world or king of the four corners as expressions of cosmological pretension that bore only limited relation to political reality, the Persian king of kings of the Achaemenid line could plausibly claim to rule over peoples of dozens of languages, religions, ethnic origins, and political traditions, organized into a system of satrapies whose governors administered the laws and customs of their respective regions under the supervision of a central royal authority. Where the religious ideology of preceding Near Eastern monarchies had been narrowly confessional, identifying the king with a specific national god whose temple in the royal capital served as the spiritual center of the kingdom, the Achaemenid royal theology, in the form that emerged from Cyrus and was elaborated by his successors, identified the king as the chosen instrument of Ahura Mazda, the supreme creator god of the Iranian religious tradition associated with the prophet Zarathustra, while extending recognition and patronage to the gods and the temples of every people within the empire's borders.

The Cyrus whom history remembers was therefore simultaneously a military conqueror of unusual strategic intelligence, a political innovator whose administrative arrangements provided the model for every subsequent empire of the ancient world, a religious figure whose policy of tolerance and patronage acquired for him a quasi-messianic status in the traditions of the Jewish and the Zoroastrian communities, and a personal embodiment of those qualities of justice, moderation, and largeness of mind which the political traditions of the ancient world identified as the proper marks of legitimate rule. He was, in the famous judgment of Xenophon at the opening of the Cyropaedia, the kind of ruler who could persuade men to obey him willingly across enormous distances and through every variety of nation, who could secure the loyalty of those he had conquered as readily as that of those he had inherited, and who could leave behind him at his death an empire so well constituted that it endured under successors of inferior abilities for two centuries before its eventual collapse. The historical Cyrus, recoverable only imperfectly from the fragmentary sources of the sixth century and the more elaborate but tendentious narratives composed in Greek and Hebrew in the generations after his death, was certainly less perfect than the idealized portrait that Xenophon constructed for the moral instruction of the educated Athenians of the fourth century, but he was also more than the mere conqueror whose achievements could be reduced to a catalogue of battles won and cities sacked. He was the founder of a political tradition whose reach extended far beyond the boundaries of Iran, and whose memory remained powerful in the political imagination of the ancient and medieval worlds long after the empire he created had passed into history.

The biography that follows traces, so far as the surviving sources permit, the long path from the obscure origins of Cyrus in the Persian highlands of the early sixth century BCE to his death on the steppes of Central Asia in 530, and the elaboration of his memory in the religious, philosophical, and political traditions of the cultures that succeeded him. It begins with the geographical and ethnographic context of the Iranian plateau in the early first millennium, the migration of the Iranian peoples from the Central Asian steppes into the lands south and west of the Caspian, and the political condition of the Median and Persian kingdoms in the years before Cyrus's birth. It proceeds through the legendary and largely unrecoverable account of his birth and upbringing as preserved in the narratives of Herodotus and Xenophon, the historical conjectures that can be made about his actual circumstances from the surviving cuneiform texts and from the archaeological evidence of his early capital at Pasargadae, his successful rebellion against his Median overlord Astyages in the late 550s, his subsequent campaigns against the Lydian kingdom of Croesus in Asia Minor and against the Greek and Phoenician cities of the eastern Mediterranean coast, the climactic conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE which made him master of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the lands of Mesopotamia and Syria, the famous decree authorizing the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem and the reconstruction of the Temple, the eastern campaigns that carried Persian arms to the borders of India and into the steppes of Central Asia, the final campaign against the Massagetae beyond the Jaxartes in which he met his death, the brief reign of his son Cambyses, and the eventual establishment of the dynasty under Darius the Great whose elaboration of the administrative and ideological structure of the empire would consolidate the achievement of its founder. It is a story in which the dynamics of early Iron Age state formation, the political ambitions of an emerging Iranian nobility, the religious and ethnographic complexity of the ancient Near East, and the personal genius of an extraordinary individual converge to produce one of the formative moments of world history.

The Iranian Plateau and the Early History of Persia

The Iranian plateau, that vast and elevated region bounded on the west by the Zagros mountains overlooking the Mesopotamian plain, on the east by the Hindu Kush and the deserts of Central Asia, on the north by the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, and on the south by the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, had been inhabited from time immemorial by populations of diverse linguistic and ethnic origins whose archaeological remains stretched back into the deepest layers of the prehistoric record. The earliest urban civilizations of the region, contemporaneous with the third-millennium florescence of Sumer and Akkad in the lowlands of Mesopotamia, included the Elamite kingdom centered on the city of Susa in the lowlands of Khuzistan, whose script and language were unrelated to those of any neighboring civilization and which maintained a political and cultural existence of nearly three thousand years from its earliest attestation in the late fourth millennium to its final absorption into the Achaemenid Empire under the rule of Cyrus himself. The plateau had also been the seat of a succession of less well-attested polities at sites such as Tepe Sialk near modern Kashan, Tepe Yahya in the southeastern province of Kerman, and the great mound at Tepe Hissar near modern Damghan, whose archaeological remains testified to extensive metallurgical and ceramic traditions, to trade contacts with Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the lapis lazuli mines of Afghanistan, and to social organizations of considerable complexity that nonetheless never achieved the level of integration and literacy that characterized the lowland civilizations to the west.

The arrival on the plateau of populations speaking languages of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, the linguistic ancestors of both the Iranian and the Indic peoples of historical antiquity, is conventionally dated to the second millennium BCE and is associated with the gradual migration southward of pastoral and semi-nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe lands north of the Caspian and Aral seas. The pattern of this migration, which can be reconstructed only conjecturally from the comparative evidence of linguistics, of mythological tradition, and of a few scattered archaeological correlates, would seem to have involved the gradual displacement and assimilation of the earlier non-Indo-European populations of the plateau by waves of Indo-Iranian speakers whose superior mobility, derived in part from their use of the horse and the wheeled vehicle, gave them an advantage over the settled agriculturalists they encountered. By the early first millennium BCE the populations of the plateau spoke a range of mutually related Iranian languages and dialects, of which Median, Persian, Bactrian, Sogdian, Khwarezmian, Scythian, and Saka were among the most important, and which together constituted the eastern half of the Iranian linguistic family whose western half included the related languages spoken by the populations of Armenia, of the Pontic coast, and of certain steppe peoples whose territory extended westward across the Black Sea and into the Balkans.

The political organization of the Iranian-speaking peoples of the early first millennium was, by the standards of the lowland civilizations to the west, primitive and tribal. They were organized into clans and confederations of clans under the leadership of warrior-chieftains whose authority rested on personal prowess, on the loyalty of an aristocratic retinue, and on the customary observances of the tribe. They practiced a pastoral economy supplemented by limited agriculture in the river valleys and on the irrigated plains adjacent to the mountains, they fought on horseback with the bow and the lance, they buried their dead with the personal weapons and the riding gear that the warrior aristocracy required for the journey to the afterlife, and they worshipped a pantheon of nature deities and ancestral heroes whose names and functions can be partially reconstructed from the religious traditions of their later Iranian and Indic descendants. The principal documentary evidence for their existence in this period is provided by the cuneiform records of the Assyrian Empire of the ninth and eighth centuries, whose kings, in the course of their repeated campaigns into the Zagros mountains in search of horses, livestock, and slaves, recorded the names of the tribal confederations they encountered and the tribute they exacted from them. The earliest unambiguous attestation of the people who would become known as the Medes occurs in the annals of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in the middle of the ninth century, who recorded the tribute he received from the country of the Mada during his campaigns into the central Zagros region, and the earliest attestation of the Persians occurs slightly later, in the records of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III in the eighth century, who recorded the tribute he received from the country of the Parsua in the western Zagros.

The Median confederation, whose territory occupied the central portion of the Iranian plateau between the Caspian and the central Zagros, was the first of the Iranian peoples to achieve the level of political organization characteristic of a state, in the form of a kingdom centered on the city of Ecbatana at the foot of Mount Alvand in the modern province of Hamadan. The political history of this kingdom, as preserved in the narrative of Herodotus and in the cuneiform sources of the seventh and sixth centuries, traced its origin to a unifying chieftain named Deioces, who according to Herodotus persuaded the scattered Median tribes to choose him as their king on the strength of his reputation for impartial justice, and who built the great seven-walled fortress of Ecbatana as the capital of his new monarchy. The historical Deioces, whose name appears in the Assyrian sources of the eighth century as a tribal chieftain who was deported to Hamath in Syria after the suppression of a revolt against Assyrian overlordship, was probably not the founder of the kingdom in the manner described by Herodotus, but the consolidation of the Median tribes into a single political structure under the leadership of a paramount chieftain belongs to the later eighth and early seventh centuries, in the context of the prolonged confrontation between the Iranian highland peoples and the Assyrian armies that periodically invaded their territory. The decisive transformation of the Median tribal confederation into an aggressive imperial power, however, occurred under the rule of Cyaxares, the third king of the Median dynasty according to Herodotus, who reigned approximately from 625 to 585 BCE and who, in alliance with the Neo-Babylonian king Nabopolassar, conducted the campaigns that destroyed the Assyrian Empire and partitioned its territories between the Babylonian and Median kingdoms in the closing decade of the seventh century.

The fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE to the combined armies of Cyaxares and Nabopolassar marked the end of the Assyrian Empire that had dominated the Near East for the previous three centuries and the elevation of the Median and the Babylonian kingdoms to the status of the two principal powers of the region. The Median Empire that emerged from this success extended from the central Iranian plateau westward through the Zagros mountains into eastern Anatolia, where its western boundary was eventually established at the river Halys after the inconclusive war with the Lydian kingdom of King Alyattes that ended with the famous solar eclipse of 28 May 585 BCE during the Battle of the Halys, an eclipse whose successful prediction by Thales of Miletus marks one of the earliest documented achievements of Greek natural philosophy. The Median sphere of influence also extended northward into the Armenian highlands, eastward across the plateau toward the regions of Parthia and Hyrcania, and southward into the lands of the Persians, whose tribal kingdoms in the western and southern Zagros had been brought into a relationship of subordinate alliance with the Median throne by the campaigns of Cyaxares and his predecessors. The relationship between the Medes and the Persians, who spoke closely related Iranian languages, who shared a common religious and cultural inheritance, and who were probably regarded by their neighbors as branches of a single Iranian nation, was nonetheless one of unequal partnership, with the Persian chieftains acknowledging the suzerainty of the Median king and providing contingents of warriors for his armies in return for the protection and the patronage of the imperial throne at Ecbatana.

The Persian Kingdom of Anshan and the Achaemenid Family

The Persian kingdom over which Cyrus would inherit and from which he would launch his career of conquest was a small and politically marginal state in the early sixth century BCE, occupying the rugged uplands of the modern Iranian province of Fars in the southwestern Zagros mountains, together with the adjoining lowland plains of Khuzistan that had formerly belonged to the Elamite kingdom of Susa. Its principal city was Anshan, whose ruins have been identified with the mound of Tall-e Malyan some forty miles north of the later Achaemenid capital of Persepolis, and which had been one of the most important urban centers of the Elamite civilization for some two thousand years before its absorption into the new Persian polity. The Persian occupation of the Elamite territories, which seems to have taken place gradually in the course of the seventh century as the power of the Elamite kingdom declined under the pressure of repeated Assyrian invasions and as the Persian tribes migrated southward from the upper Zagros into the depopulated lands of the former Elamite domain, established the new Persian kingdom on the foundations of the much older Elamite civilization, with the result that the early Persian state adopted many of the administrative practices, the artistic conventions, and the royal titulature of its Elamite predecessors, including the use of the Elamite cuneiform script and the Elamite language for its early administrative documents.

