“The Magnanimous Heart of Cyrus. The Cyrus Cylinder and its Literary Models”, in: M. Rahim Shayegan (ed.), Cyrus the Great: Life and Lore. Ilex Series 21 (Harvard University Press 2019), pp. 67-91. PDF

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The Magnanimous Heart of Cyrus: The Cyrus Cylinder and its Literary Models Hanspeter Schaudig University of Heidelberg, Germany If indeed with any prince history seems to turn into poetry, it is with the founder of the Persian empire, Cyrus. Just see this divine sprout, conquerer and legislator of t...

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The Magnanimous Heart of Cyrus: The Cyrus Cylinder and its Literary Models Hanspeter Schaudig University of Heidelberg, Germany If indeed with any prince history seems to turn into poetry, it is with the founder of the Persian empire, Cyrus. Just see this divine sprout, conquerer and legislator of the nations, as portrayed in the writings of the Hebrews or Persians, by Herodotus or Xenophon. It is beyond doubt that the latter writer of historical belles-lettres, being already inspired by his teacher to write a Cyropaedia, did collect genuine reports on him on his expeditions throughout Asia. But since Cyrus had long passed away, these reports in Asian manner would not speak of him but in the hymnical tone of praise that is so particular and customary to any of the reports of these nations about their kings and heroes.” Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Weimar 1784), 12th book, IInd chapter: Medes and Persians.

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hen Herder wrote these lines on Cyrus “the Great,” he still had to rely completely on the reports of the classical authors. It was only about a century later that in the loamy ruins of Babylonian cities vast amounts of cuneiform documents were found that could give first-hand reports on Cyrus and the events connected to his name and fame. As we shall see, not only was Xenophon’s Cyropaedia more poetry than reality, but already the Babylonians had cast the figure of Cyrus and events surrounding his rule into the molds of their own religious literature. The words of Herder about history transformed into poetry still hold true. The Babylonian sources, and above all the Cyrus Cylinder itself, are by no means dull and dry documents listing mere facts, but elaborate and refined literature. Using the experience of styling history for more than two millennia, this literature had woven the “facts” into a glittering and silky image of “historical truth” that was intended to last. The stories of the Jews and the

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Greeks were in turn but reflections of the literary-historical masterpiece the Babylonians created. The few pieces of information about Cyrus that we are inclined to consider as sober and plain facts are told quickly. Our main source is a Babylonian chronicle that lists the data and events pertaining to the reign of the last Babylonian king Nabonidus and those of his Persian adversary Cyrus.1 Cyrus was the son of Cambyses I and inherited from his father the rulership over Persia, as well as the status of a vassal to the Median king Astyages. But in 550 BCE, Cyrus rebelled against Astyages. He took his overlord captive and looted his royal city Ecbatana. During the following decade, Cyrus seized Lydia ruled by king Croesus.2 In the summer of 539 BCE, Cyrus moved against Babylonia. He defeated the Babylonians at Opis and took Sippar without a battle. Again without fighting, his troops entered Babylon, led by Cyrus’ general Gaubarva on October 12, 539 BCE. The reign of Nabonidus was thereby brought to an end, and Nabonidus made captive. Cyrus entered Babylon in triumph only two weeks later, on October 29. According to the report given by the Babylonian-Greek writer Berossos,3 Cyrus treated Nabonidus, the vanquished opponent – an old man of about 80 years – magnanimously: instead of slaying him, he exiled him from Babylonia to Carmania in the east where Nabonidus spent the rest of his life. This magnanimity seems indeed to have been a trait of Cyrus, since it has parallels in his treatment of the Median king Astyages and, at least according to well-known Greek historiettes, Cyrus’ treatment of Croesus of Lydia. Cyrus pardoned his former enemies after they had been defeated. However, we should bear in mind that this kind of noble behavior was not an exception at all in the ancient Near East. At the same time there were many defeated foreign kings living in the palace at Babylon in exile, among them the last king of Judah, Jehoiachin. Recently, Bert van der Spek has demonstrated in detail that the politics of the Persian rulers towards their subjects and vassals were in fact a faithful continuation of the politics of their Assyrian and Babylonian predecessors.4 Now we shall have a closer look at the famous text that first praised the magnanimous heart of the great Cyrus: The Cyrus Cylinder.5 It is a barrel1. The following events summarized after the Nabonidus Chronicle (Grayson 1975, 104– 111, chronicle 7) and an inscription of Nabonidus (Schaudig 2001, 417, no. 2.12 1 I 26–29). 2. This event had formerly been dated to 547 BCE because of a misread line in the Nabonidus Chronicle (Grayson 1975, 107, chronicle 7, II 16). However, as Oelsner (1999–2000, 378–379) has demonstrated, this line of the chronicle deals with U[rartu], the land of Ararat, not with Lydia. 3. Verbrugghe and Wickersham 1996, 61, F10a. 4. Van der Spek 2014. 5. Editions and translations of the Cyrus Cylinder can be found in Schaudig 2001, 550–

