Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  An hour after leaving Shiraz we rolled into the parking lot at the entrance to Pasargadae. By then the mists had cleared, and bright, crisp sunlight was spilling across the plain. Long before the highway put Pasargadae within easy reach of curiosity seekers, many European travelers, enamored with the ancient world, had found their way here. As early as the fifteenth century, the Italian Giosafat Barbaro had passed through, the Dutch sailor Jan Struys arrived another century later, and in the nineteenth century James Morier, a British diplomat. In 1881 and 1882 the Frenchmen Eugène Flandin and Pascal Coste published 350 drawings of the site. Their published accounts fueled interest in the ancient world all across Europe and led to a stream of followers, which means that, on this bright summer morning, my visit was only the most recent in a line that stretched across the centuries.

  Despite the many travelers who have trooped through this part of Iran there is little left of Pasargadae to attract them. All that remains is a broad, flat, empty field where a lavish palace once stood, now spotted with the stone stumps of columns that once upheld the roofs and porticos of grand halls and reception rooms—along with the glory of a blossoming empire. Cyrus, the consummate Persian, was a lover of gardens, and so his palace contained a number of interlocking gardens that knitted the sprawling complex together. Giant winged bulls guarded the main gate, symbolism borrowed from Assyrian palaces that were located in what is present-day Iraq. Though they carried no religious meaning in Zoroastrian Persia, they signified Cyrus’s aspiration and the power and reach of the empire that he would ultimately create.

  We circled the grounds along the roadway that wound through the site, getting out at the few signboards that marked the remnants of individual sections of the palace. Historical evidence suggests that Cyrus began work on Pasargadae about 559 BCE, but he would never live to see its completion, and his successors would not be so attached to it. Cambyses II relocated the Persian capital to Susa, in today’s province of Khuzestan, and Darius I would reflect the increasing power of the empire by constructing a far more regal capital at Persepolis. But in his beloved Pasargadae is where Cyrus would be buried, in a plain block tomb that stands atop an apron of stone steps, magnificent in its blandness and modesty.

  What is striking about the tomb is not only its slight scale—after all, two thousand years earlier Egypt’s pharaohs had themselves buried in monumental pyramids—but its isolation, seemingly out of character for the founder of an empire. With his palace now destroyed by time, the tomb’s location evokes an aura of loneliness. Compounding Cyrus’s humility is the tomb’s self-deprecating epitaph, translated by Plutarch as follows:

  Oh man, whoever you are and wherever you come from, . . . I am Cyrus, who won the Persians their empire. Do not begrudge me this bit of earth that covers my bones.

  Having read of Cyrus’s accomplishments in the Cyropedia of Xenophon, a student of Socrates, Alexander the Great was so enamored of the Persian ruler that after he had torn through Persepolis he felt obliged to visit the tomb. By then all of its treasures had been carted away by his marauding soldiers, filling him with shame.

  It is impossible to overestimate the esteem in which Cyrus is still held in today’s Iran, the legacy that he left, and the indelible imprint he made on the Persian identity. In her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi proudly described herself as “a descendent of Cyrus,” referring not to his empire’s size but to Cyrus’s policy of tolerance and respect for all minorities wherever he had entered as a conqueror. The empire he created would eventually stretch from the eastern Mediterranean to India, becoming the largest in the ancient world and the largest that until then had ever existed. It embraced the kaleidoscope of religious and regional cultures, kingdoms and mini-empires that the ancient Near East comprised. The empire’s vast reach provided the basis for the diversity of ethnic groups that are found in Iran today—and the air of chutzpah that occasionally puffs up contemporary Iranians. “We also know what it means to be a superpower,” one man told me when I asked him how he might compare Iran to the United States, and he added, lest I forget: “We have seven thousand years of history behind us. You are just getting started.”

  As might be expected of an emperor, Cyrus was royal born and bred. He was the son of the Achaemenid king Cambyses I and his wife, Mandana, whose father Astyages was the ruler of the nearby Median kingdom. For more than a century Cyrus’s family had ruled over the collection of tribes that formed the foundation of what would become the Persian Empire.

