Cyrus the Great
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you'll find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Cyrus II of Persia, commonly known as Cyrus the Great, was born in the 6th century BCE in Persis, which is now in Iran.

He was the founder of the first Persian Empire, the largest empire at that point in history, spanning more than 2 million square miles. His story was told by the Greek historians Herodotus and Xenophon, and in the Hebrew Bible he's famous for freeing the Jewish captives in Babylon. Cyrus proclaimed himself king of the four corners of the world in the Cyrus Cylinder.

It's been called by some the first Bill of Human Rights, but that's a label which has been disputed by most scholars today. We need to discuss Cyrus the Great, Amitin Akhandapur, a researcher for the Invisible East Project at Oxford University, Lynette Mitchell, Professor Emerita in Classics and Ancient History at Exeter University, and Lindsay Allen, Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek and Near Eastern History at King's College London.

Lindsay Allen, can you set the scene where and when did Cyrus emerge? Well, he emerges in the historical record in a series of texts produced in Babylonia in the 6th century BCE. And there he proclaims himself or is proclaimed the king of Anshan and a descendant of a dynasty founded by Taspis.

Now, Anshan is a city in Iran on the Iranian plateau in Fars or Persis. And although these inscriptions from Babylonia associate Cyrus with what is actually a historic kingdom of Elam, which was on the border of Mesopotamia for many hundreds of years...

It's also the case that this dynasty Cyrus comes from may have been somewhat a sort of newly emerging power in this region. So on the one hand, he's coming from a historic kingdom with very ancient traditions, but on the other hand, he seems to be from a dynasty that is newly attested in the 7th to 6th centuries BCE. What do you mean by very ancient? Elam itself has an ancient tradition of writing and the city of Susa in the lowland part of that kingdom...

is a very ancient city from the third millennium onwards. But this is all backstory to say that there's a very sort of historic environment there. The kingdom of Elam had already been part in the sort of power politics of the ancient Near East before Cyrus and indeed had been invaded by Ashurbanipal as part of the last actions of the Neo-Athirian Empire.

Is it possible to give us a thumbnail sketch or to give the listeners a thumbnail sketch of who he was, Cyrus?

He is introduced to us as a conquering king, and that's our primary contemporary portrayal. He's a conquering king who is coming in as a legitimate ruler. Our sources from the late 6th century are really written from the perspective of Babylon and from the god who takes care of Babylon, Marduk. So our thumbnail sketch can be that Marduk

Marduk himself has gone looking to find a good legitimate king for Babylon because Marduk is unsatisfied with the current king, who is the Babylonian king Nabonidus. So Cyrus is coming into the city and taking over, conquering Babylonia. By that point, he has already conquered the Median kingdom to the northeast and

and also apparently expanded into Lydia to the northwest. But we don't have contemporary texts of those. So how do you know it then?

Because a later genre of Babylonian texts called the Nabonidus Chronicle, these are Babylonian chronicles, which are a form of historiography written in Babylonia. They do give an extended narrative of the progress of Cyrus's campaigns. In those, again, he's Cyrus of Anshan and on one occasion Cyrus of Parsua, which we could see as the later terminology for the region Parsa.

And in those, he is depicted as sort of enclosing Mesopotamia before coming down to Babylonia. Thank you very much, Lynette Mitchell.

How does the Greek historian Herodotus discover and treat Cyrus? Herodotus, like Xenophon, knows that there are lots of stories about Cyrus. He's the 5th century. He's the 5th century, so Herodotus is in the 5th century, Xenophon's in the 4th. But they know that there are lots of stories and there are lots of songs about Cyrus because that's part of who Cyrus is. He's a figure who attracts stories to him.

And what Herodotus says is that he is going to choose the story that he thinks the most plausible and gives the least exaggerated account.

So he gives us a story about Cyrus. Where does he find these stories? Oh, they're oral. Yes, they're oral stories. That's the thing. They're oral stories. And some of them have very deep roots. The story that Herodotus chooses is in fact itself part of a large storytelling cycle. Because he tells a story of Cyrus being the grandson of the king of the Medes, Astyages, who...

whose daughter, Sigis, has married his daughter to a Persian, a common man. And Sigis has these dreams that the child that will be born will take over. So he has the baby taken away to be exposed. Why? Why? Because he's frightened that the dreams might be true because he's told that he has to take notice of the dreams.