The ruling family of the Persian kingdom of Anshan in the early sixth century BCE traced its descent from an ancestral figure named Achaemenes, the Greek form of the Old Persian Hax?maniš, whose historical existence is attested only in the dynastic genealogies inscribed by his descendants and who may or may not have been an actual person rather than an eponymous ancestor invented to provide a foundation for the dynastic claim. According to the genealogy preserved in the famous inscription of Darius the Great at Bisitun and in the related Achaemenid royal inscriptions, Achaemenes was the father of Teispes, who divided his realm at his death between his two sons: Cyrus the First, who inherited the kingdom of Anshan, and Ariaramnes, who inherited the kingdom of Parsa or Parsumash in the upper Zagros. Cyrus the First was succeeded by his son Cambyses the First, who was succeeded in turn by his son Cyrus the Second, the future Cyrus the Great, who would unite the two branches of the Persian royal house by the eventual elimination of the rival line descended from Ariaramnes. The historical reliability of this genealogy has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, since the parallel line descended from Ariaramnes is attested only in inscriptions composed during the reign of Darius the Great, whose claim to the Persian throne after the death of Cambyses the Second in 522 depended on his ability to demonstrate a legitimate Achaemenid descent, and there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the elaborate genealogical structure preserved in the Bisitun inscription may reflect the political needs of the Darius reign rather than the actual prehistory of the dynasty.

What is reasonably clear from the surviving evidence is that the Persian kingdom of Anshan in the early sixth century was ruled by a line of kings of unquestionably Iranian descent who claimed the title king of Anshan and who acknowledged some form of subordination to the Median king at Ecbatana. The seal impressions and the brief administrative documents that have been recovered from the archaeological excavations at the Achaemenid capital of Pasargadae and at the earlier Persian sites of the Fars region suggest that the kingdom possessed a developed bureaucratic administration, that it was organized into administrative districts whose officials were responsible for the collection of agricultural produce and livestock from the population, and that it maintained diplomatic and commercial contacts with both the Median kingdom to the north and the Babylonian kingdom to the west. The Persian aristocracy of the kingdom was a warrior class organized into a confederation of clans whose chieftains served the king as cavalry officers and as administrators of the royal estates, and the Persian common population consisted of pastoralists, agriculturalists, and craftsmen whose economic and social organization differed little from that of the other Iranian peoples of the plateau.

The religious tradition of the Persians in this period is more difficult to characterize than their political organization, since the surviving sources do not permit a confident reconstruction of the relationship between the religious practices of the early Achaemenid family and the doctrines of the prophet Zarathustra whose Avestan hymns constitute the foundational texts of the Zoroastrian religious tradition. The Achaemenid royal inscriptions of the late sixth and the fifth centuries identify the supreme god of the dynasty as Ahura Mazda, the chief deity of the Zoroastrian pantheon, but the precise nature of the early Persian religion in the time of Cyrus the Great remains uncertain, and it has been variously argued that Cyrus himself was a follower of a pre-Zoroastrian Iranian polytheism, that he was an adherent of the reformed Zoroastrian doctrine in some early or unorthodox form, or that he was a religious pluralist whose personal beliefs cannot be reduced to any single confessional category. What is reasonably certain is that the Persian religious tradition of the period included reverence for the elements of fire, water, and earth, the maintenance of sacred fires in the open air rather than in enclosed temples, the practice of animal sacrifice under the supervision of priestly officiants drawn from the Magian caste, and an ethical orientation toward truth-telling, contractual fidelity, and the proper management of the natural world.

The Birth and Legend of Cyrus

The historical sources for the birth and early life of Cyrus the Great are of two kinds, and they preserve accounts that are in some respects irreconcilable. On the one hand, there are the narratives composed in Greek in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, of which the most important are the famous account preserved in the first book of Herodotus's Histories and the more elaborate and explicitly didactic account preserved in the Cyropaedia of Xenophon, both of which present versions of the birth and upbringing of Cyrus that incorporate substantial elements of folk legend and that have evidently passed through several stages of literary elaboration before reaching their surviving form. On the other hand, there are the contemporary cuneiform sources of the sixth century, principally the so-called Cyrus Cylinder and the related Babylonian inscriptions and chronicles, which provide a much sparser but historically more reliable account of his immediate ancestry and his accession to the Persian throne, while saying nothing about the circumstances of his birth or the events of his early life. The reconstruction of Cyrus's origins therefore depends upon a critical comparison of these two bodies of evidence, with the recognition that much of what can be said about his early years is necessarily conjectural and that the famous story of his exposure and rescue, which became the foundational myth of his dynasty, cannot be accepted as straightforward historical narrative.

The version of his birth preserved in Herodotus, which the historian himself acknowledges to be only one of several competing accounts current in his time, presents the story in the form of a dynastic legend that bears striking similarities to comparable foundation myths in other ancient traditions, including the stories of Sargon of Akkad, of Moses, of Romulus, and of various other founder-heroes whose early lives followed a recognizable pattern of exposure, rescue, and eventual restoration to their rightful inheritance. According to Herodotus, the Median king Astyages, who had succeeded his father Cyaxares around 585 BCE and who reigned for the next thirty-five years until his deposition by Cyrus in 550, dreamed two prophetic dreams in the years following the marriage of his daughter Mandane to a Persian noble named Cambyses. In the first dream, urine flowed from his daughter in such quantity that it filled the city of Ecbatana and overflowed across all of Asia; in the second dream, a vine grew from his daughter's loins that spread its branches over all of Asia. The Magian interpreters of the dreams predicted that the child to be born of Mandane would supplant Astyages on the Median throne and would rule a realm extending across all of Asia, and Astyages, alarmed at the prospect, gave instructions for the child to be killed at birth.

The newborn Cyrus, according to the Herodotean narrative, was handed over to the senior royal counsellor Harpagus with instructions that he should be killed and his body disposed of in a manner that would leave no evidence of the deed. Harpagus, reluctant to commit such an atrocity against the grandson of the king and the son of his own kinswoman, delegated the task to a herdsman named Mitradates, with instructions to expose the infant in the mountains where the wild beasts would dispose of him. Mitradates, returning to his hut in the high country with the doomed infant, found that his own wife had just delivered a stillborn child, and the herdsman and his wife conceived the plan of substituting the dead child for the living one, presenting the corpse to Harpagus's officials as the body of the exposed prince and raising the living Cyrus as their own son. The boy grew up in the herdsman's household under the assumed name of Mitradates, knowing nothing of his royal origins until, at the age of ten, he was discovered through a chain of circumstances that began when he was elected king in a game played with the other boys of his village and ordered the punishment of a noble's son who had refused to obey him, an act whose unusual peremptoriness brought him to the attention of Astyages and led to the eventual unraveling of the deception. Astyages, upon discovering that his grandson had survived, was placated by the Magian interpretation that the boy's election as king in the children's game had fulfilled the prophecy in symbolic form and that no further danger need be feared from him, and Cyrus was accordingly restored to his parents in Persia, where he grew to manhood as the heir to the Achaemenid throne of Anshan.

The Cyropaedia of Xenophon, composed in the early fourth century BCE in the form of a moralizing historical romance intended to portray the ideal upbringing and rule of a virtuous monarch, presents a substantially different account of Cyrus's youth in which the exposure motif is absent and in which the young prince grows up in his proper place at the Persian court under the careful instruction of his parents Cambyses and Mandane, with educational visits to the court of his maternal grandfather Astyages where his exceptional personal qualities first manifest themselves. The Xenophontic narrative, which expands the early life of Cyrus into a lengthy account of his educational formation, his early military experience, and his eventual succession to the Persian throne, is openly didactic in its purposes and is generally regarded by modern scholarship as a philosophical romance whose value as a historical source for Cyrus's actual life is minimal, although the Cyropaedia preserves certain incidental details about Persian customs and institutions that appear to reflect genuine knowledge of late Achaemenid administrative practice.

The cuneiform sources, by contrast, are silent on the question of Cyrus's birth and upbringing but provide a clear and historically reliable account of his immediate ancestry and the genealogy of the Persian royal house. The Cyrus Cylinder, the famous baked-clay document discovered in the foundations of the temple of Marduk at Babylon in 1879 and now preserved in the British Museum, identifies Cyrus as the son of Cambyses, the grandson of Cyrus the First, and the great-grandson of Teispes, all of whom are identified as great kings of Anshan, and it includes the standard Mesopotamian royal titulature that would be expected in an inscription composed by a new king of Babylon for the priestly authorities of the city. The Babylonian Chronicle of Nabonidus, a near-contemporary cuneiform document recording the principal events of the reign of the last Neo-Babylonian king, refers to Cyrus as the king of Anshan and the king of Persia and records his successful campaign against the Median king Astyages in the year corresponding to 550 BCE. These sources permit the reconstruction of the basic facts of Cyrus's lineage and his accession to the Persian throne but leave entirely unanswered the questions of his date of birth, the circumstances of his upbringing, and the events of his life before his rebellion against Median overlordship.

The Persian Homeland and the Early Years

Whatever the historical reality behind the legendary accounts of his birth, Cyrus must have been born in the closing years of the seventh century or the opening years of the sixth century BCE, probably between 600 and 590, in the Persian homeland of Fars in the southwestern Iranian highlands. The Persian kingdom of his youth was a small mountain principality whose principal urban centers were the old Elamite city of Anshan, by then partially in ruins but still occupied as a royal residence, and the upland sites in the high valleys of the Zagros where the Persian royal family maintained its seasonal residences and where the king conducted the rituals and administrative business of the kingdom. The landscape was that of the high Zagros: rugged mountain ridges rising to peaks of eight and nine thousand feet, intercut by deep valleys watered by mountain streams whose flow varied dramatically between the wet winters and the dry summers, with the populated settlements concentrated in the valley floors and on the lower slopes where agriculture was practicable and the higher pastures reserved for the seasonal grazing of livestock. The climate combined the extremes characteristic of the high Iranian plateau, with bitter winters and snowfall on the higher elevations and hot, dry summers in the lowland valleys, and the agriculture practiced in the valleys included the cultivation of wheat, barley, grapes, dates, and various vegetables on irrigated and rain-fed plots, supplemented by the substantial herds of sheep, goats, cattle, and horses that constituted the principal source of wealth of the Persian aristocracy.

The young Cyrus, growing up in this environment as the heir to the Persian throne, would have received the education appropriate to a Persian nobleman of the early sixth century, an education whose general character can be reconstructed from the somewhat idealized account preserved in the Cyropaedia and from the practices of the later Achaemenid court. The fundamental curriculum, as recorded by Herodotus in a famous passage describing Persian customs, consisted of three principles: to ride a horse, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth. The first two of these instructions reflected the warrior orientation of the Persian aristocracy, whose military strength rested on the discipline and skill of its mounted archers, and the educational program would have included intensive training from early childhood in horsemanship, in the use of the composite bow from horseback, and in the various other weapons of the cavalry warrior including the lance, the akinakes or short sword, and the battle-axe. The third instruction, the obligation to speak the truth, reflected the ethical orientation of the Iranian religious tradition, in which the conflict between truth and falsehood, between asha and druj in the Avestan terminology, constituted the fundamental cosmic and moral opposition and in which truth-telling was identified as the supreme virtue of the proper Iranian. The educational program would also have included instruction in the principal religious traditions of the Persian people, in the laws and customs of the kingdom, in the rudiments of administration and judicial procedure, and probably in the literary and historical traditions preserved by oral transmission among the priestly and aristocratic classes.

