Sackler displaying Cyrus Cylinder, an artifact with long history and many meanings
The Trustees of the British Museum -
Since its discovery in 1879, the Cyrus Cylinder has functioned rather like a snowball, gathering layers of meaning as it has been appropriated by different groups with different agendas.
The Cyrus Cylinder, now on view at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, should be considered in the same league as the Rosetta Stone, one of the greatest treasures of the British Museum, according to Neil MacGregor, the London institution’s director.
“It sums up a whole moment of human history, and human civilization,” he says of the shoe-box-size clay cylinder covered in cuneiform writing. Created almost 2,600 years ago to glorify Cyrus the Great, conqueror of Babylon and founder of the Achaemenid Empire, the cylinder intersects with Western and Persian history through the ages, amplifying the accomplishments of an emperor who figures in the Bible and the writings of the ancient Greeks and who has been used and misused ever since by petty tyrants, merciless autocrats and earnest Enlightenment proponents of democracy and tolerance.
(John Tsantes) - The cylinder was created almost 2,600 years ago to glorify Cyrus the Great, conqueror of Babylon and founder of the Achaemenid Empire. It is the size of a shoe box and covered in cuneiform writing.
The Cyrus Cylinder also is hailed as one of the earliest declarations of human rights. Because the inscription includes a promise to allow the captive peoples of Babylon to return to their homelands and rejuvenate their temples and traditional worship, it is often cited as an early example of freedom of religion.
The actual history is a great deal more complicated. But since its discovery in 1879, the cylinder has functioned rather like a snowball, gathering layers of meaning as it has been appropriated by different groups with different agendas. First, it was embraced by biblical scholars who found in it corroboration for episodes within the Old Testament. Later, with the emergence of Zionism, it was embraced by many Jews because it seemed to speak to their particular patrimony in Jerusalem. The shah of Iran also admired Cyrus, borrowing the cylinder in 1971 to serve as the centerpiece of a four-day orgy of self-aggrandizement, celebrating what he claimed was the 2,500th anniversary of the empire his family ruled for just over 50 years.
Its return to Iran, in 2010, gave Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a platform to promote his government and champion the Palestinian cause. But the visit also underscored cleavages in the Iranian political establishment, between hard-line clerical figures allergic to the splendors of Iran’s pre-Islamic past and younger, nationalist leaders who embraced the cylinder as a symbol of Persian heritage. Its appearance in Iran after the Green Revolution had been effectively neutered was criticized by some who saw it as a gift to the notoriously anti-Semitic Iranian leadership and a hollow gesture, given the Iranian government’s lamentable record on human rights.
Julian Raby, director of the Freer and Sackler museums, argues that it is the susceptibility of the object to interpretation that makes it fascinating.
“For me, it is that element of contention that can provoke us to think,” he says. Raby acknowledges that the cylinder isn’t coming to the Sackler for new scholarly examination and study. Rather, it comes as a purely symbolic object, displayed in a two-room exhibition that focuses attention on the historical afterlife of Cyrus within Western culture.
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