So he tries to have the child exposed. Do you want him to die, you mean? He wanted him to die, yes. Why did you want him to die? Well, because he was frightened that Cyrus would eventually overthrow him. I see. So Harpicus, who was given the job, didn't want to do it, so in fact gave the baby to a cowherd in the mountains who brought him up.

And then he was playing with the local children and they were playing kings, Herodotus tells us. And Cyrus was behaving in a too kingly a manner. And so the other children didn't like that very much. And so he ended up in front of Astyages at that point. And Astyages recognised that this was his grandson. So he was recovered and given back to his real parents again.

But eventually he does actually overthrow his grandfather so that the prophecy of the dreams actually comes true. So that's the story that Herodotus wants to tell us. But there's all sorts of folkloric motifs in there. This is not a story of what happened. It's a story that is being drawn out of a very sort of Near Eastern storytelling culture. But another powerful historian who was on the case was Xenophon. What did he say? Well, he said...

He's 4th century BCE. He doesn't have the baby exposed, but he does have him as the grandson of Stygies. And Cyrus visits him at his court and learns lots of things from his grandfather.

But from that point, the Syripaidae, which is the text that Xenophon wrote, goes off into a different direction because it's actually a piece of Greek political thought. It's a political text. Herodotus is using Cyrus as the focus of an explication of what good leadership should be because that was something that Xenophon, he was a soldier himself. He was very interested in military matters. He was very interested in what...

a good leader ought to look like. And there were lots of ideas floating around in the fourth century about what

good leadership might be, and he works this out in this very elaborate text. So it's not historical at all. It's rather charming, a boy's own adventure, I think of it as. But it's working out that the best leader manages to secure the willing obedience of his subjects by rewarding them when they're good. He also uses the stick as well, stick and carrot, but it's largely about how a good leader will acquire the willing obedience of his subjects.

so that they're not slaves but they're free. It's just another set of stories. They both knew that there were lots of different stories around about Cyrus and they've just picked the ones that are suitable for their purposes. For Herodotus, it's part of his idea of what a Near Eastern king should be or what a Near Eastern king will do, which is eventually overreach themselves and find their own destruction. Martine, how was Cyrus' reputation established today?

There were flattering legends. And how do the Greek portrayals compare to what you could call reality? So to set that up, I think I have to distinguish between two different faces of Cyrus. On the one hand, you have Cyrus as he appears in sources, in the Greek sources, in the Greek mentality.

The Greeks thought all sorts of things about Cyrus. Like we said, Xenophon had this idea that Cyrus was a very good, virtuous king. On the other hand, Herodotus was more of a scholar. He tried to establish an image of Cyrus that was more historically accurate. But still, we find stories like the being abandoned to starve as a kid story.

which is very clearly not historically viable. On the other hand, we have images of Cyrus... It recurs quite a few times, that story, doesn't it? It does indeed, yeah. Why do you think it recurs so regularly?

Because Cyrus was already embedded into oral literature of the time and place. So he acquired these qualities in his legendarium, if you want, because people like talking about him and the culture of the Middle East at that point especially was very orally oriented. So that's possibly one of the reasons why.

But from other sources, especially Mesopotamian sources, we have a more set in stone, quite literally set in stone story of who Cyrus was and what he did.

And, obviously, in those lands, nearer to home, he was seen more of a conqueror, which is exactly what he was. So rather than a storybook character, he was indeed a conqueror, a real king. Well, let's start with his conquests, Martin. What about the conquest of Sardis, the capital of Lydia in Asia Minor, now Turkey? Yes. Yes.

So Cyrus's first conquest, his big conquest, was of Media, which is in Iran proper today and towards the lands to the east of it. But soon after that, he did move northwards and westwards towards Anatolia, which is mostly now Turkey and Syria. When he went northwards, the geopolitics of this time were set in stone.

There were alliances in place. There were kingdoms and empires, and these people had pacts.

So when Cyrus defeated the Medians, the Median King Astyages, as we talked about, he was the brother-in-law of the then king of Lydia, who was Croesus, very famous king of Lydia, Croesus. Croesus, you mean his rish is Croesus? Croesus is the Greek pronunciation. Croesus is more Latinized, I suppose. I should probably say that Sardis was the capital of Lydia. It was where Croesus had his seat.

Croesus moved against Cyrus soon after his defeating the Median Empire. And there was a big battle near what is now Syria, where the battle was indecisive. Many people died, but there was no clear victor. So Croesus decided to go back home and winter his army. So he starts moving home. This is mostly from Herodotus now.

