The Ancients - The Cyrus Cylinder

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

An ancient clay artefact that dates back to the 6th century BCE, the Cyrus Cylinder is often considered one of the most important documents in history. Covered in Akkadian inscriptions that provide invaluable insight into the reign of Cyrus the Great - it focuses on Cyrus's conquering of Babylon and attempts of religious restoration. So where was this irreplaceable object found, and what else does it tell us about Cyrus the Great?In this bonus episode of our Babylon mini-series, Tristan welcomes Dr Irving Finkel from the British Museum, to help decode this incredible object. Looking at the religious messages, the description of Cyrus himself, and what it tells us about Babylon - what can we learn about the Achaemenid Empire and it's political legacy?Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. The Assistant Producer was Annie Coloe. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Voice Over performed by Toby Ricketts.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. I am Cyrus, King of the Universe, the Great King, the Powerful King, King of Babylon, King of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters of the world, the perpetual seed of kingship, whose reign Marduk and Nabu love,

and with whose kingship, to their joy, they concern themselves. When I went as harbinger of peace into Babylon, I founded my sovereign residence with the palace amid celebration and rejoicing. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, well, we are talking about one of the most famous artifacts ever discovered in Babylon. It's called the Cyrus Cylinder. It dates to the late 6th century BC, when the Babylonian Empire collapsed, it crumbled, and a new superpower reigned supreme over Babylon, the Persian Empire ruled by the great king Cyrus II, Cyrus the Great. Now the Cyrus Cylinder is complete with a cuneiform text and it is today on display at the British Museum.

Now I headed over to the British Museum a few weeks back to interview the assistant keeper of Mesopotamian script at the museum, the legendary Assyriologist, the fantastic Dr Irving Finkel. Irving is one of the lead experts on the Cyrus Cylinder and what it says. He's made his own translation of the cylinder too, so he is the perfect guest for our episode today. We're going to be covering topics going from the context behind the cylinder's creation, how it was discovered, where it was discovered in Babylon, and also naturally, of course, we're going to be focusing in on the cuneiform text itself. What was the purpose of the Cyrus Cylinder? To help give you more of a sense of the text, of how it was written, we're also going to be including excerpts from the Cylinder translated by Irving in this episode,

voiced by the fantastic voice artist Toby Ricketts. I really do hope you enjoy. Kudos to our editor Aidan who has worked especially hard to get this special episode ready for today's release. And without further ado, here's Irving. Irving, we're talking today about the Cyrus Cylinder. This feels almost amongst one of the most well-known artefacts to come out of ancient Mesopotamia. I think given the propensity for this kind of classification, the Cyrus Cylinder is definitely in the top ten and arguably in the top five. And there are persons who might nudge it even a little higher. So it is one of our most famous objects. And its fame has increased

substantially since the period when it was first discovered. In fact, exponentially, and this is one of the curious things about it, how famous it has become in the modern world with political awareness and other considerations. So we have lots of famous things, but there are not all that many things that people, when they see them in the gallery they go ah there it is and the Cyrus cylinder I think must be one of them absolutely it kind of ranks up there with the Rosetta Stone doesn't it that noticeability oh you mean that Egyptian thing yes that's quite interesting but actually the thing about the Rosetta Stone which is so important which was highlighted in the recent decitement exhibition is it's not unique and this unique thing is one of the matters which contributes to the reputation of certain objects people say

well there's only one of them it is really unique very unique and other such monstrosities and their reputation is increased thereby and this is an important matter. Well therefore obviously this is a podcast so audio only we've said the name the Cyrus cylinder but describe this object to our audience what does it look like what does it consist of? Right well the first thing is it's made of clay whitish kind of clay and I suppose it's about a foot long so there are two kinds of cylinders are there not there's a straight-sided cylinder, which you would roll out on a board or something of plasticine, but this is one in profile that gets fatter towards the middle. So it's a kind of gradual hill up and then a gradual hill down.

So if you put it flat on a table, it would rock slightly using the middle bit as a pivot, if you understand me. And it has got a hole through the middle which has to do with how it was constructed. And it's made of a certain clay which was selected in the context in which it was produced, which we can come back to, in the knowledge that it would take clearly and accurately the impression of cuneiform writing done with a stylus which is pressed into the clay, which is the script in which it's written. So the script itself of course is, well people say it's the oldest writing known, as long as you say the oldest writing known

there's no trouble. I doubt it was the first writing in the world myself. But around 3500 BC in ancient Iraq, in the land between the rivers, coming down into the heart of Mesopotamia, the Euphrates and the Tigris, brought with them gradually a wonderful quality of clay, which the Mesopotamians, the Sumerians, and then the Assyrians and the Babylonians utilized in many ways because it was free and endless, so obviously for bricks and pottery, but also as a vehicle for inscriptions. So from about three and a half thousand BC, so to speak, the first processes got underway which culminated in cuneiform writing which by say 3200 or 3100 or something like that had moved from its