  Mandana figures prominently in another well-known Persian myth. Not long after she was born, her father had a strange dream in which his daughter’s urine was so profuse that it flooded nearly all of Asia. The court interpreters offered a dire reading: that Astyages’s grandson would one day overthrow him. To skirt fate, Astyages offered his daughter in marriage to Cambyses I, a vassal prince viewed as no threat to Astyages’s reign. Then Astyages had another dream, that a vine sprouting from the womb of his pregnant daughter grew to encircle the entire Earth. This so spooked Astyages that he ordered Harpagus, a loyal court functionary, to kill his grandchild. But Harpagus could not bring himself to fulfill the deed. Instead he handed the boy over to a shepherd, and, years later, the grandson, Cyrus II, would overthrow his grandfather in the battle of Pasargad with the assistance of Harpagus, who would turn against his former sovereign and fulfill the prophecy.

  Long before Cyrus took the throne, the expansion of the Achaemenid Empire was underway, if tentatively. As far back as the ninth century BCE the Persian king Achaemenes, for whom the dynasty was named, expanded his territory to the northwest and other neighboring regions. But Cyrus would take empire building to a whole new level, seizing control of the kingdom of Medes, southwest of present-day Tehran, in 553 BCE. As far as Cyrus was concerned, when it came to empire building, family loyalty meant little.

  Cyrus then turned westward. In 547 BCE he moved against Croesus, king of Lydia on the Anatolian Peninsula, today’s Turkey. Croesus had previously captured Pteria, in today’s Cappadocia, in modern Turkey, and turned the Persian residents into slaves. The next year Cyrus defeated Croesus in the Battle of Thymbra and seized the Lydian capital of Sardis. Here Cyrus exhibited the savvy on the battlefield that would become his signature. He took the advice of one of his lieutenants to place his camels in front of his soldiers in the belief that the strange smell would confuse and frighten the enemy’s horses. The strategy worked. Cyrus defeated the Lydians handily.

  More conquests would come. In 540 BCE Cyrus defeated the Elamites, whose kingdom bordered the Persian Gulf, but the biggest prize would come later in the same year, when the Persian army took control of Babylon, then under the reign of King Nabonidus. This time a little ingenuity figured in the conquest. The path of the Persians was blocked by the Euphrates River, so the army dug a canal that drained the water and lowered the level of the river, enabling the soldiers to wade into the capital in the middle of the night.

  The conquest of neighboring Babylon would be Cyrus’s coup de grace. He had vanquished his most formidable rival, and in doing so his empire reached its zenith. In Babylon, Nabonidus was already carrying a dubious reputation by preferring to worship the Babylonian god Sin over the principal deity Marduk, angering many of the kingdom’s priests. For the Babylonians, capitulation to the Persian Zoroastrians could not have offered much consolation, but Nabonidus’s defeat was seen as a comeuppance—a smitten and vengeful Marduk allowing the king to be crushed as payback for his disloyalty.

  Most important was how Cyrus responded to his victory. According to the customs of the times, a conqueror would typically destroy the temples and icons of the defeated people, plunder their wealth, and enslave the population in order to establish the supremacy of the new order. Cyrus took a 180-degree turn. In all the lands that he conquered, Cyrus allowed freedom of worship, and in Babylon particularly he guaranteed that his army would not vandalize the people’s temples. Equally significant, he declared th
at all those who had been enslaved by the Babylonians would be free to return to their homelands. This included Babylon’s Jews, whom Cyrus permitted to return to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple. And he added to his magnanimity by agreeing to pay for the reconstruction of the temple from the state’s coffers. The Old Testament Book of Ezra (6:2–5) states:

  In the first year of King Cyrus, the king issued a decree: concerning the house of god at Jerusalem, let the temple . . . be rebuilt and let its foundations be returned . . . and let the cost be paid by the royal treasury. Also, let the gold and silver elements of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar took from the temple in Jerusalem and brought to Babylon be returned to their palaces.