And Cyrus followed. Cyrus followed him all the way to Sardis. They had another battle where Herodotus says that Cyrus used this neat trick to defeat the famous Lydian cavalry. He used camels to frighten the Lydian cavalry. So the smell of the camels apparently was strong and the horses shied away. And so the Lydian cavalry was lost. And so Cyrus was...

Potentially. I've never seen that, but I bet people have. But Sardis was besieged for two weeks and soon after defeated.

Lindsay, can you and then go back to you, Martine, can you, the two of you, between you, tell us why he went for Babylon and how he managed to conquer it, given its apparent supremacy in that part of the world at that time? Babylon as a city has a big cultural ego and political cultural ego. I think it's already been a rival to Assyria throughout the period of Assyrian domination.

to the point that eventually the Assyrian kings kind of annex it in a way that tries to cultivate their role as legitimate kings of Babylon, as restorers of Babylon. So Babylon itself has a sort of sophisticated, rich culture which seeks to engage with these dominating political powers.

Cyrus, by the account of the Babylonian Chronicle, actually fights a battle to the north of Babylon. So there is a violent subjection of possible opposition to the north of Babylon. And then, according to his own text, which is the Cyrus Cylinder produced during his reign in Babylon, he peacefully takes over with the help of the city god Marduk.

And everybody's extremely happy because he is restoring that. Now, he claims in that and in other texts, Cyrus, that he is taking over at the behest of Marduk because Marduk himself disliked the previous king. And some scholars do take that on board and suggest that Nabonidus, the previous king, was maybe not focusing on Babylon enough, actually.

as a Babylonian king. He may have spent a long time to the northwest paying attention to a historic centre, Haran, where he was cultivating and restoring sacred sites there for a different god, the god Sin.

Martin, have you anything to add to the conquest of Babylon? Yes. Like Lindsay says, Nabonidus was a big character in the politics of the time. He was very famous. He had many alliances, especially with Egypt to the west and the southwest and with Lydia to the north and northwest.

But none of those alliances went through properly, just as was the case with all other of Cyrus' conquests. Now, the interesting thing about Nabonidus is, again, as Lindsay says, he is largely portrayed as absent from the city of Babylon in many of the Babylonian sources themselves. The sources say something to the effect of he went off to Taima, which is a place in what's now Saudi Arabia, to do battle and build a new city.

And he was just not present. His crown prince was present in Babylon, but he himself was not. This was a somewhat important event of him not being present because of the annual Akitu festival. That's the New Year festival in Babylon where the god would annually coronate the king and proclaim him as the representation of Marduk himself.

and his power on the planet, basically. So the king not being there was important. So when Cyrus took over, eventually...

What he is successful in doing is saying that, well, Nabonidus was not present. He didn't do the yearly coronations and the New Year festival. I did. And that was a very big deal for him. Do you want to develop that, Lynette? Yes, because again, there are lots of stories. I've become a storytelling person, haven't I? But there are lots of stories about the taking of Nabonidus.

Babylon and they're fairly inconsistent with each other, the Greek sources in particular. It is a huge event so we need to apologise for dwelling on it. At that time the greatest city in the world, yes. And they knew it was the greatest city and one of the problems with it was that it was almost impregnable. It was very, very difficult to take. I mean the walls were huge. How did you take a city that was that big with walls that were that strong?

The stories that the Greeks wanted to say, or some of the Greeks wanted to talk about, was how the Euphrates had been diverted in order to gain access to the city through the culverts. Xenophon's account of that is different from Herodotus' account, which is itself interesting. They're not quite consistent. They both take the river route, but they do it in different ways. But the thing that I find so interesting about these river stories is

is that Nebuchadnezzar, who was an earlier Babylonian king who had rebuilt the city largely after it had been destroyed by Sennacherib, the Assyrian king Sennacherib, there had been some rebuilding work after that, but Nebuchadnezzar did a lot of building work and he left a lot of

talking about his building work. And that's mostly what we have from Mevick Nezarene is his text saying what he built. And what's interesting is that he says that we have to pay attention to the culverts because a thief could get in that way.

So there was an anxiety about the river route as being a problem. And that's probably what these Greek historians are picking up on. Not that that had actually happened, but that this was an anxiety about how the city could be taken. Can you just describe the culvert once more, please? Well, it's the...

the hole in the wall where the river goes through. Martin, would you like to come in? Just to add to what Lynette is saying, taking Babylon was a great feat for Cyrus. He prided himself on the city and he later coronated himself as king of Babylon and his son Cambyses as kind of co-regent to be later be crowned after Cyrus's own demise.