elementary evolutionary phases into a proper mobile writing system which had this characteristic which is the essence of a writing system which person A could take this clay surface and use a writing stick to make a set of marks, which another person could then look at with their eyes and hear the words that were thereby represented. So the cuneiform system grew out of pictograms, childlike pictures of things and bits and what have you, which in the very beginning just meant what they represented. And then after a passage of time somebody twigged that you could do one of these pictures not just for what it looked like, but the sound of what the thing looked like. You could use the sound independent of its meaning

graphically. And when that happened, exponentially it exploded. And eventually you had this marvelous system which looks quite barbaric if you've never seen it. All these different angular signs impressed in rows, there's no gap between the words which is a horrible thing, and it recorded language phonetically mostly by syllables, mostly by syllables, but sometimes by idea words like in Egyptian or determinative like in Egyptian, and it got to such a state that a professional scribe could record the Sumerian language which is so to speak our oldest known very bizarre language or the Semitic tongue of the Babylonians and the Assyrians both of them were recorded in the same writing system so

by the time Cyrus took up this clay cylinder to write down his own statement, which he was regarded as so important, it was a very ancient thing indeed. There had been generations and generations of scribes before them who had promulgated this writing system and had recorded in it libraries of data of all kinds, astronomical and astrological and medical and lexical and fortune telling and all these sorts of things, as well as normal documents like letters and bills and marriage documents and so forth. So it's a very long-running thing, more than 3,000 years of use, and Cyrus, who was born over the border in what we call Iran knew all about it and when the time came in his evolving dramatic Hollywood career he realised straight away how valuable that could be

as an asset. Well let's delve into that historical context now you mentioned that earlier and also you know by the time of Cyrus so he's come from Iran, ancient Persia, creating this cylinder, what's the historical context behind its creation? Right, this is the crucial question. Well, Cyrus was, so to speak, a hated Persian, theoretically. So one might imagine that Cyrus, who was poised to take over Babylon, to invade, take over the crown, take over the empire, take over Babylon, to invade, take over the crown, take over the empire, was aware that there would be resistance to this matter. Because things in Babylon were in rather a powerless state, because after the distinguished and powerful reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who was king of the world and not just in words, there was a fluttering of minor persons and culminating in Nabonidus, who in himself was probably perfectly capable of being an effective king, but he had this strange problem about religion, probably because of his mother, who I think was very dominating and very terrible.

I often visualise for her as that woman in the rocking chair in that horror film by, you know, she's in the basement. How do we know this? That's like a detailed part of that late ruler's life. Well, we know in this respect about her career and we know that she was a worshipper and a priestess in the religion devoted to the god Sin, who was the moon god. who was the moon god, she must have brought Nabonidus up from her knee to be a very serious worshipper of sin himself, as opposed to the prevailing Babylonian deity who was Marduk, who had a very long history himself, was king of the gods in literature and in theology, and in a way propounding sin worship in the face of the dominant martyr worship, I think, led to trouble. And this was a factor in what actually took place as a result at the time that Cyrus was

going to invade in 539 BC. So Navanidus, who I think, as I say, was indoctrinated with the worship of the moon, it's probably the best sort of word, became a religiously devoted worshipper, and it led him to leave Babylon and go to Tamar in Arabia. And this was a huge proposition, because he was supposed to be on the throne, he was supposed to be the visible king on the throne, and to take his part in religious possessions and whatever religious activities were necessary, he was the figurehead he would intercede for man with the gods. Crucial lynchpin, and no gainsaying the fact.

But Navanidas put his son Belshazzar on the throne and went to Arabia where he built a temple to the moon god and sat around crooning, I suppose, with a lyre hymns to the moon for a very long period of time. I can't remember how long now, but the point was that he made his son regent, not king in his stead, and there was a tremendous sense of resentment, I believe, that he wasn't there to fulfill his function. And also, very specifically, in the New Year festival, you had to take the hand of Marduk and symbolically establish worship and the link and everything. And he wasn't there. there was an undercurrent, I think, of resentment about this issue, the absent king, the regent, prince, and the dichotomy between the two religious structures.

And it's easy to say, oh, this was a religious war. It's not anything quite comparable to a modern situation. And all one can do with the whole of this narrative is form an impression on the basis of reading what survives. So it may be that in one nuance or another or in one detail or another it wasn't quite the way we see it or the way I see it, because other Assyriologists might also have quite different views about the detail. But I think in principle there was a malaise in the country. And Cyrus decided that he would write a testimony, a statement of how it was that he was going to be king and what he was going to do.