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shaped, solid cylinder of baked clay, 23 cm long and 8 cm in diameter at each end. It is not completely preserved, but fragmented. The cylinder is inscribed with a text of forty-five lines in the Babylonian language and script. Cylinders of this kind had been in use in Babylonia for more than two millennia. Being building inscriptions, their main and original purpose was to document for posterity that a certain building work had been done by a certain king, serving the gods. To that end numerous inscribed tablets, cylinders, or prisms were physically embedded into the foundations and the brickwork of the ancient buildings. So the “original” part of the present inscription is the rather short and dull part at the very end (part 10: lines 38b–45, see below), reporting that king Cyrus had done some repair on the famous and sacred wall of Babylon. As demonstrated by Jonathan Taylor, the Cyrus Cylinder itself had also been probably placed as a building inscription into the wall of Babylon, the wall Imgur-Enlil.6 Apart from the present cylinder, there are certainly still dozens of cylinders of the same kind enclosed in the brickwork of the wall that Cyrus restored. Up to now, however, the present cylinder is the only extant one reproducing the inscription by Cyrus. However, it is well known that these inscriptions were not just buried within the foundations of temples, palaces, and city walls, but that copies were kept in archives and libraries, so the texts could be read and studied.7 Thus, it came as a pleasant, but not a complete surprise when some years ago Wilfred G. Lambert and Irving Finkel discovered a copy of the text of the cylinder on fragments of a clay tablet in the Babylonian collection of the British Museum.8 This shows the text had very probably been circulating in Babylonian society, and those parts of the text that did not merely deal with the building process might have been put down on other objects such as royal stelae, enabling the distribution of the proclamation to a wider audience. So, although these cylinders originally were in fact building inscriptions, the Babylonian kings increasingly used them to provide historical reports on major events of their rule. These historical reports ultimately became the larger and also more interesting parts of the inscriptions. In the present case, Cyrus, king of Persia, reported how he had become king of Babylonia by seizing the city of Babylon in October 539 BCE and deposing the Babylonian king Nabonidus (556–539 BCE). Up to that moment, Nabonidus had been the legitimate king of Babylonia, so the attack of Cyrus had to 556, Finkel 2013a, 4–7 (translation), Finkel 2013b, 129–135 (transliteration), and Schaudig in this volume. 6. Taylor 2013, 58–59. 7. See, among others, Schaudig 2001, 46–47 for the inscriptions of Nabonidus. 8. Finkel 2013a, 15–26, and Finkel 2013b, 129.

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be justified. This was done by demonstrating that Nabonidus had offended the gods and that Cyrus had been choosen and sent by the angry god Marduk himself. Nabonidus had in fact been tied in a bitter deadlock for years with the most influential priesthood of Marduk, the traditional head of the Babylonian pantheon, because Nabonidus venerated the moon-god Sîn as the “King of the Gods” at the expense of Marduk. The Babylonian priesthood finally resolved the situation by opening the gates of Babylon to Cyrus, hailing him as the “savior” from the “tyranny” of Nabonidus.9 The inscription of the cylinder is a brilliant literary reading of the events, written by sophisticated Babylonian scribes in the name of Cyrus in a beautiful and flowery Babylonian. The text can be divided into the following parts: Part

Lines

Content

1

lines 1 –11a

Nabonidus king of Babylon is a blasphemous tyrant, despising Marduk king of the gods, neglecting the shrines, and oppressing the people.

2

lines 11b–16

The merciful god Marduk chooses Cyrus as the savior from the tyranny of Nabonidus.

3

lines 17–19

Babylon, the holy city, falls without any fighting into the hands of Cyrus, assisted miraculously by Marduk himself; Nabonidus is taken captive.

4

lines 20–22a

Cyrus introduces himself to the reader, providing his royal pedigree.

5

lines 22b–28a

Cyrus settles in Babylon as king.

6

lines 28b–30a

Cyrus receives the tribute of the world in Babylon.

7

lines30b–32

8

lines33–36

Cyrus restores the gods of Babylonia, which had been brought into Babylon by Nabonidus (for safety), to their temples in Babylonia.

9

lines 27–38a

Cyrus increases the offerings for the temple of Marduk.

10

lines 38b–45

Cyrus restores the wall of Babylon.

Cyrus restores the gods of various eastern, Trans-Tigridian regions, which had been carried off by Babylonian kings in previous wars, to their temples.

