The Great Destroyer: Cyrus, Babylon, and Jerusalem

How deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces
has now become a slave.

So begins the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Lamentations, mourning the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians at the beginning of the sixth century BC. In Near Eastern theology, if a god abandoned a city, that city would be destroyed. This was Jerusalem’s fate; it was also how the Babylonians understood the destruction of their own city by the Assyrians at the end of the seventh century.

Compiled in the sixth century and attributed to the priest and prophet Jeremiah, the Book of Lamentations is part of a tradition found across the Near East since at least the third millennium BC. Songs, called balags after the harp-like instrument that accompanied them, were sung to ward off the possibility of a city’s destruction. These laments were mostly general, specifying no city in particular, though we do have a small number of Babylonian lamentations from the second millennium where specific cities are named: Sumer, Ur, Nippur, Eridu, and Uruk.

In the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Jeremiah, the priest declares that Yahweh (God) had left Jerusalem because of the Israelites’ faithlessness. However, the pattern for lamentation found in the balags also forecasts that the god would return, that the destroyers would be punished, and that the city would be restored. Accordingly, the Book of Isaiah proclaims that Jerusalem’s destroyers, the Babylonians, would themselves be destroyed, just as Jerusalem would be rebuilt. And, as the Bible stated, the instrument for these acts was to be Cyrus the Great:

I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness:
I will make all his ways straight.
He will rebuild my city
and set my exiles free.

Celebrity stories

In antiquity, Cyrus the Great was a celebrity. We know this because stories were told about him in Greece, Rome, and in the Hebrew Bible. He was born around 600 BC, into what seems to have been a ruling nomadic family in the southwest Zagros mountains in what is now Iran. Sixth-century texts from Babylon, Sippar, Ur, and Uruk say that he was the king of Anshan, which had been an important Elamite city in what is now the province of Fars. They also say that he was descended from kings: Cambyses, Cyrus I, and Teispes. We know that Cyrus died in 530 BC, and Greek sources say that he reigned for about 30 years, so Cyrus himself seems to have become ‘king of Anshan’ in about 560 BC.

By his death, Cyrus had founded what has become known as the Achaemenid Empire, stretching from the Anatolian coast of the Mediterranean south through Mesopotamia and across central Asia, possibly as far as Cyropolis, near Samarkand. Not only revered by the later Achaemenid kings, whose royal accession ceremonies took place at his tomb in Pasargadae, his deeds were also emulated, consciously and ostentatiously, by Alexander (the Great) of Macedon, who acquired control of Cyrus’ empire in the fourth century.

Around 370 BC the Athenian historian Xenophon (c.430-355 BC) wrote an almost entirely fictional account of Cyrus’ life and leadership, the Cyropaedia. This text purports to be a comprehensive biography, the high point of which is the taking of Babylon, but it is actually a work of Athenian political theory. The thrust of Xenophon’s argument is that Cyrus provides the best example of leadership: he ruled through obtaining willing obedience from his subjects by rewarding them when they do well. He is also led by example, taking care to demonstrate that ‘he most of all was adorned with excellence’.

Greek sources from the fifth and fourth centuries BC – especially Herodotus, Xenophon, and Ctesias – record that there were many stories and songs that circulated about Cyrus, although they tell different – and inconsistent – accounts of his life. According to Herodotus, writing in the fifth century, Cyrus was the grandson of the Medish ruler Astyages, who ordered that Cyrus be exposed on a mountain as a baby in fear that, as foretold in dreams, the child would overthrow him. However, Harpagus, the general sent to expose the child, was unwilling to carry out the deed, and gave the baby to a cowherd and his wife to raise. One day, as a child, Cyrus was playing with the village children at being ‘kings’, and Cyrus was chosen to be the king. When one of the other children objected to his commanding behaviour, he was brought before his grandfather, Astyages (the actual king), to give an account of his actions. Recognising his grandson, Astyages realised this was the child he had sent to die. He returned Cyrus to his real parents and punished Harpagus, tricking him into eating his own son. When Cyrus grew to manhood, as the best and bravest of his contemporaries, he was invited by Harpagus to lead an army against his grandfather, overthrowing him as Astyages had once feared.

Ctesias, a physician to the inner circles of the Achaemenid court in the late fifth and early fourth centuries, tells a very different story. Cyrus’ father was a thief and his mother a goatherd. Luck and natural aptitude led Astyages to notice his qualities and raise him to a high position at his court. In the impossible story that Ctesias relays, his father (the thief) becomes a general in Cyrus’ army when he tries to depose Astyages. Ctesias also has Cyrus marry Astyages’ daughter which legitimates his kingship. For Ctesias, Cyrus is not the grandson of the king, but his son-in-law.