That was the basic point. So in the first instance, he decided rather cleverly to use a Babylonian vehicle to communicate this. So the cylinder, which we talked about at the beginning was the Babylonian traditional and national way of making a royal statement, I am Mr. So-and-so, I'm absolutely marvelous, I did all this, you know, fall down on your knees and worship and never destroy anything of mine, sort of inscription. and they were often written on cylinders and the point about them is they were buried in strategic places so the burial of such a thing the Assyrians

did the same with big prisms that stood on end huge prisms sometimes the Babylonians like these cylinders they were buried in sometimes in a box by the jam of a door, a big door hinge, or they were buried in foundations, or buried in the walls strategically, for two reasons. And this was a very old principle. One was that the gods, of course, who could read cuneiform very capably and had no trouble with it, could also read it when it wasn't out in the air. They could read it through a wall. They could keep an eye on the inscription. And inscription would remind the gods of whoever wrote the inscription, don't forget me. This is one thing. And the second principle was that most buildings in Mesopotamia were made of mud brick. It doesn't sound very smart,

but of course, it was very high quality brick and it was fired and it lasted forever. I mean, sometimes on an excavation, an iron hoe will break on an ancient brick, they're not just, you know, soft and crumbly. But the thing about it was that with the passage of time, especially when a building is abandoned, the roof caves in, the walls collapse, and the idea was that these inscriptions would come to light, so that a later king, oh my goodness me, this is the work of King so-and-so, we can't have this, we have to rebuild it, we have to, out of respect, rebuild it. So there's a kind of two-part message, that's the thing. So Cyrus seized on this for his own purposes, and the inscription that he wrote was written on one of these cylinders, and it was buried in a wall in Babylon, which was where it was found. So it wasn't excavated in Iran, it wasn't found in Iran,

it was found in Babylon in a wall, out of sight, buried when it was excavated in the second half of the 19th century by Hormuzd Rassan. Now there are lots of very interesting things to say about the object, separate from the inscription. So to continue with the object, it's made, as I said, of a whitish kind of clay, but actually the clay doesn't look like conventional Babylonian royal cylinder clay. I know this sounds a bit vague. It's a bit like people who can say when they try a wine, oh no, no, 1972, impossible, 1971.

It's a bit like that. But when you've spent your life mucking about with bits of cuneiform on clay, you have this kind of feeling, and I'm not the only person who's had this opinion, that the clay is not normal Babylonian clay that you'd expect to see. And then the second thing about it, it has inclusions in it. That's to say, little bits of stone. And this is also very unusual in the royal inscription because panes were taken to get inclusions out before the thing was produced to be written on because nobody wanted it. But there's a higher incidence of inclusions out before the thing was produced to be written on, because nobody wanted it. But there's

a higher incidence of inclusions there than you might expect. The third thing is, and this is even more nuanced, that the sign forms, the cuneiform sign forms in which the inscription is written, many, many lines of writing, are not quite like normal Babylonian signs of the same period. So sometimes you have signs which are deliberately archaic. So you have modern cursive that you'd use for a business letter, but when you write something official and you want to have a nod back to, say, King Hammurabi a thousand years before, say, King Hammurabi a thousand years before, and you have Hammurabi-like writing for its own kind of function. It's nothing to do with that. It's not archaizing. It's somehow

intrinsically slightly unusual looking. So you have these qualities. And then the fourth quality about it, which is even more remarkable, is this, that the cylinder is about a foot long, say something like that, and the writing starts this one long line that goes from left to right, right across the surface, and then it was turned slightly, and the next line written in it goes all the way round, and more or less meets at the back. So the whole surface is covered with writing. Now, when you write cuneiform, if you were a proper trained scribe, one thing you did, and it was so ingrained into your mind, was you were,

it was what we call right justified. So if you had a short line, you wouldn't stop in the middle and leave a gap and then go back to the next line if you couldn't fit in the next thing. They didn't like that. So the idea was a line will be complete. So sometimes this means a line is quite comfortably spaced and sometimes it's a little bit tight because the guy decided well we can get this in and it's a bit of a squeeze. So this does happen and you can sometimes look at a scribe's work as if you were their supervisor and go 8 out of ten, you know, not bad. Don't like this bit here, don't like that bit there. You could do this.

But with the Cyrus Cylinder, it's very, very, very bad indeed. Because there are some lines where the signs are rattling around, and others where they're very cramped. And I never noticed this until it came to me to make a new translation of it, which we put on our website, and it's been in various books since. The best I could do is a modern translation into reasonable English. And I had a good look at the cinder, and it became really apparent that this was out of control. And there is, of course, an explanation for it, which is perfectly straightforward.

Because when the inscription was composed, so in other words, Cyrus says, well, okay, these are the points I want to cover. And we start off when I was at school and when I went to university, when I got my first motorbike, you know, it's all in chronological order. I want this stuff going in. So there'd be people who would reduce this to a narrative in Babylonian style. And there'd be eventually an agreed master copy. Might take quite a lot of coffee and cigarettes before the thing was finalised,

but then there'd be a final version. Now, the essential point that I'm building up to here is that nobody would ever compose a work or even produce a final copy for the first time on a cylinder, because they are very inconvenient as a writing support. And the normal writing support is on tablets. So it seems to me, beyond any kind of dispute, that the original draft of the I Am Cyrus Look at Me text was written out on a normal kind of clay tablet. This being said, it makes it perfectly intelligible that the person who copied the cylinder

made a bit of a hash job of transposing from one format to another. Not so easy to do. And in order to give this more verisimilitude, I don't think there was any possibility that the Cyrus cylinder buried in the foundations of Babylon was the only one. So on the contrary, I think that Cyrus, because so much was riding on this inscription, had many copies on cylinders produced and they were all buried in suitable places in Babylon and we've only found one so far suitable places in Babylon, and we've only found one so far, because of the nature of the inscription. So maybe, say they wanted 60, maybe the top scribes in the country wouldn't

do this kind of thing. You know, come on, man, I'm a professor, I'm not going to do that. So we've got six postgraduates, we've got a few promising graduates. They share it out, and they do it, the writers. And I think this one is a second-class piece of work. So this is rather interesting. I think that, for example, if Nebuchadnezzar had been given a cylinder written like that, he'd have something to say about it. And the first thing would be, go away and do it properly.