9. This is clear from the strong support that “god Marduk” offered to Cyrus according to the narrative of the Cyrus Cylinder authors. Of course, it was not the god himself, but his human staff – his “priesthood” in the widest sense – in Babylon.

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In the Cyrus Cylinder, the original and actual building inscription forms only a rather short segment at the very end of the text (part 10: ll. 38b-45). Before it goes a part that explains why the good king Cyrus of Anšan came to replace the wicked Nabonidus as king of Babylonia (parts 2–3: ll. 11b-19). And at the beginning of the inscription there is a lengthy part that lists the many crimes and sacrileges of the former king Nabonidus (part 1: ll. 1–11a). The Cyrus Cylinder, thus, is a good example of how the original format of a genre – a building inscription – can be changed, even distorted, in order to convey a new and completely different piece of information. Since in line 43 of the Cyrus Cylinder a reference is made to an inscription of the Assyrian king Aššurbanipal, which had come to light during the restoration of the wall of Babylon by Cyrus, modern scholars have been looking for similarities between the texts that might indicate that the cylinder of Aššurbanipal had been used as a model.10 The inscription of Aššurbanipal, to which the cylinder refers, was probably one of the numerous cylinders of this king dealing with his own restoration of the walls of Babylon.11 However, the Babylonian scribes were of course completely capable of producing one of their traditional building inscriptions without any physical model. After all, these texts consisted mainly of standard expressions and stock phrases. There are of course some features that the cylinders of Aššurbanipal and Cyrus have in common, but their similarity is rather superficial. Both are massive clay cylinders with lines running all over their whole widths, with no division into columns.12 Admittedly, we know this feature best from cylinders of the Late Neo-Assyrian kings like Sargon II, Sennacherib, or Aššurbanipal. The cylinder inscriptions of the Late Babylonian kings were rather organized in two or three columns. But here the similarity ends, since the signs of the Aššurbanipal cylinder are archaizing, and the signs of the Cyrus Cylinder are Neo-Babylonian. Among the many classical stock phrases used by either text, there seems to be only one phrase that might have been inspired by the Aššurbanipal text. That is a phrase using an infinitive construction with maṣṣarta dunnunu telling us that each king had “strengthened the security or the fortifications” of Babylon. However, this similarity is not very specific, as the following demonstrates: 10. Harmatta 1974; Kuhrt 1983, pp. 88–92; Michalowski 2014. 11. Frame 1995, no. B.6.32.1. 12. Photographs of the Cyrus Cylinder, of one of the Aššurbanipal cylinders mentioned above, and of two cylinders of Nebuchadrezzar and Nabopolassar can be found in Taylor 2013, 65, for comparison.

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Aššurbanipal on the walls Imgur-Enlil and Nēmetti-Enlil: aššu maṣṣarti Esaĝil u ešrēt Bābil dunnuni13

in order to increase the security of Esaĝil and the (other) sanctuaries of Babylon

Cyrus on the wall Imgur-Enlil: [maṣṣ]artašu dunnuna ašteʾʾēma14 I sought to increase its [secu]rity Another element is the selection and order of royal titles. Both texts use the string “great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria / Babylonia, king of the four quarters.” Titles of this kind are indeed typical for Assyrian royal inscriptions, but Cyrus’ predecessor, Nabonidus had also been using them. The order he uses is in fact closer to the Assyrian model than the one used by Cyrus, who puts šar kiššati “king of the world” in front. So this may not serve as an argument for the bearing of Aššurbanipal’s cylinder on the wording of the Cyrus Cylinder. The scribes of Cyrus could have easily adopted the titles from Nabonidus directly, as we may observe: Aššurbanipal: šarru rabû šarru dannu šar kiššati šar GN šar kibrāti erbetti15 Nabonidus: šarru rabû šarru dannu šar kiššati šar GN šar kibrāti erbetti16 Cyrus: šar kiššati šarru rabû šarru dannu šar GN šar kibrāti erbetti17 The most surprising element that seems to justify the assumption that Cyrus styled himself as a successor of the Assyrian kings, rather than of the Babylonian kings, is not the alleged similarity of certain stock phrases, but the plain fact that Cyrus mentions the Assyrian king Aššurbanipal by name at all, just as Nabonidus had done. So it is not a matter of literary adaption or styling but of “name-dropping.”18 As we shall see, the literary models of the Cyrus Cylinder are to be found in another genre. The text of the Cyrus Cylinder actually refers to the Babylonian Epic of Creation (Enūma elîš) and to the Esaĝil Chronicle. Since the cylinder explains why Cyrus had to replace his – until then legitimate – predecessor, the text belongs to the genre of apologies. There 13. Frame 1995, 198, no. B.6.32.1, ll. 19–20. 14. Cyrus Cylinder, l. 38; Schaudig 2001, 554; Finkel 2013b, 133. 15. See e.g. Frame 1995, 197, no. B.6.32.1, l. 3. 16. Schaudig 2001, 415, no. 2.12, ll. 1–2. 17. Cyrus Cylinder, l. 20; Schaudig 2001, 552; Finkel 2013b, 131. 18. In this respect, I find it rather difficult to ascribe to one of these stock phrases like “I found an inscription of RNxy” such a meaning as Michalowski 2014 does. It is not the “biography of a sentence” but rather the “afterlife of a name.”

