It’s Good Friday, and visitors swarm the Yale Peabody Museum. I weave my way past a group of children playing tag in the Central Gallery. Above me, sunlight spills through the slats of the roof and onto the archelon and mosasaur skeletons suspended mid-air. I imagine most families choose to spend their holiday basking in spectacles such as these—and, indeed, the crowd is densest around the towering brontosaurus in the Burke Hall of Dinosaurs. But I’m not here for the fossils.
After four years of renovation, the Peabody reopened on March 26 with free admission and new installations. Nestled in the liminal space between the first-floor information desk and the mammoth skeleton that looms over the Human Footprint exhibition stands a compact glass case. Inside, a cylindrical piece of hardened clay perches on short stilts. At only four inches in diameter and nine inches in length, it lacks the striking visual impact of the skeletons. But this object has left a bigger footprint on history than any dinosaur in the Peabody.
Known as the Cyrus Cylinder, the artifact dates back to 539 BCE, soon after its namesake conquered the city of Babylon. As I will soon learn, the Cylinder is central to discourse on the origins of modern human rights and the formation of an Iranian national identity. Children eager to see the mammoth rush past it. But if they slow down and look to their left, they’ll discover an unfinished puzzle.
Though the exhibit consists of only the Cylinder, its title clues viewers into the man who created it. “CYRUS – Conqueror, Liberator, Superstar” in bold sans-serif splays across one of the five banners hanging behind the case.
The collection of descriptors may seem contradictory at first glance, but Cyrus the Great embodied them. His conquest, spanning northeast Africa to central Asia, began with the capture of Media—now part of modern-day Iran—in 550. After seizing large portions of Anatolia, Cyrus marched south for the urban center of Babylon. His defeat of the king Nabonidus cemented his status as the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, which would last for another two centuries until 330 BCE.
The inscription on the Cyrus Cylinder immortalizes the fall of Babylon in cuneiform script. Etchings criss-cross the surface of the clay in rows and columns of tiny characters. Although the Los Angeles Times describes the resulting texture as “a corn cob that’s been gnawed bare,” I think it more closely resembles a woven straw mat, uneven yet uniform.
“I am Cyrus, king of the world,” the inscription reads. “I returned to [the cities of] Ashur and Susa, to Akkad and Der, [the statues] of the gods who used to dwell therein…I gathered all their [exiled] people and brought them back to their settlements…All the people of Babylon persistently blessed my kingship, and I took care that all countries live in peace.”
Ezra 1 and Isaiah 45:1-15 interpret Cyrus’s act of restoration as the repatriation of Jewish people after their captivity in Babylon. In the book of Isaiah, God proclaims, “I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness…He will rebuild my city and set my exiles free.” Contemporary interpretations of the Cylinder often lean into this notion of liberation, earning the object the optimistic, yet inaccurate title of the first charter of human rights.
Incidentally, Yale University owns part of this historical object. In 1879, a team from the British Museum led by scholar and archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam excavated the Cylinder in Ésagila. Rassam and his workmen had identified the temple as a potential resting place for historically valuable objects, but did not immediately recognize the Cylinder for what it was. Pickaxe damage and improper handling left the artifact fragmented and the text incomplete. One of the missing pieces found its way to the Yale Babylonian Collection at the bequest of James B. Nies, an episcopal minister who likely purchased the fragment at an antiquities dealer. In 1975, almost a century after the initial excavation, a scholar from the University of Münster named Paul-Richard Berger studied the description of the Yale fragment and correctly deduced it as part of the Cyrus Cylinder. The Peabody exhibit marks the first time the British Museum has lent the Cylinder to Yale.
If you’re like me, someone who enjoys odd objects and reads every word of text on museum labels, you’d piece together as much as I have just done from your own stroll through the Cyrus exhibit. But after speaking with five faculty members across Yale’s Classics Department, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department, and Peabody Museum—all of whom approach the Cylinder from very different angles—I realize the exhibit leaves much unsaid.
Eckart Frahm, co-curator of the Cyrus exhibit and Yale professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, talks me through the text on the case and the banners before taking me to a classroom directly opposite the Cylinder. To my surprise, he takes out his laptop and projects an actual slideshow—eighteen slides of maps, scripture, and news clippings—onto a large screen. Only then do I realize our conversation will take the form of a seminar just as much as an interview.