So it's a noticeable thing, and it wouldn't strike a normal person who never has anything to do with cuneiform, but it's compelling when you do have something to do with cuneiform, but it's compelling when you do have something to do with cuneiform. So all these things add up to various important messages. Now the next important message is that what the inscription tells us and how we correlate that with the documents that we have, the physical documents, there's more to be extracted. So the basic message of the Cyrus Linder, which is translated, as I

say, into English on our website and in many other places, we only have about two-thirds of the whole thing. There's a lot missing. This is an important matter because it was excavated, as I said, by Rassam in Babylon, but not by Rassam, because he was somewhere else. The workmen were doing it unsupervised. And somebody found this thing excavating down in a wall. Maybe it became visible in the structure. They took it out, and they broke it. They broke it.

And you can see by analysing the breaks that this was done, and it was surely done on purpose. And there are two basic reasons. One is, perhaps they thought it was full of gold dinars, so they wanted them. And the other one was that if you had it in nine pieces or twelve pieces, you could share out a few, and somebody would get something, and the supervisor wouldn't know because they'd just take what they got. And it'd be more all-round for everybody.

It was a good idea. And by analysing the impact points where this was done, it is possible to see that that's what happened. So the function of it is that we got about two-thirds of it. One piece of it turned up in Yale. Professor Breasted bought it from a dealer years afterwards with a whole load of other stuff to Yale. It's in their collection. And the other pieces of which they're probably eight or ten, sort of three by two inches in size, something like that, are probably scattered around

America because there was a lively trade in cuneiform and lots of families dealt with it. And what they would do if they got lots and lots of small tablets, they might put something else in to make it look interesting. So they probably sorted bits of the Ciro cylinder into other lots, which are very likely in collections that have never been noticed, because the one in Yale wasn't noticed for a very long time, until Professor Berger spotted it. So that is the fact that the thing was broken. Now Cyrus had the plan to try and explain how it was that he was going to be king of Babylon. So there are various interesting episodes which he wove into one

narrative to be convincing. The first one was that Nabonidus, the so-called king, was no king at all, that he was off somewhere and not doing his job. And he painted a picture at the beginning of the cylinder of the chaos in Babylonia that resulted from this problem, because the gods in their temples weren't getting their regular sacrifices. Nabonidus' firstborn, Belshazzar, a low person, was put in charge of his country. He made a counterfeit of Ezequiel for Ur and the rest of the cult cities. Rites inappropriate to them, impure food offerings. And as an insult he brought the daily

offerings to a halt. He interfered with the rites. In Nabonidus' mind, reverential fear of Marduk, king of the gods, came to an end. People complained. Enlil of the gods became extremely angry at their complaints. The gods who lived within their territory left their shrines. So the situation was that the lack of central authority and the rigorous control of the life of temples and the offerings and all the things which are essential working with the priesthood in one united voice. This

all came to an end, it was chaotic, and the gods left their temples. They looked around and they got fed up so they decided to go. And there was trouble all over the country, people wandering about and probably bandits on the highways and all sorts of stuff like that. Things in Babylonia were at a parlous state. And Cyrus's conception was that he'd been picked out in the womb of his mother in Iran to come in and put everything to rights. This was his idea that Marduk, looking down on his beloved country, realised that he couldn't leave it in the hands of Nabonidus and that he needed an up-and-coming young, forthright and intelligent,

presumably malleable individual like Cyrus to do his bidding. So that's what happened. Marduk changed his mind about the population of the land of Sumer and Akkad, who had become like corpses, and took pity on them. He inspected and checked all the countries, seeking for the upright king of his choice. He took the hand of Cyrus, king of the city of Anshan, and called him by his name, proclaiming aloud for the kingship over all of everything. Marduk ordered that Cyrus should go to Babylon. American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle

of Midway, visit Chief Poetin as he prepares for war with the British, see Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists, and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race, I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday, so join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. by History Hit. the water in a river could not be counted, were marching fully armed at his side. He had him enter without fighting or battle right into Babylon.

