Cyrus

Okay, last time, I had us in Babylon, and the children of Israel (well, technically Judah) were there during the captivity. This is about 597 BC to 538 BCE.

Now I need to get them home. But to do that, I must introduce yet another character -- one of, in fact, the most remarkable individuals of his age, and maybe of *any* age.

Cyrus The Great.

Cyrus (600 – 530 BC) was a Persian.(1) At the time, Persia was one of the many Iranian language-speaking countries off to the East. The Persians were partly nomadic horsemen, and partly settled farmers, who were ruled by a related people, The Medes. Cyrus was a prince of the Persians, though he was closely related to the Median royal family. His grandfather was the king of the Medes, though they weren’t exactly close. (2)

About the image: Cyrus as a Winged Genius: This is a sculpture of Cyrus in Olympic Park, in Sydney, Australia. According to the park’s own webpage, it “is a replica of a bas relief discovered in Pasargade, the capital city of Persia, founded by Cyrus. It depicts Cyrus the Great (580–529) in a Babylonian costume, Jewish helmet, with two wings and a short Persian beard.” The artist of this modern sculpture was Lewis Batros and the Co-designer was Fereshteh Sadegh. (https://www.sopa.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-11/fact_sheet_public_art.pdf)

The photo of the sculpture is by Shkuru Afshar, who made it available on Wikimedia under a Creative Commons license: Shkuru Afshar, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.The file URL is https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Cyrus_The_Great_Monument-NE_to_SW_view_%281%29-Cropped.jpg and the page is: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrus_The_Great_Monument-NE_to_SW_view_(1)-Cropped.jpg

Many thanks to Shkuru Afshar for sharing the image.

It turned out that Cyrus was ambitious, and brilliant. Slowly but surely, he consolidated his power. Soon, he was the King of the Persians. Then there were some campaigns against local peoples by which he established his dominance over a few of his neighbors. But, nothing too dramatic.

Then, however, around 550 BC, we find him at war with his grandfather, the king of the Medes. It is unclear how it happened. There are two stories in circulation. One, recorded by Herodotus, the Greek historian who was a great fan of Cyrus, but who was writing much later, holds that Cyrus saw that he was destined for greatness and rebelled against his Granddad who was, after all, just in the way.

The other story we get from the Babylonians in the form of a document known as The Nabonidus Chronicle. In this version, it is the Grandfather who attacks first. Apparently he was growing increasingly uneasy about the power and ambitions of his talented grandson, and sent an army to remove him before things got messy. (I gather that historians mostly lean toward this interpretation of affairs.)

Either way, Cyrus’s grandfather lost. His own best general, Harpagus, defected to Cyrus. After that, as they say, it was all over but the shouting.

So, now Cyrus was the king of Medes and Persians. He then spent the next few years collecting up an empire of considerable size. Soon, he ruled most of the East, including the vast kingdom of Lydia, which held most of Western Anatolia (today’s western Turkey). This would, by the way, lead to one of the most romantic legends of history. Supposedly, Lydia’s king, the fabulous wealthy Croesus, was trying to decide whether or not to attack Cyrus, who had deposed his brother-in-law, Cyrus’s grandfather.

Croesus went to the Oracle of Delphi and asked what he should do. The Oracle responded that if he attacked Cyrus, “a great empire will fall.” Reassured, Croesus gathered up his troops and marched off to war...and lost. A great empire had, indeed, fallen. But it was the empire of Croesus, not Cyrus.

True? Probably not. But it is a great story.

In any case, Cyrus now owned a vast empire. One thing to note about that empire was that much of it had been obtained with only minimal bloodshed, and frequently with the support of the people who had been “conquered.” In territory after territory, nation after nation, the common people and the gentry (i.e., the upper middle classes) had either failed to support their local governments, or had even greeted Cyrus as a liberator. They had realized that where Cyrus went, taxes went down, local tyrants were removed, minorities were protected, merchants and traders were safeguarded, temples and priesthoods were honored, corn was distributed to the needy, and justice was--for once!--available to everyone.

And Cyrus was...looking West and South.

And what was there?

Why...of course...Babylon.

More to come.

Footnotes:

1. See “Cyrus the Great,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great

2. Cyrus later overthrew and replaced him. Nothing personal. Just business. SOP at the time.

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~mjt

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