Rasoul Sorkhabi, PhD —
Persian Heritage, #112, Summer 2024 —
On October 28, 2023, on the eve of Cyrus the Great Day, a statute of Cyrus the Great, was unveiled in Atlanta, Georgia. This was facilitated by the US National Monument Foundation and the Georgia-based World Within Foundation. Atlanta played a major role in the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s-60s. In fact, the leader of this non-violent movement, Martin Luther King Jr., was born and raised in Atlanta. The city is thus home to two of King’s statutes. It is a profound achievement for the Persian community in the USA that a statute of Cyrus, the founding father of their nation and a symbol of humane statesmanship in the ancient world, is now housed in Atlanta. The statute, located on the campus of the Millennium Gate Museum in Atlanta, also holds in the right hand a copy of the Cyrus Cylinder, celebrated as one of the earliest human rights charters. America’s connections to Cyrus the Great, however, is not new; it dates back to the very formative years of the Unites States. Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of American nation, was fond of Cyrus the Great and carefully read Cyropaedia (The Education of Cyrus) written by the Greek historian Xenophon. Jefferson’s copy of Cyropaedia with his notations on the margin of the book is kept at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. This copy of the book is a bilingual Greek and Latin version published in Europe in 1767. Cyropaedia was a popular book among the intellectuals who shaped the Enlightenment movement in Europe. Jefferson recommended this book to his grandson: “When you start learning Greek, the first book you should read is Cyropaedia.” Jefferson was a voracious reader and drafted the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, which begins with these famous words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
These American ideals would have resonated with Cyrus as well. When he and his army entered Babylon in 539 BC, he did not destroy or massacre the city; he rather respected people’s lives and property, liberated the Jews from their decades of captivity in Babylon, and granted freedoms of life style, work and religion to all inhabitants. This historical event is recorded in the Cyrus Cylinder, a royal inscription in Akkadian cuneiform, which was discovered in 1879 during the exaction of a temple in the ruins of Babylon in Mesopotamia (the present Iraq), and is now kept at the British Museum in London. Cyrus the Great is highly praised in the Jewish Bible (in the Old Testament books of Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Esther, Kings, and Chronicles) as well as by the ancient Greek historians Herodotus in Historia, Xenophon in Cyropaedia, and Ctesias in Persica.
One of the earliest biographies of Cyrus the Great in the modern literature was penned by an American author in the 19th century. In 1878, Jacob Abbott (1803-1879), an American educator and prolific author of biographies and history books, published Cyrus the Great, a highly readable book for young adults (Harper & Row, New York, 289 p.) which was reprinted several times. The copy I have read was published in 1902, with seven engravings, in the series “Makers of History.” Abbott also wrote biographies of Darius the Great (1878) and Xerxes the Great (1850). Of these three books, only Darius the Great has been translated into Persian. It should be noted that Abbott’s biography of Cyrus the Great precedes by several decades the books on ancient Iran written by Iranian scholars in Persian. For instance, Hasan Pirnia’s Iran Bastan (“Ancient Iran”) was published in 1933-34.
One of the best-known biographical novels of Cyrus the Great is the one written by the American writer Harold Lamb (1892-1962) and published in 1960 (Doubleday, New York, 309 p.). Lamb graduated from Columbia University majoring in Asian history, and began writing for various magazines. He was a prolific writer and published novels, short stories, biographies, history books, and film scripts totaling 90 works. During World War II, Lamb worked at the US Office of Strategic Services in Iran, and later served as advisor to the US Department of State and director of the American Friends of the Middle East. He spoke several languages including French, Latin, Persian, and Arabic. The history of the Middle East was a central theme in his works. Many of Lamb’s books have been translated into Persian, including Cyrus the Great translated by Sädeg Reza Zädeh Shafag in 1956, even before its publication in English in 1960.
In 1971, when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi hosted an international festival to commemorate the 2500-year celebration of the Persian empire, the Cyrus Cylinder was borrowed from the British Museum and displayed in Tehran. In October 1971, the Shah’s sister Ashraf Pahlavi, on the behalf of the country of Iran presented a replica of the Cyrus Cylinder to the United Nations Secretary-General Mr. U Thant in New York on the account that “the heritage of the Cyrus was the heritage of human understanding, tolerance, courage, compassion and above all, human liberty.” This “Edict of Cyrus” is still kept in the UN Conference Building.
In 2013, the Iranian Heritage Foundation (a non-profit organization in London) together with the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution organized a touring exhibition of “The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia” at the Arthur Sackler Gallery (located at the Smithsonian Institution) in Washington DC as well as museums in New York, Houston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. A companion volume (The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A New Beginning for the Middle East), written by John Curtis, was published by The British Museum in 2013. The book included the latest translation of the Cyrus Cylinder by Irving Frankel, a Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Culture at the British Museum.
Coeval with the 2013 exhibition of the Cyrus Cylinder, an international conference on Cyrus the Great held in October 2013 at the University of California, Los Angeles. The proceedings volume of this conference was later published in a book, Cyrus the Great: Life and Lore, edited by M. Rahim Shayegan (published by Ilex Foundation, Boston and Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University, 2018). It is a collection of 15 articles contributed by various scholars.
Cyrus the Great: An Ancient Iranian King, edited by Touraj Daryaee (professor at the University of California, Irvine) (Afshar Publishing, 114 p.) was published in 2013, also coeval with the exhibition of the Cyrus Cylinder in the USA. Discovering Cyrus: The Persian Conqueror Astride the Ancient World by Reza Zarghamee (Mage, Washington D.C., 2013, 784 p.) is a massive work and a true labor of love. Its author, Reza Zarghamee, was born in London in 1978 to Persian parents who had left Iran during the Islamic revolution. He studied at Columbia University, majoring in history and biology. During his student years, Zargamee took classes in Old Persian language and Zoroastrianism. Although Zarghamee was trained to be a lawyer (with a degree from Harvard Law School) and is a practicing attorney in Virginia, he devoted many years to the researching and writing of Discovering Cyrus.
The most recent book on Cyrus the Great published in the USA is King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great by Matt Waters (a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire) (Oxford University Press, 2022), which is an encyclopedic coverage of Cyrus’s life (including an easy-to-understand translation of the Cyrus Cylinder). As soon as Matt Waters’ book came out, it was translated into Persian by three different translators and published in Tehran. This shows the immense attention and care that Iranian intellectuals have for their historical roots and cultural legacy.
Although all these books are informative and valuable, the production of a major movie about the life and times of Cyrus the Great is long overdue and deserves serious attention from script writers, investors, and film directors in the USA.