He saved his city Babylon from hardship. And the consequence of it was that when the Persian army got to Babylon, there wasn't the huge bloodshed you might have expected and violence and everything, according to the narrative. And there doesn't seem to be any reason to deny it. The people opened the gates and welcomed them in, and the Persian was ushered in and became, as it were, king of Babylon. And he undertook to restore buildings and make the cults flourish again and do all the things that the good Babylonian king should do and his son after him for the rest of time so it's a kind of statement that

this is what I do you can as it were trust me the old people used to misleadingly call in Britain the safe pair of hands, which no politician has ever managed to demonstrate. So it's a bit like that. Anyway, this is all recounted in detail in very good English. In fact, you probably ought to get someone to read out the Cyrus cylinder or bits of it, because it tells in his own words what's what and how it worked. I am Cyrus, king of the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon,

king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters of the world, son of Cambyses, the great king, king of the city of Anshan, grandson of Cyrus, the great king, king of the city of Anshan, descendant of Tishpish, the great king, king of the city of Anshan, the perpetual seed of kingship, whose reign Marduk and Nabu love, and with whose kingship, to their joy, they concern themselves. When I went as harbinger of peace into Babylon, I founded my sovereign residence with the palace amid celebration and rejoicing. Marduk, the great lord, bestowed on me as my destiny the great magnanimity of one who loves Babylon, and I every day sought him out in awe. My vast troops were marching peaceably in Babylon,

and the whole of Sumer and Akkad had nothing to fear. I sought the safety of the city of Babylon and all its sanctuaries. As for the population of Babylon, who, as if without divine intervention, had endured a yoke not decreed for them, I soothed their weariness. I freed them from their bonds. Marduk, the great lord, rejoiced at my good deeds. Where the matter becomes more than a local issue, a local king doing what Babylonians did, we can, from there, disinter some other more interesting questions. So, for example, the unusual features of the Cyrus cylinder that we have suggest to me that it probably wasn't made in Babylon,

but might have been made and brought with. Because I think Cyrus, who was a very clever person, probably filched some of the Babylonian Marduk clergy into his palace service in order to discuss with them how to generate these inscriptions. They could write it in Babylonian, they knew all the signs. And they worked for him to produce the Babylonian ideal inscription to get the message across. I think that's almost inescapably true. So that gives you an idea of a high level of diplomacy, imagination and prediction to work in that kind of fashion. And if there was all this trouble about Nabonidus and the seen God worship, it might have been quite easy to get individuals who thought this

would be our liberation from this ridiculous thing. And Cyrus was responsible for a piece of street theatre which was written all about Nabonidus when he was there. He wrote this slanderous thing about babbling prayers that nobody can understand in a language you don't understand, and it's a kind of dismissal of like this with his hand. And there is some evidence that one or two monuments which belonged to Nabonidus, the inscriptions were removed by Cyrus's sappers to excise him from the Babylonian psychology. And one interesting question is this, that Cyrus's personal religion we don't know much about. I mean people say he was a worshipper of Achorah Mazda, which is of

course plausible, but there's no real written evidence which bears on this. So this is an interesting matter. But when you read the Cyrus Cylinder, he is a dyed-in-the-wool, straight-up Marduk fan, that he's promulgating the Marduk cult in every way. He's the servant of Marduk, and his own career is due to Marduk's intervention. So this is the really important question about it. Was it a cold-blooded piece of political expediency to adopt a Babylonian persona and religious sensibility in order to effect a political switch? Or is it possible that at some point in this whole evolving piece of history something happened to Cyrus where it was a sincere religious feeling.

And it's easy to rule out any kind of understanding of whether this might be true, but I have one practical point which is worth thinking about. I mean, you could say to yourself that Cyrus was a pretty callous, clever bloke, and he knew this was going to work. You know, they'd go for this hook, line and sinker, we'll be on the throne in no time and we'll go on from there. Sort of idea, one. But the other thing is, imagine this, Nebuchadnezzar was king of the world in more than words and he must have spent the first night after the battle in Nebuchadnezzar's bed, in Nebuchadnezzar's bedroom, in Nebuchadnezzar's

palace, in the middle of the world, with that empire entirely his, with an endless supply of cold champagne and any number of beautiful houris draped around the bedclothes. So you could imagine Cyrus stretching and putting his hands behind his head and thinking, God damn it, I am king of Babylon. God damn it, this must all be true. It would be quite hard to resist the idea that he was there because of Cyrus and that it was Cyrus's country and he wanted the best king and he put him on the throne and it was all his doing. And it's hard to disentangle which of those two things might have been more valid. I opine to the second because in the Bible, of course, and ever afterwards,

Cyrus has gone down in history as a very just and thoughtful and non-violent king with a rather liberal attitude. Now this is a complex question in itself but nevertheless he has, despite everything, got this remarkable reputation even today, up until this very moment, where how easy would it be to find another king with the same kind of reputation? Impossible. So this is a unique situation. So it is compatible with the idea that the great events that happened to him actually

made him think, heck, that's what's happened, that's why I'm here, I am Marduk's representative in the world. And he restored the temples and did all these things, not for political motive, but because that was the right thing to do in his position. I'm inclined to think that's more likely than it was cold-blooded. And there's another point which can be adduced to supervise the imagination,

which might say, I don't believe they opened the gates, I don't believe there weren't rape and pillages and all this kind of thing, it always happens, is that the dating of, as it were, the civil service structure reflected in business documents went on unimpeded and uninterrupted into the Persian period. And that is a kind of litmus paper where if there'd been central authority in chaos, resentment, rebellion, this and this, it would have been shattered. But it isn't. So from the documents, you can't really tell one king and the next king.

