Cyrus Cylinder

The Cyrus Cylinder is a broken clay object from the 6th century BC, inscribed with an Achaemenid royal text in Akkadian cuneiform on behalf of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great. Unearthed in 1879 amid the ruins of Babylon (in present-day Iraq), it now resides at the British Museum. The cylinder was made and placed as a foundation deposit after Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BC, absorbing the Neo-Babylonian Empire into his own.

The inscription praises Cyrus, traces his lineage, and presents him as a rightful king from a royal line. It condemns the deposed Babylonian king Nabonidus as an impious oppressor, contrasting his low birth with Cyrus’s noble heritage. Cyrus is depicted as chosen by the chief Babylonian god Marduk to restore peace and order. The text claims the Babylonians welcomed Cyrus as their ruler and that he entered the city peacefully. It asks Marduk to protect Cyrus and his son Cambyses, and it celebrates Cyrus as a benefactor who improved Babylonian life, returned displaced people, and rebuilt temples and cult sites across Mesopotamia and beyond. It ends by noting that Cyrus repaired Babylon’s city wall and discovered a similar inscription left there by an earlier king.

Biblical scholars have traditionally seen the cylinder as supporting evidence for Cyrus’s policy of repatriating the Jewish people after their Babylonian captivity—an act credited to him in the Book of Ezra—since the text mentions restoring cult sanctuaries and returning deported peoples. This view is disputed, however, because the cylinder only names Mesopotamian sanctuaries and says nothing about Jews, Jerusalem, or Judea. Still, it is often taken as a sign of Cyrus’s relatively tolerant approach to cultural and religious diversity. Former British Museum director Neil MacGregor called it “the first attempt we know about running a society, a state with different nationalities and faiths – a new kind of statecraft.”

In modern times, Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty adopted the cylinder as a national symbol, displaying it in Tehran in 1971 for the 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire. Princess Ashraf Pahlavi gave a replica to UN Secretary General U Thant, saying “the heritage of Cyrus was the heritage of human understanding, tolerance, courage, compassion and, above all, human liberty.” Her brother, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, promoted the cylinder as the “first charter of human rights,” though most historians consider this interpretation “rather anachronistic” and controversial.

**Discovery**

The Assyro-British archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam found the Cyrus Cylinder in March 1879 during a British Museum excavation program in Mesopotamia. It had been placed as a foundation deposit in the Ésagila, Babylon’s main temple. Rassam’s work followed an 1850 dig by Austen Henry Layard, who had excavated three mounds in the area with little result. In 1877, Layard—now Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled Mesopotamia—helped Rassam, his former assistant, obtain a firman from Sultan Abdul Hamid II to continue the excavations. The first firman lasted only a year, but a second, more liberal one was issued in 1878, valid for two years (until 15 October 1880) with a possible extension to 1882. It allowed Rassam to “pack and dispatch to England any antiquities [he] found … provided, however, there were no duplicates,” with a sultan’s representative present to inspect finds.

With permission secured, Rassam began large-scale digs at Babylon and other sites for the British Museum trustees, working in four phases. Between phases, he returned to England to deliver finds and raise funds. The cylinder turned up during his second expedition, which started when he left London on 8 October 1878. He reached his hometown of Mosul on 16 November, traveled down the Tigris to Baghdad on 30 January 1879, and supervised excavations at several Babylonian sites, including Babylon, in February and March.

He soon uncovered important buildings, including the Ésagila temple—though its identity was not confirmed until German archaeologist Robert Koldewey’s 1900 excavation. Workers found many clay business tablets in the temple’s foundations, along with the Cyrus Cylinder. Rassam gave conflicting accounts of the discovery. In his memoir *Asshur and the land of Nimrod*, he wrote that the cylinder came from a mound at Babylon’s southern end near the village of Jumjuma or Jimjima. But in a 20 November 1879 letter to Samuel Birch, Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, he stated, “The Cylinder of Cyrus was found at Omran [Tell Amran-ibn-Ali] with about six hundred pieces of inscribed terracottas before I left Baghdad.” He left Baghdad on 2 April.