One of the most important aspects of him taking Babylon was that he did so during a religious festival when everyone was having a huge party and very, very drunk.

disappears in almost all the sources we have of the event, be they Greek or otherwise. In fact, one of our best sources, which we've referred to multiple times, is called the Nabonidus Chronicle. It's a small clay tablet written in ancient Babylonian script. It tells us about how after Cyrus's forces entered Babylon,

Babylon and took over it, there was a special regiment that went to the main temple of the city and surrounded it. And the chronicle is quite concise. It doesn't really go into detail. It does spell out that the religious festivals that were happening were not interrupted.

So there was a special kind of attention paid to the religious festival that was occurring there. And I think this is quite significant because of how Cyrus legitimizes himself as ruler of different places, Babylon in particular. Is it important that he was regarded as a tolerant ruler? This is exactly what I was getting to. Exactly. Yes. What does that mean in those circumstances?

Cyrus' genius in terms of being a political conqueror was that he was very good at keeping the traditions and the positions of his new conquered subjects as they were, more or less. So when he conquered Babylon in this case, he underwent the New Year festival with his son. He was crowned by Marduk, the god of Babylon.

You want to come in? Lindsay, yeah?

So really it's to his advantage and to the advantage of the city to maintain a certain amount of status quo. And Babylon itself only really undergoes that kind of disruption under the reigns of Darius and Xerxes, later Persian kings who had some, let's say, problems there.

But it's worth noting that really Cyrus's own self-presentation in the Cyrus Cylinder is following on from a consistent tradition of good kingship as presented in earlier Neo-Babylonian texts. And in that case, he's not actually... He may have been a great diplomat in person, but he's actually in the textual record...

not really exhibiting a great deal of different information from previous legitimate kings of Babylon. He's just showing himself to be an excellently good...

king of Babylon. And tolerance as such is maybe not a concept that would necessarily resonate in the 6th century BCE, because you have a polytheistic environment in which if you're coming into a city where the patron god is this particular patron god, you pay attention to that patron god and that god is part of your conversation in the taking over of that region.

Can I ask you, Lynette, there's been reference to the cylinder several times. I don't think we've picked it up clearly enough. Can you tell the listeners about the cylinder, the Cyrus cylinder? Well, the cylinder is currently in the British Museum, but it was excavated from Babylon in 1879. When it left Babylon, it was in one piece, but it arrived in a number of pieces. It is a smallish barrel-shaped object...

It's called a foundation text because one of the things about Mesopotamia was because the buildings were in mud brick, they had to be rebuilt all the time. And so there was continuous programs of rebuilding. And these cylinders were put into the walls. Slotted in the garbage. Yeah, they were slotted into niches in the walls. And...

The Cyrus Cylinder is one of these. It's a slightly odd one because it's Assyrianising in character rather than Babylonian in character. King of the Four Quarters, that's an Assyrian title. And it makes mention of Ashurbanipal towards the end or of a fragment of it that's been found, an extra fragment. But they were put into the wall. They were probably also an archival copy because one of the things in the last...

At least the last 20 years, probably a bit less than that, they've found fragments in a box in the British Museum of parts of a copy of the Cyrus Cylinder that was not a cylinder. It's an archived text. And so what is often assumed happened was that these texts, like the text of the Cyrus Cylinder, were publicly proclaimed as well as being put into the wall.

Do you want to take that up, Lindsay? Yeah, I think it was 2009. Great excitement in the students' room at the British Museum. I think it was Lambert and then Irving Finkel who were identifying these fragments which show that the text, although we see it as a foundation cylinder and we see it in this tradition, it actually existed in other formats as well. The Cyrus Cylinder is the fullest format that we have.

And itself, as Lynette says, it has a sort of very Babylonian character. It's mentioning Marduk, but as it goes on, it mentions that a part of the restoration of Imgur and Lil, which is the walls of Babylon, the extremely important walls of Babylon, as part of that process and a sort of archaeological dig, Cyrus has discovered a previous cylinder of Ashurbanipal. So Cyrus is in dialogue with not only previous kings of Babylon, but he's also in dialogue with a previous

constructive conqueror of Babylon, which is how Ashurbanipal in a way styled himself as he was ruling and then fighting to keep control of Babylon. How reliable do you think this cylinder is? I'm not sure reliable is quite the right way to describe it. I mean, it belongs within its own literary tradition and it belongs within the literary tradition of foundation texts,

They do have a sort of format and it speaks to that. It speaks to the larger Babylonian literary tradition. There is a reference to the Enuma Elish, the creation story of the Babylonians. And that's one of the things that's really quite interesting about it is what is it about putting these things in the wall? Who are they for? But one of the people they are for, one of the groups of people they are for, is the kings that come after. So it is important...

that the Cyrus Cylinder references Ashurbanipal and the expectation is that this cylinder will be found so Cyrus will be placed within this context of Mesopotamian kingship. It is an impressively long life. Thomas Jefferson referred to it. He read about it and referred to it. It inspired him. Yes.