  Cyrus’s own words were also recorded in Chronicles (36:23):

  All the kingdoms of the Earth hath the Lord God given me, and he has charged me to build a house in Jerusalem. . . . Whomever is among you of his people—the Lord, his God, be with him—let him go there.

  In return, the Jewish people dignified Cyrus with the title of “anointed one,” the only non-Jew to ever receive the honor.

  A natural question arises: Why would Cyrus have expressed such empathy for a people imprisoned in neighboring Babylon? Some historians argue that the concept of monotheism was the tie that bound Cyrus to the Jews. Zoroastrianism, the unofficial religion of the Persians, adhered to the concept of a single deity, which the Jews shared, and this alienated Cyrus from the polytheism of the Babylonians. But Cyrus is not known to have exhibited any firm religious beliefs. As a ruler he appears to have been largely secular, which allowed him to tolerate, if not embrace, all of the faiths within his empire.

  Others claim that it was common for conquerors of the era to begin the new phase of rule with a series of reforms. Seen in this light, Cyrus was merely performing to expectations. But the principle of religious tolerance, not to mention its practice, was bold for the time and pushed the concept of reform to an entirely new level. Detractors argue that sheer pragmatism drove Cyrus: The empire had grown far too large to be managed by any central authority. A degree of autonomy was needed to pacify populations in the empire’s further reaches, and if this meant allowing a large degree of freedom of faith, it was simply one of the costs of empire building.

  The arguments against Cyrus read like more than a little historical nitpicking. Many reasons might explain why he acted as he did, and they may diminish not only his motives but the effects of his actions, but the fact remains that he did enter into history the novel concept of human rights. The claim that the many documents that followed, from the Magna Carta to the American Bill of Rights, owe their existence to the decree of Cyrus is a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, it can’t be disputed that Cyrus’s policies redefined the meaning of human existence, and, rather than withering as historical anachronisms, they were perpetuated and refined by many political systems that followed. Thomas Jefferson had studied the Cyrus Cylinder and had its principles in mind when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams each owned a copy of Xenophon’s Cyropedia, which documented the life of Cyrus.

  Cyrus’s impact on human history will continue to be a subject of debate, but there is even greater disagreement over how he met his end. Xenophon wrote that he died at Pasargadae, calmly and uneventfully. Other theories are far more colorful. Herodotus believed that Cyrus was killed in combat fighting the Massagetae from Central Asia, who were known to eat their dead. The Greek historian Ctesias has Cyrus sacrificing himself while beating back a rebellion by the Derbicae, alongside Scythian and Indian warriors and teams of elephants. But the most salacious account has Cyrus killed and beheaded by the woman he proposed to marry.

  To tell this tale we must return to the Massagetae and the Queen Tomyris. Cyrus had set his sights on Massagetae territory for some time and had devised a plan to bring it under his control by marrying Tomyris. He sent her an offer of marriage, which she refused, and this prompted a spurned and humiliated Cyrus to resort to more direct means to subjugate the Massagetae. He prepared an attack, but before it was launched, he received a tip—that the Massagetae knew nothing of wine and the effect that copious amounts have on the senses. He approached with his army and set up a camp but then pulled back, leaving behind many jugs of fine Persian wine. The Massagetae army, led by Tomyris’s son Spargapises, raided the camp, killed the remaining soldiers, and discovered the supply of wine. They then drank themselves into a stupor, enabling Cyrus’s forces to easily dispatch with the inebriated Massagetae. Tomyris, however, would have the last word. She led a counterattack in which Cyrus was killed, and to avenge her son’s death, ordered Cyrus’s head chopped off and drowned in a bucket of blood.

  All that historians can agree on is that no one really knows how Cyrus died, or where, but most are inclined to believe that the father of ancient Persia received a dramatic sendoff of one kind or another. I like to believe the last colorful and grisly version, because it is the most befitting the founder of an empire. It is also probably far too grisly to be true, but that hardly matters. It emerged in an age when mythology counted far more than history, and ironically had a far greater impact on history than facts.

