Cyrus the Great & Jewish Liberation

Our story begins in 586 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Babylon, conquered Jerusalem and led the people of Judah into captivity. This event, known in Jewish history as the "Babylonian Captivity," is considered one of the darkest periods in the history of the Jewish people.

Nebuchadnezzar not only destroyed the holy city of Jerusalem but also demolished Solomon's Temple, which was the spiritual heart of the Jews, transferring its sacred objects to Babylon. Thousands of Jews, including nobles, priests, craftsmen, and scholars, were forcibly separated from their homeland and settled in Babylon.

This exile, which lasted nearly fifty years, was a harsh and bitter period for the Jewish people. They lived in exile, far from their holy land, waiting for the day when they could return home. Meanwhile, Jewish prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah kept the hope of return alive in their people's hearts.

In 539 BCE, Cyrus II, known as Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, conquered Babylon and founded the largest empire in ancient history. Cyrus, who called himself not a conqueror but a liberator, held a completely different attitude toward conquered peoples.

Unlike previous rulers who forcibly compelled conquered peoples to adopt their culture and religion, Cyrus adopted a policy of tolerance and respect for cultural and religious diversity. This innovative approach is considered one of the main reasons for the success and stability of the Persian Empire.

Cyrus understood that ruling such a vast and diverse empire as Persia required winning the consent and loyalty of all peoples. He believed that respect for local beliefs and traditions was the best way to achieve this goal. This governmental philosophy is considered a turning point in the history of international relations and human rights.

One of Cyrus's first and most important actions after conquering Babylon was issuing the decree for Jewish liberation. This historic decree, recorded in the Book of Ezra in the Bible, not only granted permission for Jews to return to Jerusalem but also included orders to rebuild Solomon's Temple and return the sacred objects.

The text of Cyrus's decree as recorded in the Book of Ezra states: "Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel."

This decree was significant not only religiously and culturally for the Jews but also legally and politically unprecedented. For the first time in history, a monarchy explicitly recognized the right of exiled peoples to return to their homeland and revive their religious and cultural identity.

In March 1879, excavators working for the British Museum at Babylon, led by Hormuzd Rassam, unearthed a barrel-shaped cylinder of baked clay, about 22.5 centimetres long, covered in lines of Akkadian cuneiform. It had lain in the foundations of a wall for more than 2,500 years. Today it sits in Room 52 of the British Museum — the object this article, and this entire project, is named for. Yet it is often misunderstood, and what it actually says only makes it more remarkable.

The inscription is written in the voice of Cyrus, shortly after his forces entered Babylon in October 539 BCE. It tells how the Babylonian god Marduk, angered by the impiety of the previous king Nabonidus, "took the hand of Cyrus" and called him to the throne; how Cyrus entered the city in peace, without a battle; and how he then restored the temples and shrines that had fallen into neglect, returned the statues of the gods to their sanctuaries, and let displaced peoples go back to their homes and rebuild them.

Here is the crucial detail: the Cylinder never mentions the Jews, Jerusalem, or Judah. Its concern is entirely with Babylon and the sanctuaries of Mesopotamia. The story of the Jewish return is told separately, in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Ezra. The two documents are independent witnesses — but they describe the same policy. What the Cylinder proves is that returning exiled peoples and their gods to their homelands, and rebuilding their temples, was Cyrus's declared and general practice. That is exactly what makes the biblical account of the Jewish return historically credible.

The Cylinder is often called "the first charter of human rights." That description was popularised by Mohammad Reza Shah, who in the late 1960s framed the object as an ancient Persian declaration of liberty; in 1971 his sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, presented a replica to United Nations Secretary-General U Thant, and a copy remains on display at UN headquarters in New York to this day. Specialist historians, however, are cautious. British Museum curator C.B.F. Walker described the Cylinder's essential character as "not a general declaration of human rights or religious toleration but simply a building inscription, in the Babylonian and Assyrian tradition." The scholars Bill Arnold and Piotr Michalowski note that it "belongs with other foundation deposit inscriptions." The most illuminating reading, offered by former British Museum director Neil MacGregor, is subtler and arguably greater: the Cylinder is one of the earliest records of a ruler trying to govern a vast empire of many peoples and faiths by tolerance rather than terror — "a new kind of statecraft."