The death of Cyrus's father Cambyses the First, which probably occurred sometime in the late 560s or early 550s BCE, brought the young Cyrus to the Persian throne. The exact date of his accession cannot be established with certainty, since the cuneiform sources provide reliable chronological information only for the later phases of his career, but it must have taken place in the years immediately preceding his rebellion against Median overlordship in 553 or 552, and a date of approximately 559 has been conventionally adopted on the basis of the testimony of Herodotus and of the Babylonian Chronicle. The Persian kingdom that Cyrus inherited at his accession was, as it had been throughout the preceding generations, a subordinate ally of the Median Empire at Ecbatana, owing tribute and military service to the Median king Astyages in return for the protection of the imperial throne and the recognition of the Achaemenid family as the legitimate rulers of the Persian people. The relationship between the Persian and Median royal houses was further reinforced by family ties, since Cyrus's mother Mandane, if the genealogical accounts of Herodotus can be trusted, was the daughter of Astyages and the granddaughter of Cyaxares, and the young Persian king was therefore the maternal grandson of the very Median monarch whose throne he was eventually to seize.

The Rebellion Against Astyages

The circumstances that led Cyrus to revolt against Median overlordship in the early 550s BCE are imperfectly known from the surviving sources, but the evidence permits a reasonable reconstruction of the principal events. The Median Empire under the rule of Astyages had passed in the four decades since the destruction of Assyria from the dynamic expansionist phase of Cyaxares's reign into a period of relative stagnation and internal discontent. The Median aristocracy, which had supported Cyaxares in his wars of conquest and had enriched itself with the plunder and the tribute of the conquered territories, found under Astyages an increasingly autocratic and unpopular monarch whose pretensions to royal grandeur and whose suspicion of the great noble families had alienated the very class on whose loyalty the dynasty depended. The Persian dependency, meanwhile, had grown in wealth and in military capacity in the course of the same period, as the agricultural and pastoral resources of the Fars region had been developed under the stable administration of the Achaemenid kings and as the Persian aristocracy had absorbed the military and administrative practices of the more sophisticated Median state. The conditions for a successful revolt were therefore in place by the time of Cyrus's accession, and the only requirement was an opportunity and a leader capable of exploiting it.

The opportunity, according to the narrative preserved in Herodotus and confirmed in its general outlines by the Babylonian sources, was provided by a conspiracy organized within the Median court itself, in which the senior counsellor Harpagus, whose son had been killed by Astyages in revenge for the supposed failure to dispose of the infant Cyrus, secretly contacted the Persian king and proposed that the Medes would support a Persian revolt against the rule of Astyages. The accounts of how this conspiracy was conducted and of the precise role of Harpagus in the subsequent events differ in their details, but the essential narrative, which is consistent across the principal sources, is that Cyrus, having received the secret commitments of the Median nobles disaffected with Astyages, raised the standard of revolt in Persia in or around 553 BCE and marched at the head of his army to challenge the Median king. Astyages, summoning his armies and placing them under the command of the very Harpagus who was the chief conspirator against him, advanced into the field to suppress the rebellion. In the decisive battle that followed, fought somewhere in the western Iranian plateau between the Persian highlands and the Median capital, the bulk of the Median army defected to Cyrus, leaving Astyages with only a small force of loyalists who were rapidly overcome. Astyages himself, according to the Babylonian Chronicle, was captured by his own soldiers and delivered to Cyrus, while the Persian army marched on to the unguarded capital at Ecbatana and seized the royal treasury and the symbols of imperial authority. The campaign was concluded in the year corresponding to 550 BCE, when Cyrus was formally proclaimed king of the combined Median and Persian dominions and entered the city of Ecbatana as the new master of the Iranian plateau.

The treatment of the defeated Astyages by his victorious grandson set a pattern that would characterize Cyrus's policy throughout his subsequent career and that would distinguish him sharply from the conqueror-kings of the previous Near Eastern dynasties. Astyages was not killed, was not mutilated, was not paraded in a triumphal procession or exposed to public humiliation, and was not subjected to the systematic terrors that the Assyrian kings had customarily inflicted on their defeated enemies. Instead, according to the accounts that have come down to us, he was treated with the respect appropriate to a former king and a kinsman of the conqueror, was assigned an honorable residence at the Persian court, and was permitted to live out the remainder of his life in the quiet retirement that his age and his fallen state required. The Median nobles who had supported the revolt were retained in their positions and were incorporated into the new administrative structure under the supervision of Persian officials, the Median capital at Ecbatana was preserved and continued to function as one of the principal royal residences of the new empire, and the religious and cultural institutions of the Median people were left undisturbed in their accustomed forms. The political message of these arrangements was clear: the new Persian king regarded himself not as the destroyer of the Median state but as its legitimate successor, the inheritor of the imperial dignity established by Cyaxares and now transferred to a more deserving branch of the same royal house, and the Median and Persian peoples, who shared a common Iranian heritage, were henceforth to be regarded as the joint rulers of a single Iranian empire of which the Persian king was the supreme head.

The Campaign Against Lydia and the Conquest of Sardis

The fall of the Median Empire in 550 BCE transformed the geopolitical situation of the Near East. The successor state of Persia under Cyrus inherited not only the territory and the resources of the Median kingdom but also its diplomatic relationships and its strategic problems, the most important of which was the long-standing rivalry with the Lydian kingdom of Anatolia, whose eastern boundary had been fixed at the river Halys after the war of the previous generation and whose ruler in 550 was the famously wealthy king Croesus, the son of Alyattes whose forty-year reign had brought Lydia to the height of its power and prosperity. The Lydian kingdom, centered on the city of Sardis in the western Anatolian highlands and controlling the rich agricultural and mining resources of the Hermus and Cayster valleys, was at this period the most prosperous and culturally sophisticated of the western states of Asia, with extensive commercial and diplomatic relations with the Greek cities of Ionia, with the Egyptians under their reforming pharaoh Amasis, and with the Babylonians under their new king Nabonidus. The Lydian court at Sardis had emerged in the early sixth century as the principal point of contact between the Anatolian and Aegean worlds, hosting Greek visitors of distinction including the lawgiver Solon of Athens, the sage Bias of Priene, and the philosopher Thales of Miletus, and patronizing a luxurious court culture whose splendor became proverbial in the literature of subsequent generations under the rubric of the wealth of Croesus.

The decision of Croesus to undertake war against the new Persian power, which led to his catastrophic defeat and to the absorption of his kingdom into the expanding Achaemenid Empire, has been one of the most extensively analyzed strategic miscalculations of ancient history. According to the elaborate narrative preserved in the first book of Herodotus, the Lydian king resolved upon war after consultation with the principal oracles of the Greek world, including the famous oracle of Apollo at Delphi, whose enigmatic response that if Croesus crossed the river Halys he would destroy a great empire was interpreted by the Lydian king as a prophecy of his own success but was later understood, in the bitter retrospect of his defeat, as a prophecy of the destruction of his own empire rather than that of his enemy. The historical reality behind this story was probably less mythological than the Herodotean account would suggest: Croesus, having observed the rapid expansion of Persian power and having concluded that the new empire of Cyrus posed a strategic threat to the security of his own kingdom, decided to strike before the Persian consolidation was complete, calculating that a quick offensive war could secure favorable terms before Cyrus had organized his new possessions for sustained military operations.

The Lydian invasion of the Persian Empire began in 547 or 546 BCE with the crossing of the Halys by the Lydian army and the advance into the formerly Median territory of Cappadocia in central Anatolia. The first major engagement, fought at Pteria in the Cappadocian highlands, was indecisive: the Lydian and Persian armies were of approximately equal strength, the Lydian cavalry proved superior to the Persian horse in the conditions of the battlefield, and the engagement ended with both sides withdrawing to their respective bases without a clear victor. Croesus, judging that the campaign could not be continued into the winter season and confident that the Persians would similarly retire to winter quarters, dismissed the bulk of his army and returned to Sardis with the intention of resuming operations in the spring with the support of his allies in Babylon, Egypt, and the Greek states. Cyrus, however, with the strategic boldness that would become the hallmark of his generalship, did not retire to winter quarters but instead conducted a forced march across the Anatolian plateau in the late autumn weeks, arriving at the gates of Sardis before Croesus had any opportunity to recall his disbanded forces. The Lydian king, facing the sudden appearance of the Persian army at his capital and unable to summon reinforcements, was obliged to give battle with the troops immediately available to him, principally his elite cavalry and a small body of mercenary infantry.

The battle of the plain of Sardis, fought in the autumn of 547 or the early winter of 546 BCE on the plain immediately east of the Lydian capital, was a decisive Persian victory. Cyrus, recognizing the superiority of the Lydian cavalry and the importance of neutralizing this advantage, adopted the famous expedient of placing the baggage camels of his army in the front rank of his line, with the cavalry behind them and the infantry in support. The horses of the Lydian cavalry, unaccustomed to the appearance and the smell of camels, broke ranks in panic at the first contact with the Persian line, throwing their riders and disrupting the Lydian formation, and the Persian infantry, advancing through the gaps in the broken cavalry line, was able to engage and defeat the smaller Lydian infantry contingent without difficulty. Croesus, surveying the disaster from the heights above the battlefield, was obliged to withdraw the remnants of his army into the citadel of Sardis, where he prepared to endure a siege in the expectation of relief from his allies.

The siege of Sardis, which followed the battle of the plain, was conducted by Cyrus with the same combination of strategic patience and tactical opportunism that had characterized his earlier operations. The citadel of Sardis, situated on the steep north-eastern spur of the Tmolus mountain at an elevation of several hundred feet above the surrounding plain, was one of the strongest fortifications in the ancient Near East and was generally considered impregnable to direct assault. The Persians invested the city with their full force, blockading the approaches and waiting for the food and water of the defenders to be exhausted. After perhaps two weeks of siege, however, a Persian soldier observed a Lydian sentry climbing down the rock face to recover a helmet that had fallen from the parapet, and noted the unguarded approach by which the climb had been made. A storming party was assembled from the most agile members of the Persian army, the climb was successfully repeated by night, the unguarded portion of the wall was scaled, and the citadel was captured by surprise before the defenders could organize an effective resistance. Croesus himself was taken prisoner along with his queen, his daughters, and the principal members of his court, and the city of Sardis, with its accumulated treasures of the Lydian kingdom and its rich commercial wealth, passed under Persian control.

The treatment of the captured Croesus by Cyrus has been one of the most celebrated episodes of ancient historiography, recorded in multiple versions of varying historicity in the literature of subsequent centuries. According to the dramatic account preserved in Herodotus, Cyrus initially ordered the construction of a great pyre on which Croesus was to be burned alive together with fourteen young Lydian nobles, but was moved by the dignified bearing of the defeated king and by his repeated invocation of the name of the Athenian sage Solon, whose warning that no man should be called happy until his death had been spoken to Croesus at the height of his prosperity. Cyrus, learning the meaning of the invocation through an interpreter and reflecting that he himself, as a man and a king, was subject to the same reversals of fortune that had brought Croesus to the pyre, ordered the fire to be extinguished. A sudden rainstorm, interpreted by the Lydian king as a miraculous intervention of Apollo whose oracle at Delphi he had so generously patronized, completed the rescue, and Croesus was released from his bonds and brought before the Persian king, who thenceforth treated him with the respect appropriate to a former monarch and retained him as a personal advisor in the Persian court. The historical reliability of this account has been questioned by some modern scholars, who note that a contemporary fragment of the Babylonian Chronicle appears to record the killing of the king of Lydia in the year of the conquest, and there is therefore no certainty as to the actual fate of Croesus after his capture. What is reasonably clear, however, is that the policy of conciliation and the incorporation of defeated rulers and aristocracies into the structure of the new empire, which Cyrus had inaugurated with his treatment of Astyages, was continued in his arrangements for the administration of the conquered Lydian kingdom, and that the principal members of the Lydian court found themselves rapidly accommodated within the Persian imperial system on terms that respected their status and their property.