Jefferson was also influenced, though, by Xenophon Saripadea and the Hebrew Bible too, the references to the Hebrew Bible, which is another part of this whole story of how Babylon, Cyrus, the Near East, how it all hangs together and the idea that...

Cyrus is the restorer of Jerusalem and the destroyer of Babylon. But of course, we've already said that he didn't destroy Babylon and makes a big thing out of not destroying Babylon in the Cyrus cylinder itself. So it's a very complicated tradition.

Before we move on, Martin, what other archaeological evidence do we have about Cyrus and his empire? From Cyrus himself, the most important text is undoubtedly the cylinder. The Cyrus cylinder is the lengthiest and best preserved piece of literary evidence we have from Cyrus. We have ruins of his capital in what is now a farce province in Iran. It's called Pasargadeh. Visitors can see it for themselves. And there's also...

They're okay. They're not as good as Persepolis, personally, I think. I can see Lindsay has many feelings about this. But there's also the ruins of Anshan, which have been more recently found. So that exists also. And obviously Babylon in Iraq today near Baghdad also exists. In terms of what remains from Cyrus, in terms of literary evidence, there used to be several bricks with Cyrus's name stamped on them.

four of them, two of them remain in London, two were in Berlin that were lost during the Second War.

And past that, we get the historians, the Greek historians, the Roman historians. And we also get the B. Soutoun inscription, which was written by Darius, who was the king that came and usurped Cyrus's line. And he has his own story about Cyrus and how Cyrus's entire genealogy was portrayed later. You would agree.

come in? Yeah, I mean, we're talking about much later, sort of early modern or 18th century reception of Cyrus. But in fact, we can see the memory of Cyrus being reshaped almost immediately. By Alexander the Great. Well, even before that, we have Darius I has to come in and reconquer the empire. And as a result, because he's not really the legitimate king, he has to create a genealogy which links him to Cyrus. So as far as we know with Cyrus, he has an ancestor called Taspis.

No, says Darius. In fact, in the Byzantine inscription, he says there was another ancestor called Achaemenes and Taispes was merely his son. And we're both related to him, honest.

So Darius is like a cousin of Cyrus in this retelling. And that's where we get this most commonly used name for the empire, the Achaemenid Empire, is from Darius' retooling of that genealogy. And then again, as Lynette mentioned, Xenophon is writing about Cyrus because there is a prince at the end of the 5th century BCE who is the brother of the king at that point.

Artaxerxes II, and that prince is called Cyrus, Cyrus the Younger. So we have the memory of the great Cyrus being activated at numerous points in service of reshaping the whole of the Persian Empire itself. So Alexander, when he comes in,

is really a later one of these dominant kings who is trying to link himself with Cyrus II. He's not necessarily the first person to do that. Because there's just a lovely footnote to all of this, which is the inscriptions at Pasagada, where

Cyrus built his big garden palace. There are inscriptions which say, I am Cyrus and Achaemenid. But of course, these were created, they were written by Darius rather than by Cyrus because they weren't writing in Old Persian in Cyrus' time. So Darius has very definitely gone back and tried to, in writing, rewrite history to suit him and to link Cyrus to Achaemenid's

So they're very aware of the record for their own dynastic purposes and also for the longer record, are they? Yes. Martin, can I go back to you? His influence went into medieval Europe.

And also into literature. I mean, Cervantes... Is it okay if I just add something to the previous point? Please do. As an Iranian growing up in Iran, you get a lot of very nationalistic people fond of Cyrus' memory. And my grandma was one of these people. She's one of the people who incited love of history and of the Achaemenids in me.