Xenophon tells yet another story. Cyrus was the son of the Persian king and the grandson of Astyages. From his father, Cyrus learned discipline; from his grandfather, he learned a more hedonistic style of kingship. By combining these lessons, Xenophon’s Cyrus comes to an understanding of how to achieve willing obedience from his subjects through a mixture of discipline, generosity, and fear.

And whose army?

Very few – if any – of the Greek stories we have about Cyrus are likely to be factually true. His relationship to the Medes is uncertain, but they do seem to have played an important part in his life. The Medes were probably not an ethnic group, so much as a regional one: people from cities in the region of Media along the Great Khurasan Road, one of the major land routes across the Zagros mountains from the Caspian Sea to Mesopotamia that would later become part of the silk routes.

In the seventh century BC people from the cities along this road seem to have achieved some political unity under the leadership of Cyaxares, probably one of the city rulers, and the father of the Astyages of the Greek stories. The individual cities were already known for their brigandage, but under the command of Cyaxares they formed the basis of an army, which played a major part in the fall of the Neo-Assyrian empire at the end of the seventh century. This army destroyed Asshur in 614, and then (in an alliance with the Neo-Babylonian king Nabopolassar) Nineveh in 612, and the empire’s last outpost, Harran in Syria, in 610.

The army of Cyaxares was given the name ‘Umman-manda’, Babylonian for ‘army horde’. In Mesopotamian mythology, the Umman-manda was the army which descended from the mountains and was used by the gods to perform their destructive will: they were ‘a people with partridge bodies, raven-faced humans’ who, as the enemies of the legendary Mesopotamian king Naramsin, came from ‘the shining mountains’. How Cyrus actually gained control of the Umman-manda is unclear, but we know from the Babylonian Nabonidus Chronicle, dating to the Hellenistic period, and from Herodotus, that it had defected to Cyrus from Astyages (who had inherited the command from his father) by at latest 549 BC. Whether Astyages was actually Cyrus’ grandfather is impossible to tell. The army shifted its allegiance from Astyages to Cyrus during Cyrus’ liberation of Harran in 550 BC, at that point under the control of Astyages and the Umman-manda.

This army was central to Cyrus’ military success. We do not know precisely when he took the city of Sardis in eastern Anatolia, the capital of the Lydian empire ruled by Croesus. However, we know from Greek sources that the army was there with him during the siege and final violent assault on Sardis, and that it went on to take the Greek cities on the coast. It was also with him when he took Babylon in 539 BC.

The Greek sources describe the taking of Babylon as Cyrus’ finest achievement. One of the greatest cities in the ancient world, its walls were immense. One of its most striking buildings was the ziggurat in the temple complex for Marduk, the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon. The ziggurat was known in the Hebrew Bible as the Tower of Babel, which connected heaven and earth.

In the Hebrew Bible, the taking of Babylon was connected to the destruction of Jerusalem, destroyed by the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC. As Psalm 137 says:

Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
on the day Jerusalem fell.
‘Tear it down’, they cried,
‘tear it down to its foundations!’
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

The Book of Isaiah calls Cyrus ‘messiah’, appointed by Yahweh to rebuild Jerusalem. According to Isaiah, Cyrus was chosen by Yahweh, even though Cyrus himself was not aware of him: Cyrus was to be both destroyer and rebuilder.

By the rivers of Babylon

Nabonidus, king of Babylon, probably knew that Cyrus’ attack was imminent. He recalled the statues of the gods located in sanctuaries to be brought into Babylon, both for safe-keeping and to intensify the protection of the city. But Nabonidus was no equal for Cyrus, who made a violent attack on Opis, a Babylonian city on the Tigris. Cyrus then took Sippar, another neighbouring Babylonian city, without battle. The Nabonidus Chronicle says that Cyrus’ troops entered Babylon on the 16th day of the month Tashritu (12 October) 539 BC. Cyrus himself was not present, and did not arrive in Babylon until almost three weeks later.