  We left Pasargadae just as the sun was rising toward midday, shortening the shadows left by the stumps of the broken columns. Persepolis was still the destination, but we had another stop to make—Naqsh-e Rustam, a collection of Achaemenid-era tombs dug into a rockface high above the surrounding landscape and decorated with relief sculptures depicting the triumphs of various Persian rulers over invaders. In one relief, victorious Persian leader Shapur I, who defeated the Romans in the third century, is depicted conquering Roman emperors Valerian, Gordian III, and Philip the Arab. Shapur was known for his favorable relationship with the empire’s Jews, and he also continued Cyrus’s policy of religious tolerance, allowing Christianity to establish a foothold in Zoroastrian Persia.

  Naqsh-e Rustam might be described as a Mount Rushmore necropolis. The four tombs carved into the rock face high above the plain contain the graves of those believed to be the most significant kings of the ancient empire. Only one is clearly identified as that of Darius I, whose reign followed Cyrus’s. The other three are a guessing game, but a tentative consensus has formed that they belong to Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II.

  One characteristic these leaders shared was a superpower rivalry with their only regional rival—the Greeks. Of the three, Xerxes is credited with making the most progress in whittling away at Greek power. He led a campaign that drove deep into Greek territory, but in 480 BCE, his invasion famously imploded when it was met by a much smaller Greek force in the mountain pass at Thermopylae, led by the Spartan king Leonidas. Xerxes was beaten back, but only temporarily. After being led through the mountains by a Greek soldier who jumped sides, Xerxes was able to make his way to Athens, where he conquered the city and then burned it.

  The aim of adding Greece to the Persian Empire had to be aborted when upheaval in Babylonia forced Xerxes to return home. Back in the nerve center of his empire, he expanded Persepolis by building the Hall of One Hundred Columns and the Gate of All Nations, and he finished the work started by his father Darius, completing the Treasury and the Apadana, Persepolis’s large hypostyle hall, designed for receptions and formal events. It was the grandest palace of the entire complex, supported by seventy-two columns topped with carvings of eagles, lions, and cows—the fertility symbol of the ancient Persians.

  Xerxes’s death, in 465 BCE, is material for Shakespearean intrigue. Rivalries within the upper ranks of the Persian leadership resulted in a series of murders. According to the records of Aristotle and the Greek historian Ctesias, a series of revenge killings were carried out by Xerxes’s sons Darius II and Artaxerxes; Artabanus, the royal bodyguard commander; and Megabyzus, one of Xerxes’s generals. But there are so many differences in the versions of the events that the variations exceed the body count. Ctesias claimed that Artabanus coaxed Artaxerxes to seek revenge by killin
g his brother Darius. This was after he threw the blame for the murder of Xerxes at Darius. Aristotle had a much different theory: that Xerxes was murdered by Artabanus, after he had also done away with Darius. But Artabanus had his comeuppance. According to Aristotle, he and his sons were rubbed out by Artaxerxes, after Artaxerxes found out about the murder of his father. When this knotty intrigue is finally unraveled, all that is agreed is that Artabanus killed Xerxes, but with the assistance of Aspamitres, the court eunuch.

  With Xerxes and Darius put to rest, Artaxerxes would emerge as the empire’s next ruler. According to biblical records, he allowed Ezra to leave Baghdad and return to Jerusalem to take control of matters both religious and civil for the resurrected Jewish nation. But Artaxerxes’s greatest influence on human history is arguably his contribution to the principle of the separation of religion from government affairs, an unheard of notion in the ancient world, and one that has been a difficult practice ever since. It was the founder of the American colony of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, who used the example of Artaxerxes’s response to the plight of the Persian Jews to argue that the government should stay out of religious affairs. But Williams added a twist to the argument—claiming that it was the obligation of the government to stay out of religious affairs rather than the reverse.