EPISODE 3
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CYRUS
The Persian empire holds lessons for us that are more relevant today than ever before. But caught between a political agenda in the West and a religious agenda in the East, the history of Achaemenid Persia has been completely distorted.
OL–Parsagarda: But when visiting this tomb, in the long abandoned capital of Parsagarda, just north of the city of Shiraz in present-day Iran, a forgotten voice beckons us to set the record straight. This is the final resting place of Cyrus The Great, founder of the Persian empire, and according to some scholars, the most underrated figure of antiquity. Few people have ever won the universal acclaim Cyrus did. Caesar, Alexander all considered him a brilliant military mind. Alexander was even called “Philo Kyros” by his own chroniclers, meaning “friend of Cyrus” in Greek. In fact he’s known to have visited this very tomb on at least two occasions offering sacrifices to the hero whose empire he had just conquered.
Credits
SECULAR LAW
Herodotus tells us that during his lifetime, the Persians called Cyrus their Father much the way George Washington is considered the Father of America. But after the islamic invasion of Persia, Cyrus was completely forgotten in the country of his birth.
Lewis1-1: Cyrus is obviously a major figure in history. And yet he was completely forgotten in Iran. The islamic tradition has no recollection of Cyrus.
Today a new generation of Iranians is once again calling Cyrus their Father. But the islamic Republic that rules Iran today considers Cyrus one of the greatest threats to their regime. In fact, Cyrus is considered such a threat that the Ayatollah Khalkhali, Khomeini's deadliest henchman, wrote an entire book denying the very existence of Cyrus, titled 'Cyrus The Lie and The Criminal.'
Milani 3: Sadeq Khalkhali. He wrote about Cyrus. The name of the book was ‘Kourosh-e Doroughin va Jenayat-kar,’ it means ‘The Criminal and False Cyrus’ and basically the premise of the book is that the whole idea that there was something called Cyrus The Great is a Jewish conspiracy and there was no great king called Cyrus. There was a bastard, sodomite, Jew that the Jewish conspiracy decided to transform into this great Persian myth.
Perhaps Cyrus is considered such a threat because he represents the opposite alternative to today's islamic regime. The most glaring difference is the Islamic Republic's religious code of laws, known as sharia.
Frye-L2: The Sharia that they have is supposed to be the law, not of the religion but the law of the state. And Sharia is supposed to be the law of the state which exists at the present time, no matter where it is.
Cyrus also ruled by a code of laws. But Cyrus's laws were secular.
Frye 1: The most important thing about Cyrus and the Achaemenid empire was the spread of secular law all over the Empire. Before this time, law was based on religion, local religion of the Babylonians, or the Hebrews, or the Egyptians. But now, for the first time in history, you have secular law.
It was Cyrus's secular laws that held together his empire long after his death.
Holland2-2: It’s not just that he conquers, he’s not like Alexander who’s achievement is merely to conquer and the moment that Alexander dies it all falls to pieces. Cyrus not only conquers this empire but he keeps it together, and he hands it down.
In fact, Cyrus is the only conqueror in history who is known more for his laws than his military conquests.
Basirov 4: Alexander the Great, through various legendary literature such as Alexander Romance and Eskandar Nameh, went . . . became a folk hero for the man on the street. So because of that they can make as many films or write as many books about him as he’s certainly got a popular appeal. Cyrus The Great on the other hand belongs to the man sitting in his study, not standing in the street. So you have to have a degree of intellect to appreciate Cyrus The Great.
Those with a degree of intellect might notice that some of Cyrus's laws were written to protect the people rather than the state. Such laws are known today as civil rights laws. These civil rights laws are the reason Classical Greeks referred to Cyrus as the "Law Giver."
Rose 8: The significance of Cyrus for world history is that he’s one of the few rulers who is recognized by both his enemies, the Greeks and the people that he saves, the Jews, as being a noble and worthy ruler, who treats the subject nations with fairness and with Justice.