Historians learn to keep their sources at arm’s length. Though he appreciates the idea of freedom that shines through the text, Frahm recognizes the Cylinder’s primary purpose: to legitimize Cyrus’s rule among the people he conquered.
“I wouldn’t call it necessarily propaganda—it’s a charged term—but something like it,” Frahm remarks. “It was meant to convey to a broader audience what this new king had in mind, how he defined himself.”
Even before mentioning the repatriation of exiled peoples, the text of the Cylinder depicts Cyrus as a liberator—this time, of the Babylonians. The previous king, Nabonidus, had lost favor among his people for poor leadership and worshiping the moon god Sin. Cyrus presented himself as a better alternative by aligning himself with Marduk, the traditional patron god of Babylon. As the Cylinder declares, “[Marduk] took the hand of Cyrus…proclaiming him aloud for the kingship over all of everything.”
Aside from religion, Cyrus also adopted another tenet of Babylonian culture: the language. Although his native tongue was Persian, the inscription on the Cylinder was written in a Babylonian dialect accessible to the literate elite of Babylon. As Frahm points out, the existence of clay tablets bearing copies of the Cylinder’s text indicates that the object was studied by contemporary scholars of Cyrus’s time. This was a text meant to be read, reproduced, disseminated.
“Instead of coming in and imposing a Persian identity on Babylon, it’s like he’s openly saying, I am accepting and adopting the traditions and customs of this place,” says Agnete Lassen, co-curator of the Cyrus exhibit and curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection.
I stop by Lassen’s office on the third floor of Sterling Memorial Library. The shelves bracketing the main workspace are lined with artifacts placed behind glass display cases: carnelian seals embossed with ants and goat heads, limestone bowls adorned with votive inscriptions, and, to my delight, more clay cylinders. Lassen shows me several examples of the latter—some Babylonian, some Assyrian—and notes that they predate Cyrus’s conquest.
“Looking at the Cyrus Cylinder, somebody who knows a lot about cylinders [would be] confused, because it has aspects that look Assyrian and aspects that look Babylonian,” she explains to me. By drawing from the traditions of the peoples he conquered, Cyrus presented himself as their natural successor, one who brought cultures together. “It follows a completely Mesopotamian tradition, using Mesopotamian titles, languages, and scripts.”
This policy paid off, and the Achaemenid Empire eventually became the largest empire by that point in history, in the sixth century BCE. The text of the Cylinder lays down the implicit principles of cultural assimilation and religious tolerance that guided Cyrus’ rule, permanently inscribed in clay that—as Frahm points out—hardens in the face of fire rather than succumbing to it.
Narratives also endure, and the implications of the Cylinder transcends its temporal and geographical context. On March 2, 2024, the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department hosted a small symposium at the Peabody under the same title as the Cyrus exhibition. The five symposium speakers, including Lassen and Frahm, used the Cylinder as a gateway to illuminate some of the narratives the exhibit does not have space to address. Most notably, the dialogue that emerged from the symposium revealed tension within the contemporary reception of the Cylinder: the extent to which one could consider the Cylinder a founding document of human rights.
According to Kevin van Bladel, another Near Eastern Languages and Civilization professor at Yale, the reading of the Cylinder as a founding document of human rights developed in the 1970’s under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran. His administration, backed substantially by the United States for its staunch anti-communist policies and agreement to denationalize oil, witnessed the rise of summary arrests, torture, and forced disappearances at the hands of the secret police known as SAVAK.
“The idea that the Cyrus Cylinder was a source document, an early declaration of human rights, is part of a propaganda program to distract from Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s crushing of dissent,” van Bladel tells me over Zoom.
As international media scrutiny over the regime’s suppression of human rights grew, the shah began to align himself closely with Cyrus, attempting to slot himself into a supposed millennia-old tradition of human rights in Iran. In 1971, the Pahlavi administration hosted a lavish celebration to mark the 2,500-year anniversary of the Achaemenid Empire. An image of the Cyrus Cylinder settled beneath Iran’s coat of arms represented the official emblem of the festivities, while the object itself was loaned to Iran by the British Museum and displayed as the centerpiece of the event.
Less than a year later, the National Iranian Film Board released Flames of Persia, a documentary commemorating the celebrations. The film ends on a shot of the Cyrus Cylinder juxtaposed against a black backdrop. As the orchestral soundtrack begins to crescendo, the voice of narrator Orson Welles billows through the speakers: “[As] a symbol of Persia’s great celebrations, this baked clay cylinder of Cyrus proclaimed that it was here that the rights of man were first made law.”
