Page 55 - All About History - Issue 33-15

Cyrus

the

Great

Cyrus was much more than a ruthless conqueror who founded the

Persian Empire – he was a brilliant and original administrator whose
government actually worked

Written by John Man

yrus the Great was the founder of one of Cyrus’s homeland, Persia, had been founded by
the most impressive regimes of the ancient his ancestor Achaemenes when his tribe emerged
world, the Persian Empire, which lasted for from inner Asia two centuries earlier. Cyrus, the
two centuries (550-330 BCE) until it was seventh king of the Achaemenid Dynasty, was
Cdestroyed by Alexander the Great. Despite born either in about 600 or 575 BCE – a 25-year
its significance, undisputed facts about Cyrus’s difference that points to the unreliability of the
conquests are thin on the ground. Scholars available sources. When Cyrus was a child, Persia
tease what they can from legend, from scattered was an unremarkable dependency of the closely
cuneiform tablets, from brief, one-sided accounts related Medes.
in the Biblical Old Testament, and from Cyrus’s Herodotus, Greece’s great historian and traveller,
own statement justifying his conquests. writing 100 years later, told of Cyrus’s rise. His
Before Cyrus’s time, Turkey and the rest of the grandfather, Astyages, king of the Medes, dreamt
Middle East was divided between three empires: of a vine growing out of his genitals. Priests
Lydia in western Turkey; Media, which spread told him its meaning – that a descendant would
across to today’s Central Asia; and Babylonia, overthrow him. His daughter, Mandane, was
spanning Iraq, Iran and the Mediterranean coast. pregnant. So the king told a noble to kill the
The ancient Assyrian empire had recently been child. The noble delegated the task to a humble
divided between the Medes and the Babylonians. shepherd, who disobeyed, and raised the child as
Away to the east and north, in the unknown heart his own. The truth came out when the boy play-
of Asia, were the Scythians (also known as Saka), acted being a king so convincingly that he came
nomadic horsemen who lived in a shadowy world to Astyages’ attention. Astyages recognised his
beyond the horizons of civilisation. grandson, who was, of course, Cyrus.
55