But how can a conqueror be also fair and just? A fair and just conqueror is usually found only in mythical tales of swashbuckling superheroes.
Basirov 4: Cyrus The Great was emphatically one of the most underrated figures in history. Considering the fact that his historical PR is far more impressive than even that of Alexander The Great, because the sources are irrefutable. His great panegyrics written by his enemy, a Greek, and other sources of his magnanimity comes from impartial sources such as the Old Testament or archaeology and things like that. So you cannot challenge Cyrus’s historical PR. But you can easily do Alexander The Great’s, who took his own historians with him. They’re called court historians. They had to write . . . even he killed one them, Callisthenes for insulting him.
Immigrants from all over the world began pouring into the Persian empire where they could live under the protections of Cyrus's new civil rights laws.
Rogers 1: The empire that Cyrus and the Persians created was in many ways the greatest that the Middle Eastern world had ever seen. It was large in extent but also if you compare it to for example the Assyrians who came before the Persians, the level of civilization, not just in sort of technical competence, but also in the humanity of the civilization was a big step forward. The Persians were much more tolerant and under them there was a period of peace and prosperity under their rule that was superior to what the area had seen for centuries, if ever before that.
To understand the difference Cyrus made to world history we first have to look at those who ruled before him.
THE EVIL EMPIRES
Eshgaft-e Gol Gol: Before Persia, the world had been terrorized for centuries by the sadistic rule of Mesopotamia, beginning with Assyria centered out of what is today northern Iraq and ending with Babylonia, which is today’s southern Iraq.
Basirov 3: Assyrians and Babylonians both ruled Mesopotamia for well over 2000 years. They had one of the most repressive and bloodthirsty regimes that the world has ever seen. It’s amazing that they lasted as long as that, that’s the extraordinary thing. They were masters of the ancient Near East for a very, very long time.
They lasted as long as they did, because the Assyrians and Babylonians ruled through sheer terror.
(Basirov 3: Babylonians were less bloodthirsty than Assyrians, but they were more or less the same Semetic people who were civilized by the Sumerians.)
Few empires in history have attained a more brutal reputation than the Assyrians.
Iraq3a-Dohuke,Khanas: We could chalk it up to bad press, if not for the written accounts of the Assyrians themselves.
Holland2-1: What the Assyrians liked to do is to represent, basically in the form of sadomasochistic strip cartoons, their feats as conquerors. You look at their inscriptions and there you have people being impaled, cities being stormed, women and children being driven off into exile sobbing.
What made them so cruel were their Gods. The Assyrians and Babylonians believed themselves to be the chosen people of their own particular God. And those who did not worship their Gods were not part of the chosen people and needed to be exterminated.
Frye-L2: These people believed that they were chosen and by . . . under their own Gods and by that that meant that the other people were to be eliminated or were to be enslaved.
For centuries the Assyrians wiped out whole populations of peoples, who did not accept their God Assur, through mass killings and enslavement. But around 740 BCE the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III came up with a new idea. Why not let the non-believers purchase their freedom with an infidel tax called a tribute. But if tribute was not paid, all the former rules, once again, applied.
Eshgaft-e Gol Gol1b: In inscriptions similar to this one, virtually every Assyrian king left a personal account of the horrors he inflicted on subject nations that refused to pay the tribute assigned to those who refused to accept their god Assur.
Holland2-2: Traditionally the policy of Near Eastern kings towards tribute had been to grab as much as they could even if it meant killing off the goose that laid the golden egg.
Tang-e Var: Around 706 BC, this part of the northern Zagros Mountains fell victim to the Assyrian king, Sargon II. Here he proudly boasts of how he had their tribal leader skinned alive, how he razed the village to the ground and led its inhabitants into slavery. These inscriptions were considered victor's justice and carved with a sense of honor. But they also served as fair warning to those considering withholding tribute from Assyria's extortion machine.