The Greek Cities of Ionia and the Western Settlement

The conquest of Sardis brought under Persian control not only the territory and the wealth of the Lydian kingdom but also the complex network of relationships that the Lydian throne had maintained with the Greek-speaking cities along the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. The Ionian and Aeolian cities of Asia Minor, twelve of which were grouped in the religious and political federation known as the Ionian League and which included the great commercial centers of Miletus, Ephesus, Phocaea, Smyrna, and Samos along with smaller cities such as Priene, Teos, Chios, and Lebedos, had been brought during the reigns of Alyattes and Croesus into a relationship of tributary alliance with the Lydian crown. The Lydian kings had not interfered with the internal political life of the Greek cities, which retained their traditional constitutional arrangements as oligarchies or as tyrannies, and had limited their demands to the payment of tribute and the provision of military contingents for the Lydian armies. The Greek cities, in return, had received the protection of the Lydian throne against the threats posed by inland Anatolian powers, had enjoyed favored access to the rich commercial networks that converged on Sardis, and had developed in the course of the late seventh and the early sixth century the highest level of literary, philosophical, and artistic culture that the Greek world had yet seen, producing in Miletus alone the natural philosophers Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes whose speculations on the fundamental constitution of the cosmos inaugurated the tradition of Greek scientific thought.

The sudden collapse of the Lydian kingdom and its absorption into the Persian Empire confronted the Ionian cities with the immediate question of what their relationship to the new imperial power would be. Cyrus, departing from Sardis after his victory and leaving the further pacification of the western territories to his lieutenants, offered the Greek cities terms similar to those they had enjoyed under the Lydian throne: they were to acknowledge his suzerainty, to pay tribute, and to provide military contingents when required, and in return they would be left to manage their own internal affairs and would enjoy the protection of the Persian state. The terms were considered relatively generous, and most of the Ionian cities, after some hesitation and after the failure of various Greek diplomatic missions to secure better arrangements, accepted them. The exception was the city of Miletus, the greatest of the Ionian centers, which had concluded its own separate accommodation with Cyrus on terms that preserved its commercial primacy among the Greek cities of the coast. The Greek cities that accepted the Persian terms were placed under the supervision of the Persian satrap of Lydia, who governed from Sardis and who exercised over them the same kind of light overlordship that the Lydian kings had previously maintained, while the cities themselves continued to manage their internal affairs through their traditional institutions.

The settlement that emerged in Ionia after the conquest of Sardis was, however, complicated by the resistance of certain cities that refused to accept Persian terms. The most spectacular case was that of Phocaea, the northernmost of the Ionian cities, whose population, rather than submit to the Persian yoke, embarked en masse on their ships and abandoned their city, sailing first to the Aegean island of Chios and then to the western Mediterranean where they established new colonies in Corsica and southern Italy. The Phocaean exodus, recorded with vivid detail in the narrative of Herodotus, was the most dramatic instance of the population movement that the Persian conquest occasioned in the eastern Mediterranean, but it was not the only one: the Teans likewise abandoned their city and migrated to the Thracian coast where they founded the colony of Abdera, and various smaller groups of Ionian Greeks emigrated to the western Greek world or to the Black Sea regions in the years following the conquest. Those Greeks who remained in their cities and accepted Persian rule, by contrast, enjoyed several decades of relatively prosperous existence under the early Achaemenid administration, contributing in some measure to the formidable Persian fleet that would be assembled by the later Achaemenid kings and exporting their commercial products throughout the Mediterranean basin under the protection of the imperial peace.

The pacification of the inland Anatolian territories proceeded in parallel with the settlement of the Ionian cities. The Lycians in the south-western corner of Asia Minor offered the most determined resistance to the Persian advance, and the campaign that subdued them, conducted under the command of the Persian general Harpagus who had defected from the Median king Astyages and who now served Cyrus as one of his most trusted commanders, was marked by the famous mass suicide of the Lycian city of Xanthus, whose inhabitants, despairing of successful resistance after the breaching of their walls, gathered their wives and children into the citadel and set fire to it before sallying out to die in combat with the attacking Persians. The Carians of the south-western Anatolian coast, the Pamphylians of the southern coast east of Lycia, the Cilicians of the south-eastern coastal plain, and the various inland populations of central and eastern Anatolia were brought under Persian rule with less dramatic resistance, partly because their political organizations were less coherent than those of the Lycians or the Greeks, and partly because the example of the Persian treatment of Lydia and Ionia had made clear that submission would be rewarded with reasonable terms. By the time Cyrus had completed his western campaigns and returned to the eastern part of his empire in approximately 545 BCE, the entirety of Asia Minor west of the Halys and as far as the Aegean coast had been incorporated into the Achaemenid state, and the western frontier of the empire had been advanced from the central Anatolian highlands to the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Eastern Campaigns Before Babylon

The years between the fall of Sardis in 547 BCE and the campaign against Babylon in 539 BCE were occupied by Cyrus with a series of expeditions into the eastern reaches of his empire, into regions whose names and locations are imperfectly known to modern scholarship but which included the lands of Hyrcania along the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, Parthia in the northern Iranian plateau, Drangiana in the Helmand basin of modern Afghanistan, Aria around the modern city of Herat, Bactria in the upper Oxus valley of modern northern Afghanistan and southern Uzbekistan, Sogdiana in the Zeravshan and lower Oxus regions of modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, Arachosia in the upper Indus drainage of modern southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, and Gandhara in the lower Kabul valley and the northern Punjab. These eastern campaigns are very sparsely documented in the surviving sources, which preserve only the names of some of the conquered territories in the lists of subject nations recorded by Darius the Great and the brief accounts of certain individual campaigns in the work of Herodotus, but they may be presumed to have constituted a major military and administrative undertaking that extended Persian rule to the edges of the Indian subcontinent and to the borders of the Central Asian steppes.

The political organization of the eastern Iranian territories before the Persian conquest had consisted of a loose patchwork of tribal confederations and small kingdoms whose populations spoke various dialects of the eastern Iranian language family and whose religious and cultural traditions were closely related to those of the Persian and Median peoples to the west. The cities of Bactria and Sogdiana, particularly the great urban centers of Balkh, Marakanda, and Bukhara whose archaeological remains have been extensively investigated in modern times, had developed in the course of the late second and the early first millennium BCE a level of urbanization and economic sophistication comparable to that of the western Iranian regions, with extensive commercial connections to the Indus civilization to the south, to the Central Asian steppe peoples to the north, and to the Mesopotamian lowlands to the west through the network of caravan routes that would later be known as the Silk Road. The principal economic activities of these eastern territories included intensive irrigated agriculture in the river valleys of the Oxus, Jaxartes, and their tributaries; the breeding of horses and other livestock on the pasturelands of the foothills and the steppes; the working of the rich mineral resources of the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountains, including the lapis lazuli mines of Badakhshan whose products had been exported to the Near East since the third millennium; and the long-distance trade in luxury goods that connected the Mediterranean world with the steppes of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

The conquest of these territories by Cyrus would have followed the established pattern of Persian campaigning: a combination of military pressure against the principal centers of resistance with diplomatic accommodation of the local aristocracies and the retention of existing administrative structures wherever this could be done without prejudice to imperial authority. The Bactrian and Sogdian cities, in particular, would have been brought under Persian rule through a combination of military assault and negotiated settlement, with the local kings and chieftains being incorporated into the new imperial administration as satraps or as subordinate officials and the populations being left undisturbed in their traditional ways of life. The eastern campaigns culminated in the establishment of the Achaemenid province known as Hindush, the lower Indus valley of modern Pakistan, which constituted the easternmost extension of the Persian Empire and which would remain under Persian control until its loss to Alexander of Macedon in 326 BCE. The territories beyond the Jaxartes river, which constituted the north-eastern frontier of the empire and which were occupied by the nomadic peoples whom the Persians collectively designated as the Sakas, were not formally incorporated into the empire but were subjected to a more or less effective overlordship that involved the payment of tribute, the provision of military contingents for the Achaemenid armies, and the periodic visitation of the territory by Persian military expeditions.

The Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Background to the Conquest of Babylon

The most important and the best-documented of Cyrus's campaigns was the conquest of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE, which made him master of the lands of Mesopotamia and Syria and which represented the culminating achievement of his career of conquest. The Neo-Babylonian Empire over which the last of its kings, Nabonidus, ruled in the closing years of the 540s was the successor state to the Assyrian Empire that had been destroyed in 612 by the combined armies of Cyaxares and Nabopolassar, and it had inherited from its Assyrian predecessor the territories of Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and northern Arabia. The Babylonian throne had been occupied since 605 by Nabopolassar's son Nebuchadnezzar II, whose long reign of forty-three years had been marked by the great campaigns against the kingdom of Judah that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of the Jewish elites to Babylon in 587-586, by the spectacular construction projects in the city of Babylon that produced the famous walls, gates, and processional way associated with the name of the king, and by the cultural florescence of the late Babylonian civilization in literature, in mathematics, in astronomy, and in the arts. The death of Nebuchadnezzar in 562 had been followed by a period of dynastic instability in which three successive kings had occupied and lost the throne in the space of six years, before the accession in 556 of Nabonidus, a Babylonian aristocrat of provincial origins whose claim to the throne rested on the support of certain factions of the priestly and military establishment.

The reign of Nabonidus was one of the most peculiar and controversial reigns in the long history of Babylonian kingship. He was an antiquarian of considerable learning who took a particular interest in the religious traditions of the ancient Mesopotamian cities, who conducted extensive archaeological investigations of the foundations of ancient temples and inscribed monuments in order to recover the names and the rituals of the early kings, and who was personally devoted to the worship of the moon-god Sin of Harran rather than to the worship of Marduk of Babylon, the chief deity of the imperial capital and the patron of the Babylonian state. His religious eccentricities, which manifested themselves in the elaborate reconstruction of the temple of Sin at Harran, in the importation of the statue of Sin to Babylon, and in the apparent neglect of the New Year festival of Marduk during the years when the king was absent from the capital, alienated the powerful priestly establishment of Babylon and created serious tensions within the political structure of the empire. His unexplained ten-year residence at the oasis of Tayma in the Arabian peninsula, during which the affairs of the empire were conducted in his name by his son Belshazzar acting as crown prince in Babylon, has been variously interpreted as a religiously motivated retreat for the purpose of communing with the moon-god, as a strategic relocation for the purpose of controlling the lucrative caravan trade of northern Arabia, and as a self-imposed exile resulting from political conflicts at the Babylonian court, and the precise reasons for the king's prolonged absence from his capital remain a matter of scholarly debate.

The political consequences of Nabonidus's religious and personal eccentricities were serious. The priestly establishment of Babylon, whose support was essential to the legitimate exercise of royal authority and whose hostility to the king was registered in a series of contemporary cuneiform documents that have been preserved in the libraries of the city, became progressively alienated from the throne and willing to consider alternative arrangements. The merchant class of Babylon, dependent on the stability of imperial administration and on the maintenance of the commercial networks that converged on the capital, found the king's prolonged absence and his apparent neglect of routine administrative business deeply unsettling. The military establishment, accustomed under previous kings to the regular conduct of campaigns and to the maintenance of an active foreign policy, found Nabonidus's defensive posture and his apparent unwillingness to engage with the rising Persian threat from the east increasingly difficult to accept. By the time Nabonidus returned from Tayma to Babylon in approximately 543 BCE, the political condition of the empire had been seriously weakened by the prolonged absence of effective royal leadership, and the conditions for a foreign conquest had been substantially prepared by the internal disaffection of the principal political and economic interests of the capital.