And as lovely Lynette reminded me, she would often have me recite the cuneiform inscriptions that were attributed to Cyrus in dinner parties to all the guests. She would say, Mateen, what did Cyrus say in his garden again? And I had to recite it in Old Persian and everyone would clap and say, wow, that's amazing. Could you do that now, a little bit of it? I mean, I don't have it off the top of my head properly. This isn't a quote proper, but it would say something to the effect of Adam Kourosh...

which means, I am Cyrus, king of kings, in Old Persian. Well, that settled the matter, I suppose. It really reminded people of who's king. Can we get back to Don Quixote? Right. So if we want to track Cyrus down European literature, Xenophon, Herodotus, and some of the other Roman authors later, these remain prominent in Europe throughout history.

and many, many important European authors like Machiavelli, like Cervantes, they would make reference to Persian kings and the Cumanid kings because they were the counterpart to Alexander, but Oriental. And so Cervantes would say something to the effect of,

And this is a joke that he makes early on in his book Don Quixote. He says something like, if you read other books written in Spain at my time, what you will find is a lengthy bibliography that is full of the Herodotuses and the Xenophones and all of that. Well, I refuse to do that. Something to that effect.

But maybe Machiavelli is a bit more serious when he makes reference to Cyrus. Can we turn now to the Hebrew Bible and Cyrus' role he plays there? Especially, of course, the great thing is the decision to free the Jews from captivity in Babylon and return them to their own land and rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. Quite a handful. What I will say is that the Hebrew Bible...

He portrays Cyrus as a memory in a way. He is a model of how well the Jewish community can do under empire. And so he is remembered in these texts as a saviour and as somebody who enabled the reconstruction of Jerusalem and the reconstruction of the temple.

But quite often in retrospect, so in Ezra and Nehemiah, we have a reference back to the fact that there is approval for reconstruction of the temple dating back to that time. So in a way, Cyrus is a little bit like for other things under the Persian Empire. Cyrus is a sort of authoritative reference point for the status of the community.

This idea of freeing of captives, I will say, I think the general context for that that's worth remembering is that deportations happen under every conquest. So the Syrian, Babylonian, Persian, perhaps sometimes targeted, sometimes wholesale, taken to different regions for development, resettlement or hostages. So all of those things happen under those political conditions.

And finally, I will say that the rhetoric of the presentation of Cyrus in the Hebrew Bible is that it's somewhat similar to the rhetoric of the Cyrus cylinder in that the oppression that people have been undergoing is really the oppression of bad rule.

So in that sense, the role that Cyrus is playing is of a saviour coming in, but somebody who is restoring good conduct in kingship. Lynette? Again, we have to think about the books of the Hebrew Bible belonging to their own literary tradition, particularly the tradition of lamentation. There are the books in the Hebrew Bible called lamentations,

but there is just a cycle of lamentations which has its roots in Mesopotamia actually. Is there one characteristic you can apply to lamentations?

Yes, the destruction of cities and then their rebuilding. So we have a number of references to Cyrus in the Hebrew Bible, but it is within that context of the destroyer of Babylon and a rebuilder of Jerusalem. So it's even argued by biblical scholars that the references to the rebuilding of Jerusalem by Cyrus are not genuine edicts. The rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem happened a lot later and...

The biblical reception of Cyrus needs to be understood on those terms, and I even think that the Cyrus cylinder needs to be understood on those terms as part of that cycle of destruction and rebuilding. And Cyrus then can emerge as the great cosmic victor. Martine, to what extent do you think is Cyrus' reputation as the great is justified? And then I'll come to you, Lindsay.

Well, this is a great question. I often ask this of classrooms when I teach younger children in outreach classes. Why do you think Cyrus is great? It really goes back to the same question we had of the legendary Cyrus that people portrayed him as and the historic Cyrus, which was the real Cyrus on the ground when he was. When we look at Cyrus as a historic character, he was a conqueror.

He would have fought people, he would have defeated them, and he would have taken their lands. And taken their lives or just their land? Oh, a bit of both. Or all of both, maybe.

But, I mean, Herodotus' story of Cyrus' death is very telling of this, where finally, in his last conquest, somewhere in modern-day Central Asia, Cyrus goes to war against a Scythian tribe called the Massagetae, and the queen of the Massagetae manages to have his head in battle. And that is the end of Cyrus, according to Herodotus. She has it chopped off and presented to her.

But in terms of being great, he's very similar to other characters we know as the greats, such as Charlemagne or Charles the Great, if you want, or of Alexander the Great, very similar conqueror. He was a very good conqueror. He was. And then the legend that goes along with it portrays him as a great guy to go with the title.

