THE FORM, LANGUAGE AND CONTENTS OF THE CYRUS CYLINDER

The Cylinder, the Text and its Language

The Babylonian scribes who made the Cyrus Cylinder drew on a millennium-long
tradition of Babylonian and Assyrian royal building inscriptions. In such texts, kings
not only commemorated the construction or reconstruction of temples, palaces,
fortifications, canals and other public works, but also used the occasion to memorialize
their names, their genealogies and titles, their attributes, the gods’ sponsorship of their
reigns, and sometimes their deeds. The objects that carried the texts were often
included in the structure or foundations of the buildings that they commemorated,
with the expectation that future rulers and their scribes would rediscover them,
recognize them and respect them. Thus, these documents express an ancient sense of
what a modern person might call history by embodying and sometimes citing a deep
past and by expressing an expectation of an indefinite future. The information that the
rulers chose to convey informs but also constrains later knowledge of the
Mesopotamian past, including the historical understanding of modern observers.

The barrel-shaped clay “Cylinder” resembles the objects that carried many Babylonian
royal inscriptions from the reigns of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian kings, from
the eighth century BC and after. The Cyrus Cylinder is one of the last known examples.
Its text is laid out in 45 lines that run all the way across the long axis. In this respect, it
differs from the inscribed cylinders of the Neo-Babylonian kings who immediately
preceded Cyrus, which usually have texts laid out in two parallel columns running
around the circumference. Instead, it resembles older counterparts that commemorate
Neo-Assyrian kings; the resemblance may be deliberate.

The Cyrus Cylinder was discovered in 1879 in the area of Babylon where Esagil, the
great temple of Marduk, had stood. Only recently, parts of another copy of the text of
the Cylinder were identified on two fragments of a single clay tablet in the Babylon
collections of the British Museum, the remains of an archival copy of the inscription
(http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_res
ults.aspx?searchText=1881%2C0830.656+OR+1881%2C0830.698).

The forms of the cuneiform signs that record the text resemble contemporary Neo-
Babylonian forms in current use, not the ornamental, archaizing sign forms that some
inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian kings prefer. The language of the text is a version of
the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian called Standard Babylonian. It was the language of
literature and learning, scholarship and science, as well as of royal inscriptions, both in
Assyria and in Babylonia. By comparison with contemporary letters—that is, with
examples of the language in which people actually communicated with each other—it is
marked by exalted vocabulary, arch and stilted grammatical forms and archaizing
usages. The sound of Cyrus’s message was grand and old.

The main message, the conqueror’s portrayal of himself as a restorer of order, is a

venerable royal theme. The compositional elements of this portrayal—from the
opening temporal clause that sets the scene to the closing prayer for divine blessing—
belong to a well-established repertoire. Such exalted language arrayed in these
familiar forms minimized novelty for ancient readers or hearers, even where modern
observers recognize an announcement of historic change.

Contents

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As the newly discovered tablet fragments confirm, the text of the Cylinder begins (lines
1-10) from the point of view of Marduk, the god of Babylon and the supreme god of the
Babylonian pantheon, who observes with divine anger the condition of Babylonia
under its Babylonian king. Many details are lost to damage, but the passage refers in
charged language to the construction and endowment of a sacrilegious shrine, to the
abrogation of proper support for Marduk’s temple and cult, an assault on reverence for
the supreme god; to ruinous impositions on the people; to anger and abandonment by
the other gods, whose images had been brought to Babylon and kept there. The name
of the wicked Babylonian king responsible, Nabonidus (ruled 555-539 BC), is lost. The
passage apparently implicates his son and regent in these sins, foreshadowing Cyrus’s
later association of his own son, Cambyses, with his righteous restoration of order.