With the decree proclaimed, the road home opened for the first time in half a century. The Book of Ezra records that the first caravans of returnees set out under the leadership of Sheshbazzar, "the prince of Judah," and soon after under Zerubbabel and the high priest Jeshua. The journey from Babylon back to Judah was roughly a thousand kilometres across desert and river country — a hard passage undertaken by families who, in many cases, had been born in exile and had never seen the land to which they were returning.

Ezra numbers the first assembly of returnees at about 42,360 people, besides their servants (Ezra 2:64). Cyrus did more than grant permission: he ordered the return of the sacred vessels of gold and silver that Nebuchadnezzar had carried off from Solomon's Temple — some 5,400 objects, handed back from the Babylonian treasury (Ezra 1:7–11). For a king to restore to a conquered people the very treasures a previous empire had looted was, in the ancient world, extraordinary.

Not every Jew went. Many chose to remain in Babylon and across the Persian realm, where they had built homes, businesses and houses of study. From that decision grew one of the oldest and most enduring diaspora communities in the world — the Jews of Iran — who would live on Persian soil for more than 2,500 years, long after the empires that first brought them there had vanished. The return to Jerusalem and the flourishing of Jewish life inside Iran were two branches of the same gift.

The returnees' first act on reaching Jerusalem was to rebuild the altar and lay the foundations of a new Temple on the ruins of Solomon's. Ezra records a scene of mixed emotion: the young shouted for joy while the old, who remembered the first Temple's glory, wept aloud — so that "the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the weeping" (Ezra 3:13).

The work was not easy. Local opposition and political change stalled construction for years. It resumed under Darius I, urged on by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah — and, in a striking detail, was authorised again only after Cyrus's original decree was found on file in the Persian royal archives at Ecbatana (Ezra 6:2), proving the empire honoured its own word across a generation of kings. The Second Temple was completed in 516 BCE, and it would stand at the centre of Jewish life for the next five centuries.

The Hebrew Bible pays Cyrus an honour it grants to no other foreign ruler. In the Book of Isaiah, God calls him "my shepherd" (Isaiah 44:28) and then, astonishingly, "his anointed" — in Hebrew, mashiach, messiah (Isaiah 45:1): "Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped." Cyrus is the only non-Jew in all of Scripture to be called the Lord's anointed. For a Persian king to be woven so deeply into the sacred memory of another people is without parallel in the ancient world.

Cyrus's model outlived him. The idea that a single state could hold many nations, languages and religions together by respect rather than force — what Neil MacGregor called "a new kind of statecraft" — shaped how empires from Persia onward imagined themselves. And the community his policy set free never forgot. Iranian Jews preserved his memory across twenty-five centuries; to this day the tomb traditionally honoured as that of Esther and Mordechai stands in Hamadan, in the Iranian heartland, cared for as a shrine.

It is fair to say, as scholars insist, that Cyrus did not write a modern bill of rights, and that later empires — including his own — could be as brutal as any. But it is equally fair to say that the memory of a king who freed captives and rebuilt their temples has done real work in the world — from the language of human rights to the founding metaphor of this very project.

This is why the peace envisioned between a free Iran and Israel is called پیمان کوروش — the Cyrus Accords. The name is not decoration. It is an argument about who owes whom — and it runs in the opposite direction to the way the region's story is usually told.

In the standard telling, Israel is the strong, established state and Iran the troubled one to be helped. The Cyrus Cylinder tells an older truth. Iran — Persia — was the original liberator. It was a Persian king who freed the Jews from captivity in 538 BCE, returned their treasures and paid to rebuild their Temple, when they had no power to free themselves. A modern accord bearing Cyrus's name is therefore not Israel rescuing Iran, and not charity in either direction. It is the completion of a 2,500-year friendship whose first chapter Iran wrote — a mutual debt, honoured at last.