The Conquest of Babylon and the Cyrus Cylinder

The campaign that brought Cyrus to the throne of Babylon in 539 BCE was, by the standards of his earlier military operations, relatively brief and bloodless. The Persian army, advancing from the east through the territory of Elam and into the Mesopotamian lowlands, encountered the Babylonian forces at the city of Opis on the Tigris in early October 539. The battle of Opis, fought between the Persian army under Cyrus's command and the Babylonian forces under Nabonidus and his son Belshazzar, resulted in a decisive Persian victory: the Babylonian army was broken and dispersed, the city of Opis was captured and, according to the Babylonian Chronicle, its inhabitants were massacred by Cyrus's troops in one of the rare instances of brutal treatment recorded in his career. The capture of Opis was followed by the surrender of the nearby fortress of Sippar without resistance, and by the rapid advance of the Persian army on the capital city of Babylon itself.

The fall of Babylon to Cyrus's army on the sixteenth of October 539 BCE was effected, according to the Babylonian Chronicle, without a battle: the city was entered by a Persian detachment under the command of the general Ugbaru, a former Babylonian governor of Gutium who had defected to the Persian cause, and the resistance of the defenders, if any was attempted, was rapidly overcome. The accounts preserved in the Greek historians Herodotus and Xenophon describe an elaborate stratagem by which the Persian forces diverted the waters of the Euphrates that flowed through the city and entered Babylon along the bed of the river under cover of darkness, but this account is not corroborated by the contemporary cuneiform sources and is probably a literary elaboration rather than a historically accurate description. What is clear from the Babylonian sources is that the actual entry into the city was rapid and that organized resistance was minimal, and that the Persian occupation of the capital was completed within a few days of the fall of Opis. The king Nabonidus, who had attempted to organize a defense from the city, was captured shortly after the fall of Babylon and was treated, in accordance with the established Persian policy toward defeated monarchs, with respect and lenience: he was reportedly exiled to the eastern province of Carmania where he spent the remainder of his life in dignified retirement.

The seventeen days between the actual fall of the city to the Persian forces and the formal entry of Cyrus himself into Babylon on the third of November 539 BCE were occupied with the preparations for what the Persian king clearly intended to be a major political and propaganda event. The cooperation of the Babylonian priestly establishment, whose disaffection from Nabonidus had been one of the principal factors enabling the Persian conquest, was secured by Cyrus through a series of careful gestures aimed at presenting the Persian king as the legitimate continuation of Babylonian kingship and as the chosen instrument of the Babylonian gods, particularly of Marduk himself, the chief deity of the city whose worship Nabonidus was alleged to have neglected. The ceremonial entry of Cyrus into Babylon, conducted according to the traditional rites of Babylonian royal accession, included the famous procession in which the king clasped the hands of the statue of Marduk in the great temple of Esagila in the heart of the city, the ritual gesture by which a new king was formally recognized as the chosen of the god and was invested with the legitimate authority of the Babylonian throne. The Persian king took for himself the traditional Mesopotamian titles of king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters, and king of the universe, and presented himself in his Babylonian inscriptions as the legitimate continuation of the line of Babylonian kingship.

The most important documentary evidence for the political ideology of Cyrus's rule in Babylon is the famous Cyrus Cylinder, a baked clay cylinder some twenty-three centimeters in length and eleven centimeters in diameter, inscribed with forty-five lines of Akkadian cuneiform text, which was deposited in the foundations of the temple of Marduk in Babylon at the time of Cyrus's formal accession to the Babylonian throne and which was recovered by the British archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam during his excavations of the site in 1879. The text of the cylinder, which has been the subject of extensive study and translation, presents Cyrus's accession to the Babylonian throne in terms that closely follow the conventions of the traditional Babylonian royal inscriptions: it accuses the previous king Nabonidus of religious impiety and of neglect of the proper cults of the Babylonian gods, it describes how the god Marduk searched among the lands for a righteous king to deliver his city from the impious rule of its previous monarch, it identifies Cyrus as the chosen of Marduk whom the god summoned by name and led to victory over the unrighteous king, and it describes the peaceful entry of Cyrus into the city and his restoration of the proper religious observances. The cylinder further describes Cyrus's policy toward the conquered peoples and toward the sanctuaries of their gods, asserting that he had returned to their original cities the divine images that had been brought to Babylon by previous kings and had restored to their homes the populations that had been forcibly relocated, and concluding with the traditional Babylonian formulae of royal benediction and prayer for divine favor.

The Cyrus Cylinder has acquired in modern times a status as a foundational document in the history of human rights, having been described in various official statements of the Iranian government and the United Nations as the first declaration of human rights in the ancient world. This interpretation, while inspiring and politically influential, requires some qualification. The text of the cylinder is a formal Babylonian royal inscription in the established tradition of the genre, composed by Babylonian scribes for a Babylonian audience and following the conventions of similar inscriptions composed for previous Babylonian kings. Its statements about the restoration of divine images to their cities and the return of displaced populations to their homes are paralleled in earlier Mesopotamian inscriptions and are not in themselves evidence of any unprecedented humanitarian policy. The cylinder makes no general declaration of universal human rights, makes no provision for the protection of individuals against arbitrary state action, and does not advance any of the philosophical or constitutional principles that would later be associated with the modern concept of human rights. What it does demonstrate, however, is the political genius of Cyrus in adapting his self-presentation to the religious and cultural traditions of his subject populations, and the broader policy of religious tolerance and accommodation that distinguished the Achaemenid imperial system from its more brutal Assyrian and Babylonian predecessors.

The Edict of Return and the Jewish Exiles

The most celebrated application of Cyrus's policy of religious tolerance and of restoration of displaced populations was his treatment of the Jewish exiles who had been deported to Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II and who, in the year following the fall of Babylon, received from the new Persian king the famous decree authorizing their return to the land of Judah and the reconstruction of the temple at Jerusalem. The Jewish exile in Babylon, which had begun in 597 BCE with the first deportation of King Jehoiachin and the principal members of the Judahite elite, and which had been completed in 587-586 BCE with the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of the remaining population, had created in Mesopotamia a significant community of perhaps fifty thousand to a hundred thousand persons of Judahite origin, settled in various locations throughout the Babylonian Empire and engaged in agricultural, commercial, and artisanal activities. The exilic community had preserved its religious identity through the institutional development of the synagogue as a place of communal prayer and study in the absence of the destroyed Jerusalem temple, through the editorial activity that produced in the course of the exile the final form of much of the Hebrew Bible including the Pentateuch and the historical and prophetic books, and through the preservation of the Hebrew language and the genealogical records that distinguished the exiles from the surrounding populations.

The decree of Cyrus authorizing the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem and the reconstruction of the temple is preserved in two versions in the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Ezra and in the book of Chronicles, and is also reflected in various passages of the prophetic literature composed during and immediately after the exile, particularly in the so-called Second Isaiah, the anonymous prophet whose oracles in chapters forty through fifty-five of the book of Isaiah hail Cyrus as the anointed of the Lord and as the divinely chosen instrument of the restoration of Israel. The two versions of the decree preserved in Ezra differ somewhat in their language and in their administrative details: the Hebrew version in Ezra chapter one is presented as a public proclamation made throughout the empire and emphasizes the religious motivation of the king's policy, while the Aramaic version in Ezra chapter six is presented as a memorandum from the royal archives recording the administrative details of the project, including the dimensions of the temple to be reconstructed and the funds to be allocated from the royal treasury for the purpose. The two versions are generally regarded by modern scholarship as preserving, with the usual editorial modifications of biblical historical writing, the substance of an actual Achaemenid administrative decree, and they constitute important evidence both for the policy of the Persian king and for the religious self-understanding of the post-exilic Jewish community.

The return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem under Cyrus's authorization was not a single event but a process that extended over several decades, and the eventual reconstruction of the temple was not completed until the reign of Darius the Great, some twenty years after the original decree. The first contingent of returnees, led according to the biblical account by a certain Sheshbazzar who is identified as a prince of Judah, arrived in Jerusalem in or shortly after 538 BCE with the authorization of the Persian king and with funds and materials allocated from the royal treasury for the project. A second and larger contingent, led by Zerubbabel the grandson of King Jehoiachin and accompanied by the high priest Joshua, arrived some years later and undertook the actual reconstruction of the temple, which was completed in 515 BCE. The community that emerged from this process, known in the historical literature as the post-exilic or Second Temple Jewish community, was significantly smaller and poorer than the pre-exilic kingdom of Judah had been, was concentrated in the region of Jerusalem and the surrounding Judean hills with a substantial population remaining in Babylon and other parts of the empire, and was characterized by an intensified religious orthodoxy organized around the rebuilt temple, the codified scriptural texts, and the priestly hierarchy whose authority would dominate Jewish religious life until the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 CE.

The status of Cyrus in subsequent Jewish religious tradition was one of unique honor among the rulers of the ancient world. He was identified in the Second Isaiah as the anointed of the Lord, a designation that in the Hebrew was the term Mashiach from which the later messianic concept would develop, and which was applied to him in the prophetic literature with a directness that was extended to no other foreign ruler in the Hebrew Bible. He was identified as the divinely chosen agent of the restoration of Israel after the disaster of the exile, as the one whom the Lord had raised up from the east to fulfill the divine purpose, and as the legitimate executor of the divine plan for the salvation of the chosen people. This positive evaluation of the Persian king was preserved in the editorial framework of the biblical literature, was elaborated in the post-biblical Jewish tradition, and was transmitted through the Christian Old Testament to the religious imagination of the Western world, where Cyrus would remain throughout the medieval and modern periods one of the few non-Israelite rulers to enjoy a positive reputation in the religious literature of the Abrahamic traditions.

The Administrative Organization of the Empire

The administrative arrangements that Cyrus established for the governance of his rapidly expanding empire constituted, perhaps even more than his military conquests, the foundational achievement of his reign and the basis of the long-term success of the Achaemenid dynasty. The empire that he created was, by the standards of any previous Near Eastern state, of unprecedented size and ethnographic complexity, extending over distances that required weeks of travel to traverse and incorporating populations whose languages, religions, customs, and historical experiences differed profoundly from those of the Persian core. The administrative challenge of governing such an empire was correspondingly unprecedented, and the solutions that Cyrus and his immediate successors devised would constitute the basic template for imperial governance in the Old World for the following thousand years and would influence, directly or indirectly, the administrative structures of every subsequent empire from the Hellenistic kingdoms of the successors of Alexander through the Roman Empire and the Sassanian and Islamic empires of the medieval Near East down to the Mughal Empire of India and the Ottoman Empire of the modern period.

The principal administrative unit of the Achaemenid system was the satrapy, a regional government of approximately the size of one of the constituent kingdoms that the empire had absorbed, presided over by a satrap who was usually a member of the Persian royal family or a senior aristocrat of the imperial court and who exercised on behalf of the king the full range of administrative, judicial, military, and fiscal authority within his territory. The system of satrapies, which would receive its definitive elaboration under Darius the Great in the late sixth century, was already present in embryonic form in the arrangements that Cyrus established after each of his major conquests, with the territories of the former Median Empire being administered as a single province under a Persian satrap based at Ecbatana, the former Lydian kingdom and the Greek cities of Ionia being administered as a satrapy with its center at Sardis, the various eastern Iranian territories being grouped into satrapies based at Bactra, Marakanda, and other principal cities, and the former Neo-Babylonian Empire being administered as a satrapy based at Babylon. The satrap was typically supported by a small central administration of Persian officials, by a body of military forces that included both a permanent garrison and the contingents of the local aristocratic levies, and by the existing administrative apparatus of the conquered kingdom, whose officials were generally retained in their positions and continued to conduct routine business in their accustomed manner.

