Cyrus Cylinder

The Cyrus Cylinder is a barrel-shaped clay cylinder, now broken into several fragments, inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform in the name of Cyrus the Great following his conquest of Babylon around 539-538 BC. Written in the conventional form of a Mesopotamian royal building and dedication inscription, it recounts Cyrus's capture of the city, denounces the deposed king Nabonidus, credits the god Marduk with granting Cyrus the kingship, and describes Cyrus restoring displaced peoples and returning cult statues taken to Babylon to their home temples. Excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at the Esagila temple in Babylon in 1879 and held by the British Museum since, the cylinder has acquired an outsized modern reputation, popularly described by some commentators as an early charter of human rights or religious tolerance, a reading most Assyriologists regard as anachronistic since the text follows a well-established genre of Mesopotamian royal propaganda rather than announcing any universal principle. It nonetheless remains a primary source of exceptional value for the transition from the Neo-Babylonian to the Achaemenid Persian empire.