As the text continues, (10-12) still told from Marduk’s point of view, the god’s anger
relents. He contemplates the ruined sanctuaries (again foreshadowing Cyrus’s
restoration), and the near-death condition of the people of “Sumer and Akkad” (a
traditional term for Babylonia). The field of view widens as he surveys all lands and
looks closely for a righteous king. He finds Cyrus (12-13), king of Anshan (the ancient
Elamite capital of the territory that was now Persia), takes him by the hand, calls him to
be supreme ruler, and subjugates Media and the mountain territories that bordered
Babylonia (again using old literary terms, not contemporary political names for these
regions).

Pleased with Cyrus’s accomplishment of the triumph that Marduk gave him, Marduk
orders Cyrus to go to Babylon (14-15). And now the view narrows and descends from
heavenly oversight to earthly participation (15-17). Marduk escorts Cyrus, walking at
his side “like a friend and companion,” while his vast army marches beside him under
arms. Marduk brings Cyrus into the very heart of Babylon, the district called Shuanna,
where the royal palace and the temple of Marduk were, “without conflict or battle.” He
hands over the impious Babylonian king Nabonidus (of whom no more is said). The
people of Babylon and of Babylonia, their leaders and their governors (again using old
terms without contemporary political currency), do homage to him, delighted to praise
him as a savior (18-19).

The narrative point of view has shifted by stages from the Marduk’s oversight of
Babylonia and his wider survey of all the lands, first to Cyrus’s ascent in western Iran
and his progress into Babylonia, and then to settled focus on Cyrus enthroned in the
midst of Babylon. Now the perspective changes from Marduk’s to Cyrus’s own. The
remainder of the text is given as Cyrus’s own words, beginning “I am Cyrus … “ (20).

Cyrus identifies himself in three ways: first (20), in political terms, with a series of
Mesopotamian royal epithets, some especially favored by Assyrian kings, asserting
universal dominion, both rule over Babylonia and rule over the entire world; second
(21) in decidedly non-Babylonian genealogical and geographical terms, as the
descendant of three generations of kings of Anshan, making him the “perpetual seed of
kingship” as Babylonian rulers must be; third (22), in religious terms, as the protégé of
the Babylonian gods Bēl (Marduk) and Nabû.

The next lines echo, in Cyrus’s voice, essential elements of the impersonal narrative in
the first part of the text. Cyrus elaborates his peaceable entry into Babylon (22, 24), and
the consequent relief of Babylonia from anxiety, oppression and exhaustion (24-26). He

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repeats that he brought this about as an agent of Marduk (23). He adds that he now
made the palace of Babylon his own royal seat (23).

Just as Marduk had earlier taken pleasure in Cyrus’s ascendancy in Iran (14), so now,
Cyrus says, Marduk was pleased with these good deeds in Babylonia. Marduk rewarded
them with blessings on Cyrus and his son Cambyses (the righteous counterpart of the
wicked Babylonian prince-regent [3]) and on his conquering army (26-28). And just as
the people and leaders of Babylonia kissed Cyrus’s feet (18), now he tells of enthroned
rulers from everywhere, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and tent-dwelling
kings of the west country, who brought tribute and kissed his feet in Babylon (28-30).

Then, in a sharp shift to geographical specificity, Cyrus speaks of towns and territories
in Assyria, northern Babylonia, the land along the Diyala River and east of the Tigris
River as far as Susa in Khuzestan, areas that had lain between Babylonia proper to the
west and Media and Persia to the east. He says that he renovated their dilapidated
sanctuaries, brought their gods back and restored their populations, using imagery of
ingathering and resettlement that had been customary for expressing the re-
establishment of peaceful order since the days of Hammurabi of Babylon (30-32). He
rectifies the impiety with which Nabonidus’s had enraged the gods of Babylonia (9-10)
by returning them to their shrines (33-34). He prays that the restored gods will repay
this good deed by speaking well of him before the great gods of Babylon, Bēl (Marduk)
and Nabû (his son), calling for blessings on Cyrus himself, and on Cambyses, his son (34-
36).

