Cyrus II Who Was Persia's King of the World, A Nice Guy, Creator of Human Rights

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                       

                     Cyrus  was born about 589 BCE, II died in 529 BCE in Shushan, Persia.  In the Bible, he is referred to in the Hebrew language as Koresh (כורש‎).   

Darius the Great, the ninth king of the dynasty, traces his ancestry to him, declaring "for this reason we are called Achaemenids". According to Jewish records, Darius I(name of 3 kings of ancient Persia) reigned from 522-486 BCE) inherited the throne of Cyrus.  At the beginning of his reign, he permitted Zerubbabel and the Jews who had returned to Jerusalem to resume reconstruction of the Temple.  

Cyrus II, King of Persia, thought he truly was the king of the world.  He had many conquests, so of course he would have thought that.  He overran the Babylonian Empire, including Palestine, and that in itself was one huge and important empire.  The empire created by Cyrus was the largest the world had yet seen.  

                      Working on rebuilding the Temple 

He kept an enlightened policy towards his subject peoples and in 538 BCE,  granted permission to the exiles of Judah in Babylon to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple.  This is recorded in the Bible under Ezra 1:1-44;  and in II Chron. 36:22-23. The Edict of Restoration, a proclamation attested by a cylinder seal in which Cyrus authorized and encouraged the return of the Israelites to the Land of Israel following his conquest of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, is described in the Bible and likewise left a lasting legacy on the Jewish religion due to his role in ending the Babylonian captivity and facilitating the Jewish return to Zion. According to Isaiah 45:1 of the Hebrew Bible, God anointed Cyrus for this task, even referring to him as a messiah (lit. 'anointed one'); Cyrus is the only non-Jewish figure in the Bible to be revered in this capacity.

How the Ayatollah's have taken Persia's history and turned it around 180 degrees to be the 2nd worst on the face of the earth after Nazism is such a horrible crime. Today, Iran's citizens have had enough of it and are rebelling. Cyrus must be turning over in his grave.

Cyrus is also recognized for his achievements in human rights, politics, and military strategy, as well as his influence on both Eastern and Western civilizations. We could easily say he was the Father of Human Rights.   The Achaemenid influence in the ancient world would eventually extend as far as Athens, where upper-class Athenians adopted aspects of the culture of the ruling class of Achaemenid Persia as their own. Having originated from Persis, roughly corresponding to the modern-day Fars Province of Iran, Cyrus has played a crucial role in defining the national identity of modern Iran (up to the time of the ousted Shah by the Ayatollahs).

 He remains a cult figure amongst modern Iranians, with his tomb serving as a spot of reverence for millions of people. In the 1970s, the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, identified Cyrus' famous proclamation inscribed onto the Cyrus Cylinder as the oldest-known declaration of human rights, and the Cylinder has since been popularized as such.

 This view has been criticized by some Western historians as a misunderstanding of the Cylinder's generic nature as a traditional statement that new monarchs make at the beginning of their reign.

 Cyrus ruled for about 30 years before he died in 529 BCE, possibly in his capital of Persepolis.  He was succeeded by his son, Cambyses II, who managed to conquer Egypt, Nubia and Cyrenaica during his short rule.

The Jewish exiles regarded Cyrus II as a divine agent for allowing them to return home after being taken in 597 and again in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, possibly thinking he was angelic.  Therefore, some Jews that returned home were the descendants of Jews that had been  gone for almost 60 years and others 48 years. Probably none of them except maybe the very oldest returnee had seen Jerusalem.  For this reason, there were Jews who hadn't wanted to leave Persia and didn't.                                          

Was Cyrus trying to get rid of his Jewish population?  No, he was extending his own power and knowledge over Jerusalem in this way.  What did he know about it since that time span when the Babylonians had conquered Jerusalem through Nebuchadnezzar?  And before the Babylonians, it was  Sargon of the Assyrians in 721 BCE who had taken by force  27,290 Jews of the best quality from their homes back to Assyria.  The Jewish king Hosea of Israel in 726 BCE  had tried to stop Shalmaneser V's siege of Samaria but he had taken it. 

For the next 2 centuries, both the mass of Jews in in Exile in Mesopotamia and in the homeland in Palestine were under Persian rule.  It was under Persian auspices that there took place the return from exile to Palestine which, however, continued to be a Persian province with some degree of local autonomy.  Persia ruled.  

Moreover, the political unity of the Middle East under Persian rule made inevitable considerable movements of population from one part of this area to another which is important for population geneticists today to know about. 

The Book of Esther describes Jews living throughout the 127 provinces of Persia's empire and describes them as being numerous and influential in the capital of Susa  (Shushan). In fact, Haman, the king Ahasuerus's chief minister, felt a lot of resentment towards Mordecai, a Jewish palace official.  Mordecai may have felt fairly important due to the fact that his niece, Esther, was married to the king and Haman had found out about that.  Haman's anti-Semitism carried him to the point of instigating an assassination of all Jews of the empire, and Esther heard about it as it had already started, told the king, and Haman and all his sons were hung.  Mordecai then became the king's chief minister.  Mordecai and Esther were of the Benjamite  tribe. They had tried to keep their Jewishness a secret as the king never knew until Esther told him of Haman's plot.  Haman had been spying on Mordecai. 

I've been brought up thinking that Cyrus was the son of Esther and the king, making Darius also Jewish.  Ahasueros must be the Jewish name as one can't find that in the Persian history books of kings.  

The Book of Ezra narrates a story of the first return of exiles in the first year of Cyrus, in which Cyrus proclaims: "All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah."(Ezra 1:2)

British historian Charles Freeman suggests that "In scope and extent his achievements [Cyrus] ranked far above that of the Macedonian king, Alexander, who was to demolish the [Achaemenid] empire in the 320s but fail to provide any stable alternative." Cyrus has been a personal hero to many people, including Thomas Jefferson, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and David Ben-Gurion.

In 1948, many Jews moved to Israel.  Their numbers fell from 80,000 in 1978 to 20,000 in 1989.  Although the Jews were not persecuted (they said while being watched and heard) after the Khomeini revolution in 1978, many felt uncomfortable under the strict Islamic regime and left for Israel and the west.

Resource:

Youtube: 3 ancient mysteries of ancient cities long lost-world history

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great        

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/cyrus-the-great