The Babylonians who replaced the Assyrians were not much better. When the king of Judah, named Zedekiah, refused to pay his tribute to the infamous Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, he was forced to watch the execution of his family before his eyes were gouged out. So that the last thing Zedekiah ever saw was the murder of his children.
Kriwaczek 5: Killing his children in front of him and then blinding him and then flinging him in a dungeon where he eventually dies.
Holland2-2: Zedekiah is treated by Nebuchadnezzar as the faithless vassal that of course, in the Babylonian perspective, he was and his punishment is a terrible one. He has to witness his capital being destroyed, his sons are killed before his eyes, and then with that his eyes are put out. So that the last thing he sees is the death of his children.
After the total destruction of Judah and its capital Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar then deported some 40,000 Jewish captives to Babylon to live out the rest of their lives as slaves.
THE CYRUS CYLINDER
BritishMsm3: Now let’s look at one of Cyrus’s inscriptions. To do that we have to come here to the British Museum in London.
British Museum1: In this clay Cylinder, written shortly after his conquest of Babylon, in 539 B.C., which ended Mesopotamian dominance once and for all, Cyrus flaunts an entirely new set of values.
The writing etched into the side of this cylinder, discovered in 1879 in Iraq, is a real-time account of Cyrus bestowing his civil rights on the people of Babylon after he conquered it on October 29, 539 BCE. According to this cylinder, Cyrus granted his new Babylonian subjects two important freedoms, freedom from slavery and the freedom of religion.
Frye-L2: It is not only the freedom of religion which was proclaimed in this, but also the release of the prisoners, slaves to their homeland. And these are the two important things about the Cyrus Cylinder which we have.
Stronach3: This is a highly unusual document which shows a respect for other people’s religion and view of life which I have not recognized in any prior document, earlier document, than this particular one.
Kriwaczek 3: Enshrined on the Cyrus Cylinder is the first statement of freedom of religion in history. I know of none earlier.
New York-UN: Today, this life-size replica sits in the halls of the United Nations building in New York City. What’s so significant about this cylinder is that for the first time in recorded history the right to freedom was drafted into law.
According to the Under Secretary General of the United Nations, Shashi Tharoor, the Cyrus Cylinder is history's first declaration of Human Rights.
Tharoor: Here we have the world’s oldest Human Rights declaration, which was proclaimed by Cyrus The Great in 539 BC, and for us, it was rather important to have this, because it stands in a very prominent place, on the second floor of the United Nations building, right between the Security Council and the Economic And Social Council, so that, in fact, diplomats walking to these two chambers, who are dealing with issues of life and death, and war and peace, and human rights, can see it, sometimes pause and seek inspiration from it.
We know beyond any doubt that the events described in this ancient clay cylinder actually happened because the same events are confirmed in the Old Testament.
Holland2-2: The Cyrus Cylinder made a great impression particularly on the Biblically educated people of the West in the 19th century when it was found because of course it did seem directly to corroborate what we’re told in Isaiah and in Chronicles, that Cyrus was the man responsible for sending the Jews back home.
The Jews that Cyrus liberated and sent back home were the children and grandchildren of the same Jewish captives that Nebuchadnezzar had taken prisoner some 60 years earlier. This was the reason the Jewish people gave Cyrus the title of Messiah.
Foltz 5: Of all the foreign rulers mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, it’s quite striking to note that Cyrus is the only one who’s mentioned in favorable terms. In fact the Bible describes him as the Lord’s anointed, the Messiah, the “Mashiyach,” who has been chosen by Yahweh the Hebrew God to carry out his will. In other words, everything that Cyrus achieves, the Israelites take as a demonstration of the power of their own deity. I’m quite sure Cyrus didn’t see himself in that way.
Cyrus's laws were revolutionary not only because they were secular but because they applied to everyone within his empire equally.