The relationship between the central royal authority and the regional satrapies was structured to balance the requirements of effective regional administration with the need to prevent any individual satrap from accumulating sufficient resources and loyalty to challenge the king. The satrap was appointed by and removable at the pleasure of the king, was subject to inspection by traveling royal commissioners known in the Greek sources as the king's eyes and ears, was required to forward to the central treasury a substantial proportion of the tribute and the agricultural surplus extracted from his province, and was prevented from controlling the military garrison of his province by the parallel appointment of a separate military commander who reported directly to the king rather than to the satrap. The administrative coordination of the empire was maintained by a system of royal roads, of which the most famous was the great Royal Road that connected Sardis on the Aegean coast with Susa in the lowlands of Khuzistan, a distance of some sixteen hundred miles that could be covered by the relays of mounted couriers in approximately seven days. The road system, supplemented by an effective postal service known as the angareion which provided regular communication between the satrapal capitals and the central royal court, permitted the rapid transmission of royal orders, the reporting of provincial conditions, and the movement of imperial officials and military forces throughout the empire.

The fiscal organization of the empire was based on a system of regular tribute payments from each satrapy, the amount of which was fixed in accordance with the assessed capacity of the province to pay and was payable in a combination of silver bullion, agricultural produce, livestock, manufactured goods, and other items of value. The tribute system, which would be elaborated and codified under Darius the Great into the famous catalogue of provincial contributions preserved in the third book of Herodotus, was already established in its basic form under Cyrus and provided the financial resources for the conduct of the central royal administration, the maintenance of the imperial court, the construction of royal residences, the support of the standing army, and the various other expenses of imperial government. The system was supplemented by additional sources of revenue including the produce of the royal estates that were scattered throughout the empire, the proceeds of royal monopolies on certain commercial activities, the income from the imperial mines and quarries, and the irregular contributions extracted on special occasions such as the coronation of a new king or the celebration of a major military victory.

The religious policy of the empire, which has been mentioned in connection with Cyrus's treatment of the Babylonian, Jewish, and other religious communities, was a central element of the Achaemenid administrative system and was articulated with a clarity that distinguished it sharply from the religious policies of previous Near Eastern empires. The Persian king presented himself as the chosen of Ahura Mazda, the supreme creator god of the Iranian religious tradition, and his royal inscriptions consistently invoked the protection and the favor of this deity in their formulaic invocations. But the religious self-presentation of the king did not require, and did not in practice permit, the suppression or the displacement of the religious traditions of the conquered peoples. The temples of the various national gods of the empire were maintained at imperial expense, their priesthoods were recognized and supported by the royal authority, their festivals and rituals were permitted to continue without interference, and their authority over their own communities was reinforced by the legal recognition of the religious courts and the religious laws of each subject population. The famous decree of Cyrus authorizing the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem and the reconstruction of the temple was only one instance of a much broader pattern of religious accommodation that extended to the Egyptian temples of the Nile valley, to the Babylonian sanctuaries of Mesopotamia, to the Anatolian shrines of Lydia and Ionia, and to the Iranian fire temples of the eastern provinces.

The legal system of the empire similarly preserved a pluralistic structure in which the various subject populations were governed by their own laws and judicial procedures rather than being subjected to a uniform imperial code. The Babylonian populations continued to be governed by the elaborate corpus of Babylonian law that had been codified in the famous Code of Hammurabi and had been continuously developed and applied in the centuries since; the Jewish populations were governed by the Torah and by the developing oral tradition that would eventually be codified in the Mishnah and the Talmud; the Egyptian populations were governed by the customary law of the Pharaonic state and by the temple-administered procedures that had regulated Egyptian society for millennia; the Greek cities of Ionia continued to apply the traditional legal arrangements of their oligarchic and democratic constitutions; and the various Iranian populations of the imperial heartland were governed by the customary law of the Persian tribes and by the new royal pronouncements issued by the Achaemenid kings. The legal pluralism of the system was supplemented by a developing body of imperial royal law, applicable throughout the empire and dealing principally with matters of treason, royal authority, taxation, and military service, which was administered by the royal courts and which constituted the framework within which the various local legal systems operated.

Pasargadae and the Royal Building Program

The principal monument of Cyrus's reign that survives to the present day in a substantially intact form is the royal palace and tomb complex at Pasargadae in the high valley of the Polvar river some thirty miles north-east of the later Achaemenid capital of Persepolis. The site, situated at an elevation of approximately six thousand feet in the southern Zagros mountains and surrounded by the rich agricultural plain of the Murghab valley, was chosen by Cyrus as his principal royal residence and as the architectural expression of the new imperial dignity of the Persian throne, and the construction of its principal buildings would have been undertaken in the years following his major conquests, probably between the conquest of Lydia in 547 and his death in 530. The site is conventionally identified as the place where Cyrus had won his decisive victory over Astyages in 550, although this identification rests on later traditions rather than on contemporary evidence and may reflect the symbolic significance of the site rather than its actual historical role in the foundation of the empire.

The architectural program at Pasargadae represented a synthesis of the various artistic and architectural traditions that the Persian Empire had inherited from its conquered territories, combining elements of Median, Elamite, Babylonian, Assyrian, Lydian, Greek, and Egyptian provenance into a distinctive new style that would constitute the foundation of Achaemenid royal art. The principal buildings of the site included the great royal residence known as Palace P, the audience hall known as Palace S, the gatehouse known as Building R with its famous winged figure that may or may not represent Cyrus himself, the formal garden enclosure known as the paradeisos that gave its name to the later European concept of paradise, and the royal tomb of Cyrus that stands at the southern end of the site. The palaces were constructed of carefully fitted stone blocks of various colors, with the principal columns of black limestone supporting roofs of cedar wood imported from Lebanon, with the principal doorways framed by reliefs of guardian figures in the Mesopotamian tradition, and with the principal walls decorated with painted plaster and with inlaid tile work. The garden enclosure, which is among the earliest known formal gardens in the ancient Near East, was organized around a system of stone-lined water channels that distributed water from the river to the various planted areas, was subdivided into geometrical compartments containing fruit trees, ornamental plants, and decorative pools, and was bounded by porticoes and pavilions in which the king and his court could enjoy the cool air and the play of the water on hot summer days.

The tomb of Cyrus, which still stands at Pasargadae in a remarkably well-preserved condition some two and a half millennia after its construction, is one of the most impressive funerary monuments of the ancient world. The structure consists of a small gabled chamber of carefully fitted limestone blocks, mounted on a stepped platform of six receding tiers that rise to a total height of approximately thirty-five feet, with a low entrance on one side that originally permitted access to the interior burial chamber. The architectural form combines elements of Lydian and Anatolian funerary tradition with the stepped platform characteristic of Mesopotamian ziggurat construction, and the overall effect is one of dignified simplicity and monumental presence that distinguishes the building from the more elaborate funerary monuments of contemporary Babylonian and Egyptian rulers. The interior of the tomb, which was visited and described by Greek visitors of the late Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods, originally contained the sarcophagus of the king and various objects of personal use including weapons, jewelry, and items of ceremonial dress, but the contents had been removed and the chamber violated by the time Alexander of Macedon visited the site in 324 BCE during his eastern campaigns.

The inscription on the tomb, which was reported by various Greek visitors of the post-Achaemenid period and which has been variously reconstructed by modern scholars, was a short declaration in three languages, probably Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, in which the king identified himself simply as Cyrus, king and Achaemenid, and appealed to the visitor to respect his tomb and to do no injury to the monument. The Alexander historians preserve a version of the inscription in Greek translation that runs as follows: O man, whoever you are and from wherever you come, for I know that you will come, I am Cyrus, who founded the empire of the Persians. Do not, therefore, begrudge me this little earth that covers my body. The simplicity and the personal directness of this inscription, set against the elaborate self-glorifications of the contemporary Egyptian and Babylonian royal tombs and against the more ornate funerary inscriptions of Cyrus's own successors at Persepolis, has been cited as evidence of the personal modesty that the Persian tradition ascribed to the founder of the empire and as a reflection of the political values of restraint, dignity, and respect for human limitations that characterized the early Achaemenid royal ideology.

The Eastern Frontier and the Campaign Against the Massagetae

The final years of Cyrus's reign, from approximately 535 BCE to his death in 530, were occupied with the consolidation of the empire's eastern frontiers against the pressure of the nomadic peoples of the Central Asian steppes. The relationship between the settled agricultural and urban populations of the Iranian plateau and the nomadic pastoralists of the steppe lands to the north had been throughout the early first millennium one of intermittent conflict, in which the superior mobility of the steppe peoples and their unique tactical advantages in mounted warfare permitted them to conduct devastating raids against the agricultural populations of the south while remaining largely immune to retaliation in their own territories. The Persian Empire, having inherited the responsibility for the defense of the northern frontiers from the various Median and Iranian kingdoms that had preceded it, was obliged to undertake a sustained policy of fortification, garrisoning, and periodic punitive campaigns aimed at maintaining a defensible boundary between the settled and the nomadic worlds.

The most threatening of the steppe peoples confronting the eastern Achaemenid frontier in the closing years of Cyrus's reign was the confederation of the Massagetae, an Iranian-speaking nomadic people whose territory lay beyond the Jaxartes river in the steppes of modern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and whose military strength rested on a powerful force of mounted archers organized under the leadership of their queen Tomyris, the widow of the previous Massagetan king. The Massagetae had grown in power and assertiveness in the decades preceding Cyrus's eastern campaign, had conducted increasingly bold raids against the settled populations of the trans-Oxus territories, and had begun to threaten the security of the imperial provinces of Sogdiana and Bactria. The decision of Cyrus to undertake a major campaign against the Massagetae in 530, despite his advanced age of approximately sixty years and the prolonged labors of his preceding conquests, reflected the strategic judgment that the threat from the northern frontier could not be effectively addressed by purely defensive measures and required an offensive expedition into the heart of the Massagetan territory.

The campaign against the Massagetae, the principal source for which is the narrative preserved in the first book of Herodotus, was conducted with the full military resources of the empire under the personal command of the king. Cyrus marched his army across the Jaxartes into the steppe lands beyond, employing the established Persian techniques of long-distance military operation including the construction of a chain of supply depots along the line of advance, the maintenance of regular communications with the imperial heartland through the established postal system, and the deployment of mixed forces of infantry, cavalry, and light skirmishers capable of operating effectively in the open terrain of the steppe environment. The opening phase of the campaign was successful: the Persian army was able to engage and defeat a substantial Massagetan force, capturing in the process the son of Queen Tomyris, a young prince named Spargapises, who was reportedly taken prisoner together with a large number of other Massagetan warriors. The Massagetan losses in this engagement were sufficiently serious that Tomyris, according to the Herodotean account, sent a message to Cyrus offering peace on the condition that the Persian king withdraw his forces from her territory and release her captured son.

The negotiations that followed the first engagement, however, broke down under circumstances that are imperfectly understood. According to the Herodotean account, the captured prince Spargapises, on regaining his sobriety after a period of intoxication during which he had been captured, committed suicide in his confinement rather than face the humiliation of his defeat, and Tomyris, upon learning of her son's death, gathered the full force of the Massagetan nation for a decisive battle against the Persian invaders. The encounter that followed, which Herodotus describes as the most ferocious battle he had heard of among the barbarians, was fought between the full strength of the Persian and Massagetan armies on the steppe territory beyond the Jaxartes and resulted in the catastrophic defeat of the Persian forces. Cyrus himself was killed in the fighting, the bulk of his army was destroyed or scattered, and the Massagetan queen, according to the dramatic conclusion of the Herodotean narrative, recovered the body of the dead Persian king and plunged its severed head into a vessel filled with human blood, with the famous declaration that she was now satisfying his thirst for blood as she had threatened to do during the failed negotiations.

