Made of fired clay, the Cyrus Cylinder bears a cuneiform inscription from the time of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great, 2,600 years ago. Cyrus ruled over the earliest known large, multicultural empire in antiquity. The barrel-shaped Cyrus Cylinder is 22.86 centimetres long and was discovered in Babylon, Mesopotamia, in 1879.

By Lea Terhune /Washington

The Cyrus Cylinder has left its British Museum repository for its first US tour, beginning at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M Sackler Gallery in Washington. “The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia” showcases this 2,600-year-old archaeological treasure amid other artifacts from the Achaemenid Empire (550–331 BC) founded by the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great.

Among the most important objects in world history, the cylinder “in its time declared a new way of ruling in which disparate races and people were not oppressed into conformity but respected for diversity,” Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M Sackler Gallery Director Julian Raby told journalists at the preview.

The baked clay cylinder inscribed with cuneiform script is small in size - only 22.86 centimetres long and 10 centimetres in diameter - but vast in influence. The principles that Cyrus established outlasted his empire into the present day. The respect for diversity of race and religion evident in the text ultimately reached Europe and the Founders of the US of America.

The cylinder was hidden for centuries, buried in a building foundation, until its discovery in Babylon in 1879 by British Museum archeologists. Although it is missing about one-third of its text, fragments discovered in a British Museum drawer helped reconstruct the text.

Cuneiform scholar I F Finkel not only recognised text from the cylinder, but the particular scribe’s calligraphy. The fragments are considered evidence that the text was copied and circulated.

Typical for the era, the text begins with criticism of the previous ruler, Nabonidus (555–539 BC), who perverted ritual practices and abused the people. “He did yet more evil to his city every day,” it reads, describing how the chief Babylonian god Marduk, after seeking “an upright king” in all countries, “took the hand of Cyrus” and proclaimed him king “over all of everything”.

A first-person message from Cyrus himself follows, stating he abolished slave labour and allowed people deported by earlier rulers because they followed different faiths to return. He restored their damaged temples, asking for their prayers.

Unlike ancient Chinese and Egyptians, who wrote much about what they did and how well they did it, British Museum director Neil MacGregor said: “The Persians just did it. They don’t write about how they did it. They left no memoirs” about their great lives and times. We know what happened from Greek sources.

Cyrus held sway over the largest known early empire. It eventually encompassed the entire eastern Mediterranean, extending from Libya in the west to Afghanistan in the east. Cyrus had to devise a system to rule this unprecedented diverse, multilingual, multicultural and multireligious empire. Tolerance was the hallmark of this efficient system, which lasted 200 years, until Alexander the Great conquered the region.

The values articulated by Cyrus influenced Europe and the US, conveyed there by Classical Greek writers Herodotus and Xenophon, admirers of Cyrus’ leadership. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a partly fictional account of the ruler’s life, was read by the Founders of the US, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson is thought to have possessed two copies, one of which is on display in the current exhibit at the Sackler Gallery.

“Only the US takes up the Persian model,” MacGregor said. “Jefferson constructs a state … which supports the idea of faith but doesn’t endorse any particular one.”

The Cyrus Cylinder is, MacGregor said, as relevant today as when it was created; it is “a document about regime change, and is a meditation on how you govern a society”. – IIP Digital

Ancient Persian ruler influenced Jefferson

The discovery of the Cyrus Cylinder was a hundred years in the future when Thomas Jefferson and other founders of the United States adopted the progressive ideas of the ancient Persian ruler Cyrus the Great. They knew of Cyrus through classical Greek writers and Biblical accounts.

A copy of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia that belonged to Thomas Jefferson is on display with artifacts on loan from the British Museum in the exhibition The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A New Beginning, at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M Sackler Gallery in Washington.

The Cyropaedia is a partly fictional portrayal of the life and deeds of Cyrus the Great (c. 580–530 BC), who founded the Achaemenid Empire, which continued for nearly 200 years.  He created an efficient bureaucracy to oversee disparate cultures within his vast empire and governed with tolerance that evoked admiration in the ancient world.

The book was written a century after Cyrus died. It was not meant to be a factual history, but it captured ideas that characterised his rule.

Julian Raby, director of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M Sackler Gallery, said before the exhibition’s opening that Jefferson possessed two editions of the Cyropaedia.

The one on display, usually kept at the Library of Congress, dates from 1767. It features Greek and Latin parallel texts on facing pages.

“What’s extraordinary is that he scratched out one line,” said Raby. “The particular passage that was crossed out is a problematic passage in the manuscript … it is quite clear that Jefferson himself must have been collating line by line between his earlier edition and this later edition.”

The bold black line over the dubious Greek passage may be seen in the exhibition. Raby said that it showed the degree of attention Jefferson had paid to this book.

A quote from Jefferson, taken from a letter to his grandson Francis Wayles Eppes, is featured on the gallery wall above the Cyropaedia: “… I would advise you to undertake a regular course of History and Poetry in both languages. In Greek, go first thro’ the Cyropaedia, and then read Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon’s Hellenus and Anabasis …”

Benjamin Franklin also read the classics and was familiar with Xenophon’s work.- Lea Terhune/ IIP Digital

 

Below: This copy of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, an account of the life of Cyrus the Great, belonged to Thomas Jefferson, who studied it carefully.