It just goes on and on. And that formidable strength of the civil service, which we all know about today, obviously applied then. So I'm inclined to think that he had a religious… he woke up at some point in this thing and that was what he did and that Babylon was indeed safe in his hands as far as he could arrange it. I mean that may be naive, I don't know if you took a poll among people who work in these sources where they would fall in this issue but I used to think he was what used to be known as a clever bugger, Cyrus, you

know, and he would knew exactly what to do. I think there's more to it than that. It's very interesting you say how he portrays himself as the chosen of Marduk almost and I guess before we go on to the repatriation question and the people that part of the cylinder, is it quite interesting when you study this cylinder how there are no Persian gods mentioned and it is more of a focus on Marduk? Yes it is very revealing and it could be that of course he didn't have to persuade the Persians it had nothing to do with the Persians he was their king they follow him everywhere and do what he told them so they wouldn't need to be in on the cylinder it was

for Babylonian ears so to speak only so only. So the absence of the Persian gods, I mean, say he was cold-blooded about it, the last thing he was going to do is to say, I'm going to build a whole load of temples to my god, you know, taller than yours, so there. I mean, you wouldn't expect a mention of it. So I think that's not surprising, really. At his exalted command,

all kings who sit on thrones from every quarter, from the upper sea to the lower sea, those who inhabit remote districts, and the kings of the land of Amuru who live in tents, all of them brought their weighty tribute into Babylon and kissed my feet. From Babylon I sent back to their places, to the city of Ashur and Susa, Akkad, the land of Eshnunna, the city of Zamban, the city of Meturnu, Deir as far as the border of the land of the Guti, the sanctuaries across the river Tigris, whose shrines had earlier become dilapidated, the gods who lived thereinin and made permanent sanctuaries for them. So this meant Cyrus was acknowledged as king of Babylon by all these other kings

and the gods of the land of Sumer and Akkad which Nabonidus to the fury of the lord of the gods had brought into Joanna. Yeah that was another daft thing he did. He took these gods into Babylon, and that's how the idea came up that the gods had left their sanctuaries and shrines because they were so angry. So Nabonidus did this, and it was then theologically interpreted as the gods leaving in fury. Leaving Babylon.

Yes, that's right. So, I return them unharmed to their cells in the sanctuaries that made them happy. And may all the gods that I return to their sanctuaries every day before Bedi-Nabu ask for a long life for me and mention my good deeds. And say to Marduk, my lord, this, Cyrus, the king who fears you and can buy, sees his son. May they be the provisioners of our shrines until distant days. shrines until distant days so he talks about the population of people who were displaced from their homes and roamed about in the kingdom but he doesn't give many details about it what he says is that he wanted everyone the gods and persons alike to go back to where they belonged and that

was what he affected and it's interesting because it then once again where you ended there and just after and the population of babylon called blessings up on my kingship Once again emphasizing that liberator idea, isn't it? So their center. Yes. I am the one bringing these gods back I am sorting out the problems that nabonidus Created you say that the population of Babylon called blessings on my kingship You know This is one sentence among all these 45 lines that we have and it's easy for your eye to slide over

but actually it's very remarkable because you might expect a tyrant who had taken over, invaded and taken over not to really worry at all what the population thought, they didn't count a bit and he's very keen to establish that the population the gods and the population

everybody was on his side, and he's enabled all the lands to live in peace. And even to have such an ambition is a very significant thing. It is certainly a personal view. It is not generic kingly work. And I think it must be connected, really, with the conception that Marduk had picked him out for this position to be first violinist in the world's biggest orchestra, that sort of thing. I collected together all of their people and returned them to their settlements. So Irving, we've looked at these various parts of the text itself and explain to us this very,

well I guess more well-known part or potentially misconception of this part of the cylinder of the text, in regards to the repatriation of certain peoples. Yes, well, the thing is, once the text was translated and published, it didn't make a lot of furore. And there was an exhibition in Persia when the late Shah, in celebration of the great Dynthes of Persia, had this long, public, splendid occasion, when the Cyrus Cylinder was borrowed from the British Museum and exhibited as part of this kind of affair. And it was with that that the Cyrus Cylinder moved from its relative Assyriological obscurity into something else, because it was seen then, I don't know if that was the first time, that the text of Cyrus, which actually talked about displaced gods going back to their shrines

where they should be, and population who were roaming the country and not where they're supposed to be going back to where they belonged, was kind of identified, even though it's a rather general matter, with the other issue from the Bible of course, which is that under Cyrus's rule the Judeans who've been, so to speak, imprisoned in Babylonia since the time of Nebuchadnezzar, weeping and crying and wanting to go back to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, under the edict of Cyrus quoted in the Hebrew text they were allowed to go from Mesopotamia, from Iraq, back to Jerusalem. So the way I see it is this, that when the Bible was composed,