In the final damaged lines, Cyrus tells of his efforts to carry out the duties of a
Babylonian ruler as supporter of temple cult and as builder. He describes an oddly
modest increase in daily offerings of poultry (presumably for Marduk, 37). He says that
he planned to strengthen the main fortification wall of Babylon, as if to reiterate that
Babylon was not a conquered enemy citadel but his own political seat (38). He takes
credit for completing an unfinished canal embankment with baked bricks and bitumen
(39-41). He describes fitting a structure (perhaps the temple of Marduk) with doors of
cedar clad with bronze, along with their thresholds and fittings (42-43). And he says
that in the course of the work he discovered and restored an inscription in the name of
the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (43-44), just as the building inscriptions of his foe
Nabonidus had spoken of finding documents of ancient kings of Babylonia. Cyrus’s text
ends with a prayer to Marduk for the gift of a long life, an enduring reign and an
eternal memory (44-45).

Composition and Audience

The royal inscriptions of Babylonian and Assyrian kings sometimes refer to “experts”
or “scholars” whom the rulers consulted about building projects, about identifying old
inscriptions and preparing new ones. Scribes recopied old inscriptions, and as the
recently discovered tablet fragments show, this happened to the text of the Cyrus
Cylinder. The name of the scribe who made the copy, Qishti-Marduk, is preserved. The
name of the person who composed the original text is not.

The composer’s work shows an “expert’s” knowledge of vocabulary, epithets, formulas

and tropes, compositional elements that might convey gravity rather than freshness.
Behind this pompous surface, his work also shows concern for careful, elegant
structure. The beginning of the text is a genre-crossing innovation: the opening

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temporal clause that establishes the scene and occasion is a feature found in earlier
inscriptions on stelae displayed in the open, but not those on cylinders to be placed in
the foundations of buildings. The absence of Cyrus from opening lines is extraordinary
in a royal inscription, where the focal topic is the king, but it creates a different kind of
focus, through anticipation. The initial description of Nabonidus’s wickedness has its
nearest counterpart in a stele inscription of Nabonidus himself that describes the
devastation of Babylon by the Assyrians generations earlier. The cross-references and
change of voice between the first and second parts of Cyrus’s text enliven the message
that Cyrus’s reign was the fulfillment of Marduk’s will more effectively than mere
assertion and repetition. The shifting points of view, from heaven to earth, from Iran to
Babylon, from Babylon outward, convey a quality of performance.

For whom was this editorial craft intended? Cyrus himself had to be satisfied, of course,
and the future ruler who might find the object, as Cyrus had found an inscription of
Assurbanipal. The simplistic idea that such documents were intended only for the king,
the gods and posterity is contradicted by many examples of archived or displayed
copies of inscriptions of Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian kings, inscriptions of
Cyrus’s Achaemenid successors, and now by the tablet fragments with Qishti-Marduk’s
copy of this text. The composer had an audience in view, yet the scope of the audience,
the means of presenting the text to it and the process transmitting the text to later
scholars like Qishti-Marduk, remain matters of speculation, uncertainty and
disagreement.

Empire and Succession

The text depicts Cyrus and his army as peaceful occupiers of Babylon, ignoring their
defeat of the Babylonian army in battles few months earlier. With Cyrus’s statements
that established his residence in the royal palace of Babylon, took control over the
Babylonian people and their governors, and took tribute from rulers of the west, he is
portrayed both as the rightful king of Babylonia and as the acknowledged ruler of
Babylonia’s tributary empire across the Euphrates. A reader or hearer could suppose
that Babylon remained the capital and center of the empire and was to become the
center of Cyrus’s larger empire.