Frye-L1: People say Hammurabi, that’s a very ancient code of laws. But Hammurabi was for the Babylonians only. And number two, it was under the God Shamash and . . . it was under the aegis of the Gods, it was a religious law. Well for the first time in history, first time in history the Iranians came in and said, no; we’re going to have a secular law the law of the king; it’s called ‘data’, and it was a law which applied to everybody all over the empire, no matter what their own religious laws or their own laws were.
In his Cylinder, Cyrus also tells us that he took great care not to harm the city of Babylon or its residents. Not only did Cyrus not execute the defeated Babylonian king, Nabonidus, according to both Eusebius and Josephus, Cyrus appointed him governor of the Persian province of Carmania, today's Kerman.
Stronach 2: It’s true to say that the norm in the Near East, in prior centuries would’ve been for the deposed king to be executed.
In fact, there is no evidence that Cyrus ever executed any of his defeated kings.
Windfuhr1-4: This responsibility at that time seems to have been what a ruler has to do, namely dispose of the ruler . . . the conquered ruler or send them to captivity, right? or . . . and destroy. That is to show his superiority and vengeance so to speak. So there definitely is a break; why, we don’t know. It’s possible that it is a shift in the notion of personal responsibility to the Gods and his fellow man because people must have thought at the time, this guy’s crazy; why doesn’t he do that?
This is the question that scholars have been asking for centuries. Why did Cyrus free the slaves of Babylon, when enslaving defeated populations was his right as victor. We believe we have finally answered this age-old question.
MITHRA'S CHIVALRY
Cyrus's laws may have been secular but they were rooted in a code of ethics that was inspired by a pagan God Of Justice, named Mithra.
Windfuhr1-4: In Iranian culture there are various aspects of and parameters of social responsibility, personal responsibility within a social context. Now, they have been institutionalized in the religion, in the code of ethics.
The religion was chivalry and its God was Mithra. Mithra was the founding God of the Iranian peoples. Mithra defined the Iranian people just as Zeus defined the Greeks. Zeus also oversaw Justice. But the Iranian God Mithra was entirely dedicated to Justice.
Schwartz-1a: You do have aspects of divinities who preside over Justice so that Zeus develops a specific variant like the Zeus who is in charge of friendship, that’s Zeus Philios and so forth. But nowhere is there a specific divinity with a whole cult as such to which there are worship. By cult I mean a God who enjoys the system of worship where you make sacrifices, offerings of various sorts who becomes so important in the respective religion as Mithra does in Iran.
All worshipers of Mithra took an oath to live by a strict code of conduct. It is the same code of conduct that the West has come to know as chivalry. In fact, chivalry first came to northern England with a regiment of Iranian cavalrymen sent by the Roman General Marcus Aurelias to guard Hadrian's Wall in 174 AD.
Basirov 3: He sent about, I think, 5500 of them to England. And there they remained as a separate identity.
These Iranian cavalrymen were known as Iazygians. In fact, chivalry comes from the Roman word for cavalry, 'Caballarius', named after these Iazygian cavalrymen.
Kriwaczek 1: In Roman times the movement by Roman emperors of their population around the place resulted in a group of Iranians called Iazygians being posted to Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England.
Before it was anything else, England was a mere province of the Roman empire called Britannia. This wall, in northern Britain, marked the northern-most border of the Roman empire. It once spanned from one coast of the British Isle to the other and was named after the Roman emperor who built it - Hadrian.
THE SARMATIANS
The Iazygians belonged to a much larger Iranian tribe known as the Sarmatians. These Sarmatian Iazygians like all Iranians, were known, throughout the ancient world, as the most lethal warriors on horseback. These skills were exactly what the Romans needed to protect the 73-mile stretch of Hadrians Wall.
Kriwaczek 6: They had this wall across Northern Britain defending the Roman bit of Britain from the barbarians across the border to the north, and that required constant manning by soldiers. SoMarcus Aurelius sent these Iazygians, they were called, Sarmatian warriors to man the wall and, of course, when they retired, they didn’t go back home again. There was nowhere to go. They settled locally as happened everywhere across the Roman Empire.