So I think that these two are the reasons why he's so great alongside his genius of letting people rule their own lands, as we talked about before. Their own religions. And religion, as Lindsay says, religion is a small can of worms here when we talk about the ancient world, because religion, as we understand it today, an organized existing entity was more of a cultural entity.

element of people's lives they didn't understand each other as say for example today you would have a muslim or a jewish person or a christian they would have someone from babylon who would worship marduk and maybe other gods too so religious freedom yes he didn't force anyone against the religion but also not very many people did back then lindsay how would you summarize his legacy i

I think it's picking up on that point of greatness. I think greatness is kind of a collective project. As we've emphasised, he's relevant and burnished and appropriated his memory immediately because he is an empire founder. He has networked together an unprecedented amount of territory. And therefore, if we think about Alexander coming to Pasargadae at the end of his conquest, you have...

Cyrus being rolled up into the ultimate model, he's a collective representation of previous models of kingship, supplemented with later models of kingship all rolled together. So because he has these multiple stories attached to him, he can serve as a touchstone for many different polities, many different countries, many different cultures.

And so one site of remembrance for him, which we haven't mentioned so far, is his tomb at Pasargadae, which, contrary to the claims of Arian and his source Aristobulus, is not inscribed with Cyrus's name, but is identified with the site of Cyrus's tomb because of the description that's passed down there.

from the occasion of Alexander using it as a propagandistic episode at a point when he has to reassert his power over that region, over the historic core of the Achaemenid Empire. Using it in what way? He claims, he alleges, that the tomb and the other tombs of the Persian kings have been sacked.

in his absence in the east of the empire by a pretender called Orxenes, who himself claims to be descended from Persian royalty. But Alexander gets rid of him and executes a number of other usurpers that he comes across on his return to this heartland. And as part of that performance of setting things back in their place in the way that Cyrus advertises himself, setting things back in their place in Babylon,

He restores Cyrus's tomb and places a seal on the door as though he owns Cyrus's memory. It is his own tool to use. Lynette, what about his lasting reputation? What motors it principally? The Greeks never called him Cyrus the Great.

They call him Cyrus the Elder because there was this other Cyrus who was Cyrus the Younger. So he only acquires the title The Great. Much later, it's in the Roman period, I think it's when Pompey starts to want to be called The Great, then Cyrus becomes The Great too, because it's in that same model. Who's claimed Cyrus most passionately, most recently? I suppose the most passionate, most recent is probably the Shah of Iran in the 1970s.

He hosted a large festival. His motivation for this festival was to legitimize his own kingship, basically. But he invoked Cyrus...

in Pasargada and in Persepolis. And because of political miscalculations, this was the beginning of the end for him, ironically. But there is a famous episode where in front of Cyrus' tomb in Pasargada, he has all the world leaders sitting down under parasols. And he says in Persian, which translates roughly to sleep well, we are awake in your stead.

Something like that. It's ironic that he kind of failed miserably soon after, sadly. But sadly for him, at least. But another important thing about the same festival is that for the first time ever since it was created, the Cyrus cylinder traveled to Iran. The Cyrus cylinder was created in Babylon, modern day Iraq.

never left until the British excavated and brought it to London, where it now rests in the British Museum. It never went to Iran proper. For the first time, sometime in the 1970s, it was brought to Tehran and displayed in what was then the Shahyad Monument, now the Azadi Monument, which means Freedom Monument, on loan. And it was then returned to London.

More recently, around 2010, if I'm not mistaken, the British Museum loaned the Cyrus cylinder to Tehran again under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was running some sort of program with it. And it attracted a large number of visitors. Thank you very much. Thanks to Mateen Akandapur, Lynette Mitchell and Lindsay Allen.

Next week, Thomas Middleton, the son of a bricklayer who became one of the most successful and prolific playwrights of the Jacobean age. Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Starting with you, Ferdinand, what would you like to have said that you didn't have time to say? I think as this conversation developed and looking back at it now in hindsight throughout my own research on Cyrus, it explains a lot of the writer's block I've been having when writing. But realistically, Cyrus is a big historic character

who drew on a sophisticated, expansive and ancient, already by his time, ancient political and literary structure. But not much of it remains. Not enough of it remains. But obviously because of how great a character he was, the word great is coming back, how great a character he was, he left a large wake with his passing. People remembered him for a long time for so many reasons that we talked about.

So one of the biggest challenges in studying Cyrus as a historic, as a literary or political character is trying to decipher what he really was from this amalgamation of influenced texts, texts that were later somehow influenced by political events, literary events, religious events,

and piecing together what really may have happened and how people really thought of him. I think I would have liked to have said a bit more about the Greeks in Anatolia and the way that... Because that is a good example of how he...

