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.