Despite the claims in Isaiah, it seems that Cyrus had no intention of destroying the city. One consistent detail in almost all of our accounts of the fall of Babylon is that it was taken without major destruction. Both Herodotus and Xenophon say that Cyrus’ army breached the city by entering through the culverts of the Euphrates, which ran through the middle of the city, although their accounts of how the army did this are different. Herodotus says that Cyrus diverted the river’s course so that its water level dropped, allowing access through the culverts during a festival; Xenophon says that Cyrus drained the river into ditches dug beside the city walls and relied on two defectors, Gobyras and Gadatas, to lead his army into the city during the festival. That both Herodotus and Xenophon choose to have Cyrus enter along the river may reflect a more general concern in the city about this point of weakness in its defences. Babylonian building inscriptions from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar in the late seventh and early sixth centuries refer to concerns about the vulnerability posed by the river. Nebuchadnezzar says:

I checked the outflow of its water and built its embankments with bitumen and baked brick so that no robber [or] sneak thief could enter the outflows of its water, I blocked its outflow with shiny iron.

The Nabonidus Chronicle is vague about how the army entered the city but suggests that it was not taken by violent assault and that the rituals for Marduk continued to be performed at his temple, the Esagila, which may account for the Greek reports of a festival.

However the army entered the city, it was probably not by breaching the walls. There is no substantial archaeological evidence for the destruction of the walls in this period, although there is a building receipt for repairs to a small part of one wall. In one of the few contemporary documents that we have – and over whose text Cyrus probably had some influence – we are told explicitly that the city was taken peacefully. That document is the Cyrus Cylinder.

Marduk’s king

The Cyrus Cylinder, now held in the British Museum, is what is called a ‘foundation text’. These documents, part of a Mesopotamian tradition, were written in cuneiform on small barrel-shaped clay cylinders and placed in niches within the walls of buildings when they were repaired or rebuilt (which, being made from mud-brick, they were on a regular basis). The Cyrus Cylinder was found at Babylon by archaeologists during excavations in the 19th century and the text of the inscription (in Babylonian Akkadian) justifies Cyrus’ army taking the city. Although there were probably many copies, we only have the Cylinder itself (now broken, although complete when first discovered), and two fragments of a further Babylonian archival copy that was discovered in the British Museum’s collection in 2010. These two fragments show that the text of the Cylinder had existed in different forms. That there was more than one format for the text is important for understanding its purpose. It is clear that the Cylinder, like other foundation texts, was meant to be found and read by future builders (that is, future kings). Indeed the Cyrus Cylinder itself makes reference to a previous foundation text by Ashurbanipal, a seventh-century Assyrian king who had been involved in the rebuilding of Babylon after the destruction of the city by his grandfather, Sennacherib.

The Cylinder reads as a public declaration of kingship, and it is likely that the archival copy was read out on ritual occasions as a statement of Cyrus’ royal ideology. The text is divided roughly into three parts. In the first part Nabonidus (the previous king) is denounced for his impiety, shown through his lack of attention to the gods, especially Marduk. As a result, Marduk abandoned the city, and went in search of a new king:

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 him aloud for the kingship overall for everything.

In the second section, Cyrus makes a statement of his lineage, using Assyrian titles because he seems to want to make a connection with Babylon’s Assyrian heritage. He says he entered Babylon peacefully, and returned the gods to their sanctuaries: 

I founded my sovereign residence within the palace amid celebration and rejoicing. Marduk, the great lord, bestowed on me as my destiny the magnanimity of one who loves Babylon, and I every day sought him out in awe.

In the third part, which is very fragmentary, Cyrus describes his ritual activities, to prove he is a good king, and what seems to be the accession ceremony of his son Cambyses. Probably produced not long after the taking of Babylon, the Cylinder reflects the expectation of renewal found in the lamentations of the balags. Cyrus is described as a ‘saviour’, just as in Isaiah he is called ‘messiah’.

Although Cyrus certainly did take Babylon, the city appears to have accepted his conquest peacefully. There are no hints of any Babylonian rebellion until the beginning of the reign of Darius I in 522. Despite Cyrus’ claims to the contrary, in his own inscriptions Nabonidus had been eager to show that he was a pious king, especially in his relationship to Marduk. However, Nabonidus had been absent from Babylon for a ten-year period, only returning in 543, four years before Babylon’s capture by Cyrus. Nabonidus had been in Arabia, where it seems he was trying to establish an outpost of the Babylonian empire. His focus was also taken up with rebuilding the temple of Sin, the moon god, at Harran. That Nabonidus had concerned himself with Sin, and had not been present in Babylon to complete the annual rituals for Marduk may well have aroused the suspicion and jealousy of the Babylonian priests of Marduk. The Cyrus Cylinder takes this on directly and presents Cyrus as not so much a conquering king, but a pious one. But Cyrus did not stay in Babylon. Before he even entered the city, he had his son Cambyses named as its new king.