He was very brutal in the way at least his army dealt with the Greeks of Asia Minor, of Anatolia. But then he let them maintain their political structure. So it's not so much a question of religion as he let them... They had what was called the Panionium, which was a common council for the Greeks of the region, and he didn't disturb that. As long as they kept paying their tribute...

As long as he had access to the Mediterranean, which is clearly what he wanted from them, he kept the coinage that they had, the coinage system that they had, so that they were able to... They could just get on doing what he wanted them to do, which was to create revenue. And I think this is where you get this sort of twin side of him, that he is a brutal conqueror, but he's also got this reputation for being gentle because he just let them get on with it. The word brutal has been used several times. How?

Do you want to describe what you mean by brutal? Well, the remains at Sardis are quite striking. He chopped it about pretty well, and he also... Elaborate on that. You mean he chopped the place about or the people about? Both. The excavated remains of bodies that have been hacked about quite seriously. But we also know that with the Greek cities, if they resisted him...

or they resisted his army, then there was no mercy shown to them. To the point that some of the Greeks just decided to leave altogether. They got in their boats and went to the other side of the Mediterranean, basically, because of the consequences of being captured. If they didn't want to be captured, then there was going to be serious consequences and they didn't really want to face that.

Would you have anything to say there?

And I guess the other thing to say is that it's hard to remember, I think, that he's triggering a process here. I don't want to be too much of a Darius fan, but he's triggering a process which kind of cascades into the reign of his successor Cambyses and then has to be kind of rescued under a coalition under Darius, which might have led to a collapse.

So it's not necessarily the case, a bit like Alexander really, it's not really the case that he necessarily completely got a handle on everything immediately. This is an expansionist process that then took a few generations to really stabilise. Just to add to that, because you can see the prototypes of what was to become...

the Persian Empire under Darius in terms of structures, but it's really only vestigial, it's really only prototypes, whereas it's Darius who comes back and sets the whole thing up properly. So there is proper tribute, there are proper satraps, there are proper governors, and there is a proper provincial system. Although the early administrative language, which is in use by the time of Darius's reign...

is actually Elamite, cuneiform. And it's clearly functioning as a sophisticated bureaucracy by that point. So that I think we can perhaps link to this sort of dynastic heritage from that part of Iran. We've only briefly mentioned Cambyses, Cyrus's grown son, who is installed in Babylon as Cyrus's representative and who Herodotus has a fantastic time absolutely trashing in the histories of

partly at least because his line as a legitimate dynastic branch is terminated with Darius I. So whilst we may go on about the millennia-long reach of Cyrus and his reputation, in the short term it was kind of terminated because Cambyses died following his invasion of Egypt and his addition of Egypt to the Persian Empire.

And then effectively Darius I started again in reconstructing the sort of dynastic identity to the point that the memory that Herodotus purveys of Cyrus's son Cambyses is really quite...

destructively negative. We sort of have two poles here. We have Cyrus on the one hand, who is the gentle father, and Cambyses on the other, who is the tyrant. And he becomes the archetypal tyrant in Greek political memory, in Greek political thought. Would you like to summarise this, where we've got to, Lindsay? I think we've got to a multiple personality...

founder who himself was, I guess, a successor in a post-imperial world, a post-Assyrian world.

and therefore in a transitional phase, but whose impact was global and whose impact I think continues to transform and about whom we are still finding things out. Pasargadae itself still is subject to archaeological investigation, although its excavation was begun in the 1960s.

And as an environment, it's influential in the sense that the series of palaces there are arranged around a garden, which was a new form of palatial environment really for the era, although there were Assyrian palace gardens too. But this kind of expansive landscape, palatial landscape was quite astonishing there.

So hopefully there will be more archaeological discoveries about him, which may not bring us closer to him as a historical person, as a personality. We might not be able to think about his character in a kind of very individualised way.

but we will be able to think about his political context and impact. Thank you very much indeed. Melvin, what would you like to drink? Tea, please. One tea. Lynette? Tea, please. Tea. Lindsay? Coffee. Coffee. And a tea, please. So three teas and one coffee. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg was produced by Eliane Glazer and it is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.

Nothing is a better bonder of a group of people than one collective enemy.

From BBC Radio 4, the new series of Why Do We Do That? With me, Ella Oshamahi. Available now on BBC Sounds.