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are similar apologies in the ancient Near East, and their main argument is that the former king either never had divine support or had lost it in the meantime. For example, Nabonidus himself once explained in this way why Lā-abâš-Marduk, the legitimate son and successor of king Neriglissar, had to be removed from the throne. According to Nabonidus, Lā-abâš-Marduk sat on the throne “against the will of the gods,” and furthermore, he displayed a bad character and “would not show proper behavior”: Lā-abâš-Mar[duk] mārušu ṣaḫr[u] lā āḫiz riddi kīma lā libbi ilīma ina kussî šarrūti ūšimma19

Lā-abâš-Mar[duk], (Neriglissar’s) little son who would not show proper behavior, ascended the royal throne without divine consent.

Very close to the formulation of the Cyrus Cylinder is a text of the Assyrian king Sargon II, which explains why his brother and predecessor lost the throne. Shalmaneser V, dubbed in the text as “he who did not fear the King of the Universe (that is, Aššur),” had imposed corvée labor on the citizens of the holy city of Aššur. In consequence, “the Enlil of the gods (that is, Aššur) overthrew his reign in the rage of his heart,” and appointed Sargon instead:20 (32)

lā pāliḫ ša[r] gimri ana āli šuʾāti qā[ss]u ana lemutti ūbilma He who did not fear the Kin[g] of the Universe brought [h]is han[d] to that city for evil.

(32–33)

[eli] nišīšu ilku tupšikku marṣ[i]š i[šku]n i[mt]ani ṣābī ḫupšiš He griev[ous]ly im[pos]ed corvée and forced labor [upon] its people, (and) so c[ount]ed them as people of serf status.

(34)

Enlil ilānī ina uggat libbīšu palâšu ⌈iskip⌉ The Enlil of the gods (that is, Aššur) overthrew his reign in the rage of his heart.

In the ancient Near East, many holy cities like Aššur, Nippur, or Babylon enjoyed privileges such as freedom from taxation and from service for the king, since they were entirely to serve their tutelar deities.21 Hence, in the end the grievous sin of Shalmaneser solely consisted in imposing taxes. 19. Nabonidus, Babylon Stela, IV:37′–42′; Schaudig 2001, 517. 20. The following after Saggs 1975, 14–15, the “Aššur Charter,” ll. 32–34. 21. On this concept of kidinnu “divine protection” and kidinnūtu “privileged status,” see Reviv 1988 and Pongratz-Leisten 1997.

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The sins of Nabonidus also fit into this scheme. According to the Cylinder his main fault consisted in his no longer being fearful of Marduk, the king of the gods. This is the reason why “he laid his hands on Babylon with evil intent.” He made “a copy, a counterfeit of Esaĝil,” the temple of Marduk and the center of the universe. This accusation aims at the fact that Nabonidus indeed fostered the cult of the Syrian moon god of Ḫarrān as king of the gods and had restored the temple of this god at Ḫarrān. Furthermore, Nabonidus is said to have introduced “inappropriate cultic pratices” and to have “cut the offerings.” And last, but not least, he oppressed the people of Babylon and “ruined them by a yoke without relief.”22 Like Shalmaneser, Nabonidus had imposed taxes on the rich temples and cities of Babylonia. This was deemed a sacrilege and so god Marduk went into action. Just as Marduk once had saved the gods, his fathers, from hardship in olden days, he now saved his city Babylon from the hardship imposed by Nabonidus. The rare phrase used in the Cyrus Cylinder – īṭir ina šapšāqi (he saved from hardship) – is a clear allusion to a verse from the Babylonian Epic of Creation (Enūma elîš) which is dedicated to Marduk as the king of the universe: Enūma elîš:

(Marduk ša) ilānī abbīšu

īṭiru

ina

šapšāqi

(Marduk who) saved the gods, his fathers, from hardship (Enūma elîš VI:126; Kämmerer and Metzler 2012, 271) Cyrus Cylinder: (Marduk) ālšu Bābil

īṭir

ina

šapšāqi

(Marduk) saved his city Babylon from hardship (Cyrus Cylinder, l. 17; Schaudig 2001, 552; and Schaudig in this volume) There is also another quote from Enūma elîš in a formula, wherein Cyrus and Cambyses are called upon to perfom the duties held by the office of the “provid...