In several passages, Cyrus associates himself with his son, Cambyses. The nearest
parallels for these passages are in inscriptions of Cyrus’s despised predecessor,
Nabonidus, which sometimes call similarly for blessings on his son Belshazzar. They are
tantamount to designating an heir-apparent, highlighting one of the great problems of
all ancient monarchies, the problem of dynastic succession. Other Babylonian
documents offer glimpses of what was involved. A Babylonian Chronicle tells that Cyrus
formally installed his son Cambyses at the annual New Year’s ritual at the beginning of
his reign. Date formulas on legal tablets from the following year, the first full regnal
year of Cyrus, refer to Cambyses as “king of Babylon,” and Cyrus as “king of (all) the
Lands,” preserving, at least in name, a kingdom of Babylonia within the greater Persian
Empire. This was a short-lived expedient. After a year, Cambyses’ name ceased to
appear in dates. Shortly afterwards, legal and administrative texts began to refer to
satraps with the title “governor of Babylon and Across-the-River (i.e., the Euphrates).”
Their province was nominally coterminous with the conquered Babylonian empire and
they governed it from Babylon, but as Persian governors, not as Babylonian kings. Eight
years after Cyrus entered Babylon, Cambyses succeeded him without trouble as the
single ruler of the whole empire and its parts. In the parlance of Babylonian legal texts,
as “king of Babylon and king of (all) the Lands,” ruling from 529 to 522 BC.

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 The Cyrus Cylinder and Later Babylonian Inscriptions

The text of the Cylinder describes the restoration of an existing order, with Babylon at
its center, but once Babylonia was incorporated into an empire that encompassed a
whole continent, many things were bound to change, including Babylonian royal
inscriptions.

Two other short inscriptions of Cyrus have been found at sites in southern Babylonia,
both stamped on bricks that were used in royal building projects. One, from Ur,
portrays him, like the Cylinder text, as a benign foreign conqueror, in terms similar to
the Cylinder; it calls him “king of Anshan,” says that the gods gave him control of all
lands, and that he settled “the land” (Babylonia) in peace. The other, from Uruk,
simply characterizes him as the mighty king, lover of the temples Esagil (temple of
Marduk) and Ezida (temple of Nabû), things that might have been said of any
Babylonian ruler.

No comparable documents of Cyrus’s Persian successors have come to light in

Babylonia. As far as is known now, they did not sponsor and commemorate the
reconstruction of temples and palaces in customary Babylonian forms. From the reign
of Darius I on, the inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings at the palaces of Persepolis and
Susa, on the cliff face at Bisutun in western Iran, and elsewhere regularly included
versions in Babylonian language, alongside versions in Elamite and Old Persian. A few
fragments of such trilinguals were found in the palace complex at Babylon.

In form and contents, these later Achaemenid inscriptions were very different from
older Mesopotamian royal inscriptions and from the text of the Cyrus Cylinder. Their
aims did not include an assurance of Mesopotamian continuity. Even so, in the longest
and most elaborate of them, the great inscription of Darius I at Bisutun, the Babylonian
version sometimes departs from the Old Persian and Elamite versions in ways that were
meant for a particular, Babylonian audience. In fact, in a fragmentary Babylonian
edition of this text on a damaged stone monument in Babylon itself, the god who
choose, guides, and supports King Darius, called Ahuramazda in the main edition, is
instead called Bēl, allowing a Babylonian reader or hearer to suppose that Marduk was
meant—that Marduk, who guided Cyrus, also guided Darius.

The tradition to which the Cyrus Cylinder belonged was not entirely forgotten. After
the Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great had established control of Babylonia,
Antiochus I (ruled 281-261 BC) left an inscription on a similar barrel-shaped clay
cylinder. It is laid out like older Babylonian examples in two parallel columns and
written in archaizing sign forms. It commemorates the reconstruction of the Ezida, the
temple of Nabû at Borsippa, near Babylon. As in the Cyrus Cylinder, the prayers for
blessings associate the king with his son and successor (but unlike the Cyrus Cylinder,
also with his wife). The Antiochus Cylinder is the latest known document of this kind.

Matthew W. Stolper
Oriental Institute
University of Chicago

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