This is one of the Mithraic temples along Hadrians Wall in Northern Britain. It was from these Iranian Sarmatians that the West gets its very symbol of chivalry, King Arthur.
BATRAZ
Basirov 3: Arthur, of course, was born out of an Iranian legend. He’s got an alter ego at the moment, in this day and age amongst the Ossetians, called Batraz. They’re the descendants of Alans and Sarmatians and Scythians.
The same code of conduct that has come to be known as chivalry in the West is referred to in Iran today as Pahlavani or Javanmardi, which literally means 'young manliness'.
Windfuhr1-4: The whole notion of Javanmardi, to use a Persian term, is a wonderful aspect of Persian culture.
Nowhere are the Persian principles of Javanmardi better preserved than in the Shahnameh or Book Of Kings, written by the Iranian poet Ferdowsi.
Rose 5: The heroic age in Persian terms perhaps can be seen in the Shahnameh when we have the early kings and princes who are constantly battling on behalf of Iran, on behalf of the good against the evil rule of Azi Dahaka or the Turanians who are bad. So you have this precursor perhaps to the medieval motifs of chivalry and courtliness within the Persian epic.
But Ferdowsi's Persian epic was written 1500 years after Cyrus. So where did Cyrus get his chivalry from? Well the original principles of chivalry were recorded for all time in an ancient text known as the Mihr Yasht, which means the 'Hymn To Mithra.' The Hymn To Mithra dates back to almost 2000 BCE. It is one of the oldest texts in the ancient Iranian holy book known as the Avesta.
Rose 7: In the Mihr Yasht, the Hymn to Mithra, Mithra is situated on the top of Mount Hara and he watches human beings as the Sun moves over the sky. So like the Sun, he sees all the activities of human beings and can judge them according to whether they are true to the contract or not.
The contracts that Mithra is watching over are agreements between two willing people. Staying true to your contract would have been the first rule of Chivalry. How do we know? Because Mithra's very name means 'Contract'.
Schwartz-1a: He’s a God of Justice, specifically of overseeing relationships between people – deals, agreements, compacts, contracts, that sort of thing. And that’s what his name means. It means the agreement between people just as an ordinary noun. That word then becomes his name as though he’s mister deal, mister agreement.
Windfuhr1-2: Mithra comes from the root ‘mei,’ to exchange, exchange gifts or whatever, exchange. ‘Tra’ is an instrumental suffix so it is the exchanger. Mithra always has to do with two, always pairing.
This is the reason Cyrus could never allow slavery in his empire, because the slave is not a willing party to the agreement. It is only when we view Cyrus in the context of Mithraism that everything about him starts to make sense.
Pourshariati1-3: You know, millennia afterwards, then it makes sense to consider that, you know, what, in fact, Xenophon is describing of the practices of Cyrus, right, in the sense of worshiping to the Sun, right, or in the sense of slaughtering sacrificial bulls, right, to the Sun is, in fact, a form of what we know of Mithra worship.
The first person to introduce chivalry to the West was not King Arthur or the Sarmatians, it was Xenophon. He did not call it chivalry but Xenophon used Cyrus to educate his fellow Greeks on the Mithraic principles of honor. In fact, his book, the Cyropaedia literally means, The Education Of Cyrus.
Nadon 1: On the one hand Xenophon shows that for the Persians honor is supremely important. They’re subjected to an extremely rigorous physical education which calls upon them to be extremely continent and forego all kinds of daily bodily pleasures. Why do they do this? For the sake of honor. And Cyrus, he says at the very beginning of The Education Of Cyrus was the man that he knew of who was most driven by the love of honor.
Cyrus's conquest of Babylon ushered in a new age in human history. A new culture took over after almost a thousand years of Assyrian and Babylonian dominance. To most of Cyrus's non-Iranian subjects, Persian culture would have been completely alien. So where did this strange culture come from?
COMING SOON: Episode 4
The Origins Of Chivalry