the fate of the Judeans, what later became the Jewish nation, Jewish religion, Jewish people, was always conceived of as the chosen persons under their Old Testament God. And everything that happened to them was done by divine intervention. That was the whole of their interpretation of their history. So when Cyrus came, and obviously did establish in the kingdom of Babylonia these principles that people could come and go and they could go back to where they belonged and that the gods were in a civilized way

to be put back where they belonged. Under that general edict no doubt there was some circumstance which allowed the Judeans to go from Babylon back to Persia but it's not mentioned in the Cyrus Cylinder. So you have a general description, and then you have a very specific case study, and the case study is always associated with the general, and of course a lot of people think that going back to Jerusalem to build the temple and the name of the Judeans is in the Cyrus Cylinder, but it's not, there's no specific mention. So it was only part of all sorts of other things that were going on, and so they're not incompatible, they reflect the same reality. But the Cyrus Cylinder does not

mention anything about the Judeans and Jerusalem. Of course there is more to this, because when the Cylinder was on exhibition in Iran after it came back, I don't quite know how this happened, but there was a sudden ascription to the cylinder that it was the first charter of human rights. So the essence that we've talked about, these features, were suddenly blown into a charter for human rights. And what a charter for human rights means is the following.

A, it is a prescriptive document which stipulates that a good king, any proper king, does this and it's predicated on the existence of human rights. Now in antiquity there were no human rights. There weren't any. When necessary, like in the First World War, soldiers were cannon fodder and nobody cared about the poor and the lame and so forth. That's why all that talk about it in the Bible. There weren't any human rights. There are hardly any human rights in the world today. So it is beyond belief that anybody could say that this cylinder, which was a political document as explained, that this cylinder, which was a political document as explained, was either a charter with prescriptive contents or embodied the rights of humanity as

humanity. That those things are both nothing to do with the Cyrus Cylinder in essence. However, in the United Nations, may it live forever, a highly enlightened institution and may it ever grow stronger stronger there is a replica of the cyrus cylinder in a cabinet in under the glass called the first charter of human rights and when people are in there and they're concerned with human rights and the end of tyranny and the beginning of freedom in the world and all those marvelous issues they see the cyrus and they think marvelous marvelous how fantastic and even then avoid and there's nothing wrong with that so the last thing we want to do is to tamper with it because anything that has a symbolic potency to enhance

those things shall be welcomed it should be welcomed and to say that oh well that's not what cyrus was thinking about if you can read the babylon, you realise that it's nothing to do with that. It's just that this is a unique thing in the world, that such an accretion has embedded the, cocooned the Cyrus cylinder in a different reality, which is a good reality, not a bad reality, a good thing in the world, so effectively. So once Shirin Abadi, who was an Iranian thinker and writer, got the Nobel Peace Prize, came to the British Museum once, and she gave a moving talk about Iran and about human rights and the marvelous thing that the Cyrus Cylinder was. All the

staff were there on a very important occasion, And they asked me to make a rejoinder to reply to her when she'd finished speaking. You know, she was a very famous person. Dulp. So everybody thought, well, I'm going to stand up and say, well, it's all very well, you know, but we scholars know this has nothing to do with reality. And I already deplore the way the cyber-cyylinder has been exploited by these voices and those voices. Nothing to do with it, you know, because you have to ask and listen to us. I didn't do

anything of the kind. I said, and I still think it was a helpful conception, that the Cyrus Cylinder was like a snowball. And you had this snowball at the beginning, which wasn't very big, and it had snowball quality. And down the this snowball at the beginning which wasn't very big and it had snowball quality and down the side of a snowy mountain it started to roll and as it rolled it got bigger and bigger

and it's easy to imagine the Cyrus cylinder rolling and it got overlaid with extra stuff so in the end it was the biggest snowball in the world. And that is what it is, and it stands for these things, and that is a miraculous matter. So what could have been an awkward moment passed with applause, and everybody agreed that was it. So it's something to be celebrated. Of course, politically speaking, I don't think Cyrus is really very popular in Iran, because the youth, in the same same way regard him as a symbolic source of light and integrity and freedom and religious freedom and all the other freedoms and is a very important person all over again in that context and I've heard that there are new translations of the Cyrus Cylinder where a modern Middle Eastern deity has been supplied

in the place of the name of Marduk. So it is a never-ending and rather miraculous matter. Another point that we should consider is this. When the Cyrus Cylinder was first becoming very, very famous, and being the charter of human rights, one of the aspects of its CV was its uniqueness, because people like nothing so much as a unique object. And the Cyrus cylinder was not only the most important human voice in the history of the world, but there was only one of them. So people handled it with special gloves, very, very careful and respectful, bowed down in front of it and so forth. Now, a few years ago, my own professor, the one who taught me when I was a boy, came in in the period between Christmas and New Year's when

students don't come in very often and I don't think anybody here was very pleased that he'd come in and he started going through these boxes or bits and he found a small bit of tablet about two inches long and an inch high, with lines on it from the Cyrus Cylinder text. Now, the Cyrus Cylinder text is very famous among Assyriologists. Everybody reads it, the cuneiform. So it's sort of in your mind, and if you find a bit, it's electrifying, because it's unique. And how could we possibly have another bit?