The historical reliability of the various details of this account has been the subject of considerable scholarly discussion. The fact of Cyrus's death on the eastern frontier in 530 BCE is securely established by the cuneiform sources, which record the accession of his son Cambyses to the throne in that year, but the precise circumstances of his death are less certain. The Herodotean version, with its dramatic elements of the prince's suicide, the queen's vengeance, and the gruesome treatment of the dead king's body, has the literary character of a tragic narrative composed for the moral instruction of the Greek audience rather than a sober historical record, and various elements of the story may have been added or elaborated by the Greek tradition in the course of its transmission. Other ancient sources preserve different versions of the king's death: Ctesias, the Greek physician at the court of Artaxerxes II who wrote a history of Persia in the late fifth and early fourth centuries, reported that Cyrus was killed in a campaign against the Derbices rather than the Massagetae and that the wound that caused his death was inflicted by an Indian elephant rather than by a Massagetan arrow; Xenophon in the Cyropaedia presented the death of Cyrus in the form of a peaceful demise at his royal capital surrounded by his sons and advisors, in conformity with the moralistic intentions of his didactic narrative. The truth of the matter is probably that Cyrus died in battle somewhere on the steppe frontier in 530 BCE, that his army suffered a serious defeat in the engagement, and that his body was recovered by the surviving Persian forces and brought back to the imperial capital for burial at Pasargadae.

The Burial and the Succession

The body of Cyrus was brought back to Pasargadae after his death on the eastern frontier and was buried in the great stone tomb that he had constructed during his lifetime at the southern end of the royal residence complex. The funerary rites that accompanied his burial would have followed the established traditions of the Iranian royal house, combined with elements drawn from the religious practices of the various subject populations whose deities and customs the Persian throne had honored throughout the reign. The tomb itself, with its stepped platform and its gabled chamber of carefully fitted stone, became the principal cult site of the founder of the empire, and was attended throughout the subsequent two centuries of Achaemenid rule by a hereditary corps of Magian priests who performed the daily sacrifices and the monthly offerings prescribed for the maintenance of the royal cult. The visitors who described the tomb during the late Achaemenid period reported that the body of the king lay within a golden coffin on a golden couch, surrounded by various objects of personal value including weapons, jewelry, and items of royal dress, and that the chamber was illuminated by the constant burning of lamps tended by the attendant priests.

The succession to the throne passed without immediate difficulty to Cyrus's eldest son Cambyses, who had been associated with his father in the government of the empire for several years before the final campaign and who had received the formal recognition of his future succession at the conquest of Babylon in 539, when he had been installed as the regent of the Babylonian portion of the empire under the supervision of his father. Cambyses had been born in the early years of his father's reign, probably around 558 or 555 BCE, and had been educated in the disciplines appropriate to a Persian prince of the Achaemenid line: he had received the standard instruction in horsemanship, archery, and the use of weapons that constituted the foundation of the Persian aristocratic education; he had been trained in the religious traditions of the Iranian royal house and in the administrative and judicial procedures of the imperial government; and he had been associated with his father in the conduct of major imperial enterprises during the closing years of the reign. His accession to the throne in 530 BCE was accepted by the Persian aristocracy and by the various subject populations without significant resistance, and the empire passed under his rule into a new phase of imperial expansion that would include the conquest of Egypt in 525 and the temporary extension of Persian authority over the Nile valley as far south as the borders of Nubia.

The reign of Cambyses, which extended from 530 to 522 BCE, has traditionally been regarded as a period of decline from the standards established by his father, an evaluation that rests in part on the unfavorable narrative preserved in Herodotus, which presents Cambyses as a brutal and unstable monarch whose cruelty toward his subjects, contempt for foreign religious traditions, and personal eccentricities contrasted sharply with the moderate and dignified conduct of his father. The historical accuracy of this characterization has been questioned by modern scholarship, which has noted that the Greek tradition's hostility toward Cambyses may reflect the political needs of his successor Darius the Great rather than the actual conduct of the king, and that the cuneiform sources from Egypt and Babylon present a more measured picture of his administrative arrangements. What is reasonably clear is that the conquest of Egypt under Cambyses extended the territorial limits of the empire to their fullest extent before the campaigns of Darius and Xerxes, that the administrative system inherited from Cyrus continued to function effectively under the new king, and that the dynastic crisis that erupted at the end of his reign in 522 with the alleged usurpation of the throne by a Magian impostor named Bardiya or Gaumata and with the subsequent coup d'etat that brought Darius the Great to power was a consequence of the unusual circumstances of Cambyses's death in Syria during his return from the Egyptian campaign rather than a reflection of any fundamental weakness in the imperial structure.

The Elaboration of the Achaemenid System Under Darius

The Achaemenid imperial system that Cyrus had founded received its definitive elaboration under the long reign of Darius the Great, who came to the throne in 522 BCE in the aftermath of the dynastic crisis that followed the death of Cambyses and who ruled until 486 BCE, during which time he consolidated the administrative arrangements of the empire, extended the frontiers in several directions, conducted the campaigns against the Greek mainland that culminated in the famous Persian War of the early fifth century, and constructed the great royal residence complex at Persepolis that would constitute the supreme monumental expression of the Achaemenid civilization. The relationship between the achievements of Cyrus and the elaborations of Darius is one of the central questions of Achaemenid historiography, and it has been variously argued by modern scholars that the imperial system was substantially complete under Cyrus and that Darius's role was primarily one of consolidation and refinement, or alternatively that the system was largely created by Darius and that the achievement of Cyrus was limited to the original conquests on which the later imperial structure was built.

The truth probably lies between these two interpretations. The basic conception of the imperial system, with its policy of religious and cultural tolerance, its administrative arrangements based on the satrapy and the regional governor, its system of royal roads and rapid communications, its tribute-based fiscal organization, and its self-presentation as the legitimate continuation of the political traditions of each conquered region, was substantially in place under Cyrus and constituted his most important contribution to the long-term success of the empire. The elaborations introduced by Darius, however, were of considerable importance in giving the system its definitive form: the codification of the satrapal system into twenty regularly numbered satrapies with fixed tribute assessments; the introduction of a standardized imperial coinage based on the gold daric and the silver siglos; the elaboration of the royal road system into a comprehensive network of imperial highways with regular post-stations and supply depots; the development of the Aramaic language as the official administrative language of the empire, replacing the various regional languages that had been used under Cyrus and Cambyses; the construction of the great royal residences at Susa and at Persepolis, with their distinctive architectural and artistic style that combined elements from all the cultures of the empire; and the systematic codification of the royal inscriptions in the multilingual format that would characterize Achaemenid official documents for the next century and a half. These developments transformed the rough imperial structure inherited from Cyrus into the highly elaborated and stable administrative system that would govern the Persian Empire for the next century and a half.

The Legacy in the Greek Tradition

The memory of Cyrus the Great in the literary and political traditions of the Greek world has constituted one of the most important channels through which his historical reputation has been transmitted to the modern age. The Greek tradition of Cyrus, which began to develop in the generation immediately following his death and which reached its principal literary elaboration in the work of Xenophon in the early fourth century, presented the founder of the Persian Empire in a remarkably favorable light, identifying him as the model of the wise and just ruler whose qualities of moderation, generosity, and political insight contrasted sharply with the brutality and arbitrariness conventionally associated with the despotic monarchies of the East. This positive evaluation, which is particularly striking given the historical context of repeated Persian invasions of Greece and the deep cultural antagonism between the two civilizations, reflected both the genuine impressiveness of Cyrus's historical achievement and the literary and didactic purposes for which his memory was deployed in Greek political thought.

The historical account of Cyrus preserved in the first book of Herodotus, composed in the third quarter of the fifth century BCE for an Athenian audience that had just emerged from the second Persian War and that was actively defining its own political identity in opposition to the Persian threat, presented the founder of the empire as a complex figure whose military genius and political wisdom were combined with personal flaws that ultimately led to his death. The Herodotean Cyrus is the central figure of the first book of the Histories, in which the historian narrates in succession the conflict with the Median king Astyages, the campaign against Croesus of Lydia, the conquest of Babylon, and the final campaign against the Massagetae that ended in the king's death. The narrative is structured around a series of moral and philosophical themes that recur throughout the Herodotean account: the instability of fortune and the unpredictability of human affairs; the operation of divine providence in the rise and fall of nations; the value of moderation and the dangers of excessive ambition; and the importance of attention to wise counsel and to the warnings of those with experience of the changing fortunes of life. These themes are illustrated through the dramatic narratives of the principal episodes of the reign, particularly the encounter between Croesus and Solon, the dialogue between Cyrus and the captured Croesus, and the negotiations between Cyrus and Tomyris that preceded the final disaster.

The literary and philosophical elaboration of the memory of Cyrus reached its highest point in the Cyropaedia of Xenophon, composed in the 360s BCE as an extended meditation on the ideal upbringing and rule of a virtuous monarch. The Cyropaedia, whose Greek title literally means the education of Cyrus, takes the historical figure of the founder of the Persian Empire as the basis for an elaborate didactic narrative in which the principles of good government, the qualities of effective leadership, and the proper relations between rulers and subjects are illustrated through the fictional episodes of the king's life from his childhood at the Median court through his great conquests to his peaceful death in the imperial capital. The work, which combines historical narrative with extended dialogues on political, military, and philosophical themes, became one of the most influential political treatises of antiquity, was studied throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods as a foundational text of practical political theory, and was rediscovered in the Renaissance as a model for the education of princes alongside the more famous works of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.

The influence of the Greek tradition of Cyrus in subsequent Western thought has been extensive and persistent. The Cyropaedia was translated into Latin in the fifteenth century, was read in the original Greek by the humanists of the Renaissance, and was cited as a foundational text of political wisdom by such varied authorities as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Erasmus, Castiglione, and Thomas Jefferson, who is reported to have owned two copies of the work and to have recommended it as essential reading for the education of the American republican citizenry. The figure of Cyrus as the wise and benevolent monarch became one of the principal positive models in Western political iconography, providing a counterpoint to the more familiar negative models drawn from the catalogue of tyrants and providing inspiration for the various idealistic conceptions of legitimate kingship that informed European political thought from the medieval mirror-of-princes literature through the absolutist political theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the constitutional liberalism of the nineteenth.

The Legacy in the Hebrew and Christian Traditions

The memory of Cyrus in the Hebrew and Christian religious traditions, which has already been noted in connection with the decree authorizing the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem, deserves further consideration as one of the most remarkable instances in religious history of the elevation of a non-Israelite ruler to a position of unique honor within the biblical canon. The Second Isaiah, the anonymous prophet whose oracles in chapters forty through fifty-five of the book of Isaiah constitute one of the principal documents of post-exilic Jewish religious thought, identified Cyrus by name as the anointed of the Lord whom God had raised up to fulfill the divine purpose of restoring his chosen people to their homeland. The relevant passage in chapter forty-five reads in part as follows: thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him and to loose the loins of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed. The application of the term anointed, which in the Hebrew is Mashiach and from which the later concept of the Messiah would develop, to a non-Israelite monarch was without precedent in the biblical literature and constituted a remarkable theological judgment that the divine purposes could be served by the actions of rulers outside the chosen people.