King of where?

What, then, of Jerusalem? The Hebrew Bible’s Book of Ezra claims that Cyrus ordered the rebuilding of the Temple, but modern scholars have doubted that he did. Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Israel, but that may have been a pragmatic decision to create a bridgehead on a route through the Levant to Egypt. Cyrus himself did not go to Egypt, but his son Cambyses added Egypt to the empire, one of his few acts before he died of a wound on his return while in Syria in 522 BC.

Cyrus may not have destroyed Babylon, or rebuilt the Temple at Jerusalem, although this was what the literary tradition, reflecting the ritual of lamentation, required him to do, and therefore remembered him as doing. He was, however, a great empire builder. His idea of empire seems to have centred on controlling routes rather than land, and his aim was probably wealth acquisition. After his army took the Greek cities on the Anatolian coast with great brutality at some point in the 540s, Cyrus allowed their lucrative economic activities to continue in the Mediterranean, especially with Egypt.

Because of his apparent interest in economic issues, it is no surprise that we find Cyrus along the trade routes across Mesopotamia, Anatolia, possibly Armenia, and central Asia. He was at Harran, a major hub connecting the Levantine coast with Anatolia, in the late 550s. He was probably also as far away as Cyropolis, a city on the edge of the Persian empire that he is said to have founded by Arrian, one of the historians of Alexander the Great, who captured the city in 329 BC.

One of the few things we know certainly about Cyrus is that his death was known in the city of Kish (in Babylonia) on 4 December 530, where the date marked the beginning of a new regnal era. We think Cyrus was probably about 70 years old, though we do not know where he died. Greek sources give different accounts. Herodotus says he died in battle in central Asia, as does Ctesias, although their accounts of how differ. For Herodotus he died fighting the Massagetae, his dead body decapitated by the Massagetan queen in revenge for the death of her son who died by suicide as one of Cyrus’ prisoners. For Ctesias Cyrus’ final enemy were the Derbicae, and Cyrus took a serious wound to the thigh which led to his death (thigh wounds being metaphors for emasculation of power – Cyrus’ son Cambyses also allegedly died of such a wound in 522). Ctesias’ Cyrus gives a short death-bed speech, addressed to his sons. Xenophon, however, says that Cyrus returned to Persia as an old man and died in his palace.

However he died, the heart of Cyrus’ empire was not Babylon, but Pasargadae in Fars, where Cyrus’ tomb sits at one end of his palace garden. On the Cyrus Cylinder Cyrus declares he is king of Anshan. On clay bricks from other temples in Babylonia he is also named as king of that city. Anshan had been one of the two major cities of the Elamite kingdom: Anshan in the mountains, Susa in the lowlands. However, Anshan (and all of Fars) was archaeologically ‘empty’ in the first half of the first millennium bc, and there is little evidence of settlement. It seems the people of Fars had been forced to move from agriculture to nomadism.

Despite the claim in Babylonian documents that Cyrus was king of Anshan, and although he must have known where the old Elamite city was located, he chose not to build his palace there but instead to the northeast in the Pulvar Valley at Pasargadae. Herodotus says that the tribe of the Pasargadae were the ‘noblest’, which suggests that there was something exceptional in Greek thinking about the people and the region. The final battle between Cyrus and Astyages is also placed here by later sources, including Ctesias. That he chose a new location for the centre of his empire suggests that Cyrus was trying to refigure his imperial vision away from the old Elamite kingdoms of Susa and Anshan. The one surviving image he produced of his kingship, on the gate at his palace in Pasargadae, shows a figure in low relief wearing Elamite ceremonial dress, with Assyrian ‘wings’, and possibly Egyptian or Phoenician headgear.

For all time

Across nearly 2,500 years, Cyrus has continued to inspire emulation and, sometimes, appropriation. In the 1970s Iran’s Pahlavi regime made the claim that the Cyrus Cylinder was a statement of human rights, on the basis of its referring to the returning gods. Such claims cannot be justified. Cyrus’ reference to the gods was necessary because, as per the lamentations, the gods needed to return for a city’s salvation. In 2016, during riots against the current Iranian regime, Cyrus’ tomb became such a focus for protesters that mass visitations to the tomb were prevented. Though his memory is many faceted, often partial, and sometimes controversial, Cyrus’ ancient celebrity has endured.

Lynette Mitchell is Professor Emerita in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter and author of Cyrus the Great: A Biography of Kingship (Routledge, 2023).