It was a duplicate. It was a duplicate. And not only was it a duplicate, it even filled in a few wedges missing in one of the gaps. So, heck, what happened then? Well, the first thing is he was my professor and he taught me how to read cuneiform, and I was really, quite frankly, pissed off to all hell that he'd found this and not me, because I'd made this translation, it was supposed to be the Cyrus Cylinder bloke for the time being so I came in the day after I found out about this and I went through the entire collection we have about a hundred and thirty thousand tablets in boxes in trays I mean some of them are Cimmerian and it wouldn't be in there but the Babylon tablets are all

mixed up from different excavations, different periods in boxes and boxes. I went through the whole lot, and at the end of it, I found another piece, which was slightly bigger, and was obviously from the same document. So the important thing about this discovery, joking aside, thing about this discovery, joking aside, was that it established that a tablet version of this inscription existed. We'd inferred it already from the layout, as discussed before. There must have been tablets. And these two pieces were obviously from quite a big tablet – you could work out how big it was and the number of lines. And they were, although small, a testimony to the existence of the tablet version.

And this asks one to take more consideration of the nature of the object that we have. Because we know it wasn't really the Charter of Human Rights, but we know lots of people think it is, and good for them, I don't mind that. But the thing is, if you were a king invading another capital and you had thought up the charter of human rights which was going to change the world forever afterwards would you write it once on a clay cylinder and bury it under the ground no i think we can take that to be the case so this is my vision of it, that when Cyrus got there, let's say he wrote 120 of those cylinders. Let's say there were tablets everywhere on

exhibition with this text in it. Let's say that on all the motorways there were placards with I am Cyrus in cuneiform written in ink. So wherever you went you saw this. His name, yeah. As much much more likely so now we've got one cylinder two-thirds of it and two small fragments of one tablet which in my opinion must be taken as witnesses for the whole of that literature because it is definitely politically orientated certainly is and there must have been many different versions of it all around and all around. So wherever you look at the Cyrus Cylinder, there are conundra and funny aspects and comic things and serious things, and it is a never-ending narrative. You never know what's

going to happen next. What I hope will happen next is that some curator in a museum will find another lump of the cylinder that we have. And in the modern age, of course, you can make wonderful digital photographs or even make a mould of the piece, which is what we did with the one in Yale, so that the text can be put back together and we can read the lines which are missing. Because we don't know what's in the holes and it might be something completely different. Cyrus might say say and another thing you know looking around i don't like the travel system you know we've got to have it we've got to build the underground and um um i think we ought to have schools and or he might think well we're gonna put everybody under 15 and into slaves and tar the roads i mean god knows what was in

there it might not all have been pious ruler it might have been something else so it's imperative to find it i don't think that would be the case well it is very exciting though for the future isn't it that there might be more to this story to the inscriptional story of the cyrus cylinder found and very is it safe maybe more of the cyrus propaganda will be discovered in the future whether it is more of an whether it's another cylinder buried cylinder or it's more of the tablet version or another version that we yet don't know of all those things are possible and of course when the Iraqis excavated in Babylon they're very likely to find one

of these cylinders another one it would be very exciting to get the whole text because one of the paradoxes is we know that one was bashed by Rassam's worm, but normally speaking, when a foundation deposit is buried, nine times out of ten, when it's discovered, it's in perfect condition, because sometimes it's in a box, or at least it's been sheltered from any kind of damage, buried. So the ones we have sometimes really large Assyrian things are complete of all texts they're most likely to be complete because of the circumstances of their burial and this one is

bashed up and bashed up in the book that we published we took, it was possible to take a rotating photograph so that you could print an image of the whole cylinder as if it were flat and then you can see how much is missing. It's quite a lot. It mustn't be underestimated.

I don't think it would be anything startling, but you never know. And of course the thing about Assyriology is it's always evolving, because the documents are very numerous, and they're in different museums, and there may be 250,000 tablets in the museums of the world, who knows. But in the ground of Iraq, there are countless tablets, countless documents which have never been excavated and probably it's a good thing, but sooner or later someone will find a bit more of that wonderful text.

Well, Irving, I'm no doubt we could chat for hours or you could definitely chat for hours about this fascinating object. But I've got to wrap it up here and it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today well it's been a big pleasure for me i enjoyed talking to you about it and as you say we can go on for hours so let's carry on some other time absolutely well there you go there was dr irving Finkel explaining all things the Cyrus Cylinder, from the story behind its discovery and why it's created, to the meaning of the text itself, and the Cylinder's legacy down to the present day. I hope you enjoyed the episode and don't

you worry, we've got more Babylon episodes coming imminently on the ancients. Now last things from me you know what I'm going to say but if you have been enjoying the ancients podcast and you want to help us out well you know what you can do it's simple it's easy but you can leave us a lovely rating on apple podcast on spotify wherever you get your podcast from it doesn't take any time at all and it really helps us as we continue to spread the word of these remarkable stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible we're going to keep going on and on and on we've got so many ideas potential future topics in the pipeline that i can't wait to share with you in due course.

I absolutely love it and I hope you do too. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next time. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton.