The Cyrus Cylinder
Composed by Babylonian scribes for a foreign conqueror, the cylinder argues that Cyrus's takeover of Babylon was not conquest at all but restoration, the god Marduk himself choosing a righteous outsider to replace an impious native king.
- Babylonian scribal genre used to legitimize a Persian conqueror
- conquest reframed as pious restoration
- policy of returning displaced cult statues and peoples
- formal model traced to an Ashurbanipal-era Assyrian building inscription, not only to Nabonidus
Buried in the foundations of Babylon's Esagila temple after the Persian conquest of 539 BC, the Cyrus Cylinder is written in the traditional Akkadian form of a Babylonian royal building and dedication inscription, composed by Babylonian priest-scribes even though its speaker is the Persian king Cyrus II. It denounces the deposed Nabonidus for neglecting Marduk's cult and casts Cyrus as Marduk's chosen instrument, welcomed into the city without a fight, before recording Cyrus's restoration of displaced peoples and their gods to their home sanctuaries, a claim later invoked, likely too broadly, in connection with the biblical account of the return of Judean exiles. Formally the cylinder follows the Babylonian royal building-inscription genre and, more specifically, echoes phrasing scholars trace to an Ashurbanipal-era Assyrian building inscription, even as it answers and supersedes Nabonidus's own version of the same genre.
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