The status of Cyrus in the subsequent development of the Hebrew religious tradition was one of unique positive evaluation. The historical accounts preserved in the books of Ezra, Chronicles, and Daniel presented him as the divinely chosen agent of the restoration, attributed to him a religious sensitivity that included recognition of the Lord as the supreme deity, and credited him with personal acts of generosity and respect toward the Jewish community that placed him in a category distinct from other foreign rulers mentioned in the biblical literature. The post-biblical Jewish tradition, including the writings of the Hellenistic Jewish historian Josephus and the various rabbinic commentaries of the late ancient period, elaborated on this positive evaluation and credited Cyrus with various additional acts of generosity and protection toward the Jewish people. The Christian tradition, inheriting this positive evaluation from the Hebrew sources and recognizing in the figure of Cyrus a type or prefiguration of the Messiah, similarly maintained throughout the medieval and early modern periods a generally favorable view of the Persian king as a divinely chosen instrument of providence.

The influence of this religious evaluation on Western political and cultural attitudes has been considerable. The image of Cyrus as the divinely chosen liberator of the oppressed, the restorer of religious freedom, and the model of the just monarch contributed to the development of certain themes in European political thought that have been particularly important in the modern period, including the conception of religious tolerance as a positive principle of state policy, the recognition of the rights of subject populations to their own religious and cultural traditions, and the ideal of the legitimate monarch as the protector of the diverse communities under his authority. The figure of Cyrus has been invoked in various political contexts of the modern period, from the American Revolution where the founding fathers cited his example as a model of enlightened rule, through the European liberal movements of the nineteenth century where his name appeared in the rhetoric of religious toleration and minority rights, to the modern Israeli foundation in which the parallel between the post-exilic return under Persian patronage and the modern return of Jewish populations to the land of Israel has been a recurrent theme.

The Legacy in the Iranian Tradition

The memory of Cyrus in the Iranian tradition itself, somewhat paradoxically, has been less consistently elaborated than the memories preserved in the Greek and Hebrew sources, reflecting the various political and religious transformations through which Iranian civilization passed in the centuries after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire to Alexander of Macedon in 330 BCE. The destruction of the Achaemenid capital at Persepolis by Alexander's army, the dispersal of the royal archives and libraries, and the subsequent political subordination of the Iranian territories to the Macedonian and Hellenistic successor states resulted in the loss of much of the documentary tradition that had preserved the memory of the founder of the empire, and the later Iranian dynasties of the Parthian and Sassanian periods, while broadly conscious of their connection to the Achaemenid heritage, did not maintain a detailed historical memory of the early Persian kings. The Islamic conquest of Iran in the seventh century CE and the gradual conversion of the Iranian population to Islam introduced further discontinuities in the transmission of the pre-Islamic tradition, although the Persian historical and literary tradition preserved through the great epic poem of Ferdowsi, the Shahnameh, retained some recollection of the early Persian kings under names and circumstances that bore only a partial relation to their historical reality.

The modern Iranian rediscovery of Cyrus and of the broader Achaemenid heritage has been a relatively recent development, dating principally from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the systematic archaeological investigation of the ancient Iranian sites, the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, and the recovery of the historical sources for the early Persian dynasties created the possibility of reconstructing the actual history of the founders of the empire. The political deployment of this rediscovered heritage by the modern Pahlavi dynasty in the twentieth century, particularly in the elaborate celebrations of the twenty-five hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Iranian monarchy in 1971, established the figure of Cyrus as a central symbol of Iranian national identity and as the historical model for the modern Iranian state. The subsequent Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic introduced a more ambivalent attitude toward the pre-Islamic heritage, but the figure of Cyrus has nonetheless retained considerable popular significance in Iranian culture, with the anniversary of his entry into Babylon being celebrated annually on the twenty-ninth of October as Cyrus the Great Day at the site of his tomb at Pasargadae.

The international dimension of the modern legacy of Cyrus reached a remarkable culmination in 1971, when the Iranian government presented a replica of the Cyrus Cylinder to the United Nations as a symbolic foundation of the modern conception of human rights, and the United Nations accepted the document as a historical antecedent of the contemporary international human rights tradition. This identification of the Cyrus Cylinder as the first declaration of human rights, while not entirely supported by the academic interpretation of the document itself, has acquired considerable popular currency in international human rights discourse and has been frequently invoked in discussions of the historical foundations of religious tolerance, minority rights, and the principle of consent in legitimate government. The Cyrus Cylinder itself has been the subject of major international exhibitions, has toured the major museums of Europe and North America, and has become one of the most widely recognized objects from the ancient Near Eastern world.

Personal Character and Historical Assessment

The personal character of Cyrus, so far as it can be reconstructed from the imperfect sources, was one of unusual balance and effectiveness for an individual placed in a position of extraordinary power. He was, in the testimony of the various sources that describe him, a man of exceptional intelligence and strategic insight whose military and political judgments rarely failed and whose ability to read the temper of his contemporaries and to anticipate their reactions was the foundation of his diplomatic and administrative success. He was a man of physical courage who led his armies in person in every major campaign of his reign and who died on the battlefield at an age when most of his contemporaries would have retired from active military command. He was a man of personal generosity and lenience toward defeated enemies, treating Astyages, Croesus, and Nabonidus with a respect and consideration that contrasted sharply with the brutal practices of his Assyrian and Babylonian predecessors and that won for him the loyalty of the populations he conquered. He was a man of religious sensitivity and tolerance, respecting the cults and traditions of the various peoples within his empire and presenting himself as the legitimate continuation of each of the political and religious traditions he absorbed. He was a man of administrative ability and political vision, constructing in the space of three decades an imperial system whose basic structure would endure for two centuries and whose principles would influence the governance of all subsequent empires of the ancient world.

The flaws and limitations of his character are less well-documented than his virtues, partly because the sources that preserve his memory are generally favorable to him and partly because the few unfavorable accounts have been substantially overshadowed by the positive tradition. The brutal treatment of the population of Opis at the beginning of the Babylonian campaign, the only documented instance of indiscriminate violence in his recorded conduct, suggests that the generally moderate policies he pursued were tactical and political rather than reflecting any absolute commitment to humane treatment of conquered populations. The final campaign against the Massagetae, conducted in defiance of the prudent advice that he should retire from the active conduct of war in his old age, suggests a willingness to take strategic risks that, on this occasion, exceeded his judgment and resulted in his death and the partial destruction of his army. The dynastic arrangements he left behind, which produced the succession crisis of 522 and the temporary disruption of imperial authority, suggest that his attention to the long-term institutional foundations of his empire may have been less consistent than his attention to immediate political and military challenges.

The historical assessment of Cyrus that has emerged from two and a half millennia of scholarly and popular reflection on his career has been one of remarkable consistency in its positive evaluation. He has been regarded by historians from antiquity through the modern period as one of the greatest figures of the ancient world, comparable in his achievements to Alexander of Macedon, to Julius Caesar, and to the other founders of major empires, but distinguished from them by the particular qualities of moderation, tolerance, and political wisdom that informed his rule. He has been credited with the creation of the first truly multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire in human history, with the establishment of the administrative model that would influence all subsequent imperial governance in the Old World, with the inauguration of the policy of religious tolerance that would become one of the principal achievements of Iranian civilization, and with the personal embodiment of those qualities of legitimate rule that the political traditions of the ancient and medieval worlds identified as the proper marks of the wise monarch. The judgment of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate in the fourth century CE, who included Cyrus in the small company of truly great rulers whose example was worthy of imitation by the contemporary rulers of the Roman world, has been substantially confirmed by the subsequent verdict of history, and the figure of Cyrus has remained throughout the modern period one of the few rulers of the ancient world whose memory commands universal admiration across the boundaries of religion, civilization, and political tradition.

CONCLUSION

The historical significance of Cyrus the Great extends far beyond the immediate facts of his military conquests and his administrative arrangements. He was the founder of the first political structure in human history that can plausibly claim the title of a world empire, encompassing within a single administrative system populations of dozens of languages, religions, and ethnic origins distributed across an area that extended from the Aegean to the Indus and from the Caspian to the Arabian peninsula. He was the originator of the political and administrative model that would constitute the basic template for imperial governance in the Old World for the following thousand years, providing the foundation on which the Hellenistic, Roman, Sassanian, Islamic, and other empires of the ancient and medieval Near East would build their own imperial systems. He was the practical inventor of the policy of religious tolerance and cultural accommodation that would distinguish the great empires of the Iranian tradition from their more brutal Assyrian and Babylonian predecessors and that would influence the development of religious and political pluralism in the subsequent civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. He was the historical model of the wise and benevolent monarch whose memory in the Greek philosophical tradition, in the Hebrew religious tradition, and in the modern political imagination has provided a touchstone for reflection on the proper character of legitimate authority and on the relations between rulers and subjects.

The empire he created passed eventually into history, conquered by Alexander of Macedon in 330 BCE and succeeded by the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Macedonian generals before being eventually reconstituted in the third century CE by the Sassanian dynasty that would maintain the Iranian imperial tradition for another four centuries until its final conquest by the Arab armies of Islam. But the political and cultural innovations that Cyrus had introduced did not perish with the dynasty he founded. The conception of the empire as a multi-ethnic political structure governed by a central royal authority through a system of regional administrations, the practice of religious tolerance as a positive principle of state policy, the elevation of the king as the chosen instrument of divine providence and as the protector of the diverse communities under his rule, the administrative apparatus of satrapies and royal roads and tribute systems, the cultural synthesis that combined elements drawn from the various traditions of the empire into a distinctive imperial style: all these innovations passed into the political vocabulary of the ancient and medieval worlds and influenced the governance of every subsequent empire of the Old World. The legacy of Cyrus, in this larger sense, is not merely the empire he founded or the dynasty he established, but the entire tradition of imperial governance that took its essential form from his innovations and that continued to shape the political life of Eurasia long after the specific institutions of the Achaemenid Empire had passed into the historical record.

The personal qualities that the various traditions ascribed to him, whatever their historical reliability, became the model of the wise monarch that informed the political imagination of subsequent ages. The image of the conqueror who treated his defeated enemies with respect, who honored the gods and the customs of his subject peoples, who restored displaced populations to their homes and rebuilt destroyed temples at his own expense, who governed his vast dominions through a combination of personal virtue and effective administration, who led his armies in person and died on the battlefield like the warrior-king he had always been: this image, transmitted through the Greek philosophers and historians, through the Hebrew prophets and biblical historians, through the Iranian poets and chroniclers of the medieval period, and through the political theorists and educators of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, became one of the most influential ideal types of the ruler in the political tradition of the Western and Islamic worlds. The actual Cyrus, recoverable only imperfectly from the fragmentary sources of the sixth century BCE, was certainly less perfect than this idealized image; but the influence of the image, perhaps more even than the influence of the historical reality, constitutes the enduring legacy of the founder of the Achaemenid Empire and the architect of the first world state.

Twenty-five centuries after his death on the steppes of Central Asia, Cyrus the Great remains one of the most influential figures of human history, his memory preserved in the religious and political traditions of cultures whose own historical experience would have given them little reason to flatter the founder of a Persian imperial power, his image inscribed on the foundational monuments of the modern Iranian nation, his tomb at Pasargadae visited each year by tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists who come to honor the memory of the king and to reflect on the long sweep of history that has carried his name across the boundaries of so many civilizations and so many centuries. The biography of his life is the biography of one of those rare individuals through whom the accumulated tendencies of an age find expression in a personal career and whose actions, in turn, shape the subsequent course of history in ways that extend far beyond the immediate consequences of their decisions. The empire he founded passed into history; the political tradition he inaugurated endured; the image of the wise and tolerant monarch that his memory bequeathed to subsequent ages has remained, in changing forms and through varied appropriations, one of the abiding ideals of human political reflection.