Around the time of the celebration, a false English text of the Cyrus Cylinder began to circulate. “I will impose my monarchy on no nation,” it reads. “I prevent slavery.”
Aside from contradicting the actual inscription on the Cylinder and the broader historical record, van Bladel notes the text was translated from Modern Persian—a language that developed 1,200 years after Cyrus’s death. This false text is still displayed in Iranian-American spaces such as the House of Iran in Balboa Park, San Diego.
Yet, as van Bladel notes, Iranians, particularly those displaced by the collapse of the shah’s regime during the revolution of 1979, are justified in wanting to accept this narrative as true.
“[Modern-day] Iranians who feel oppressed by their current Islamic regime may also harbor some hope that there is a humane treatment tradition in their distant past,” he says.
Noel Lenski, Yale professor of Classics and another speaker at the Cyrus symposium, aims to reconcile this optimistic reading with the historical record.
“I think it’s wrong to say that the Cyrus Cylinder reflects a sort of sixth century BC understanding of [human] rights discourse,” he tells me in a phone call. “But if you think of the story of the development of human rights as a kind of unfolding, then [the Cylinder] could be seen as a kind of first step in that direction.”
As a tool for legitimization, every word in the Cylinder carries weight. The fact that Cyrus made a point to write about the return of the exiled peoples and the statues of their gods, Lenski believes, “already says that he understands on some level what it is that humans regard as fundamental rights, or as fundamental obligations to be protected.”
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: the cycle continues with every discussion. With eighty-three pages of transcribed interview material at hand, I realize how difficult it is for a medium as small as an article or an exhibit to capture all the nuances and tensions surrounding the Cylinder. At least I have three thousand words; the Cyrus exhibit works with less than five hundred. Aside from the four paragraphs of context on the banners, and translated excerpts from the Cylinder on the case, the exhibit bears no text.
David Skelly, director of the Peabody, notes that such brevity is characteristic of the Peabody’s exhibition design guidelines. “We are trying to limit the amount of text that we’re putting onto the floor, not because we want people to read less, but because we want them to read more,” he tells me.
To Skelly, the principle of resonance, not resolution guides the best exhibitions. By hosting events such as the Cyrus symposium and inviting classes to hold seminars in the renovated museum, the Peabody attempts to fill in some of the gaps left by the Cyrus exhibition. Skelly mentions an upcoming event that might interest me. On May 1, 2024, Irving Finkel—Assistant Keeper of the British Museum’s Middle Eastern department and a microcelebrity among the history-slash-archaeology YouTube community—will visit the Peabody to deliver a talk titled “Cyrus and His Cylinder: What Was He Thinking?”
I cannot help but laugh at this.
“You know, the juxtaposition of the Cylinder right next to the classroom was not accidental,” says Skelly. “As much as anything, it’s a prop for discourse around the topics that are raised by its existence, and we want that to be happening in places like that classroom.”
Frahm and I leave that same classroom after an hour of conversation. We wince in tandem as a kid nearly barrels into the case containing the Cylinder. Though negotiations with the British Museum lasted four years due to preservation and security concerns, according to Lassen, the Cylinder will only remain on display until June 30, 2024, when the loan expires. It will then head to the Library of Jerusalem despite objections from Iranian government officials. And as for the space it leaves behind? Skelly’s open to ideas, hoping for more temporary, single-object exhibitions.
The Peabody has plenty of options. Frahm takes me on an impromptu hour-long tour of the Babylonian artifacts displayed on the museum’s second floor. A replica of the basalt stele inscribed with the Code of Hammurabi reaches for the ceiling in its seven-foot glory. Its height and enduring historical significance threatens to draw attention away from the smaller artifacts in the room, but I find myself endeared by the mottled serpentine seals and palm-sized amulets of sitting rams that rest on the other side of the room.
As Frahm speaks about the history behind what is apparently the world’s earliest cookbook, translating by sight if needed, I notice a woman edging closer to us to listen. It happens again as Frahm explains how the Hammurabi stele was constructed, this time with a man who regards us with open curiosity. Put two people in front of an interesting object and any space can become a classroom. I’ve experienced this firsthand with Frahm and Lassen, and I’m sure the Finkel event will lead to something similar.
“What Was He Thinking?” Humor aside, it’s a wonderfully apt question. When we stop by an exhibition, when we look at objects deemed significant enough for display, what are we thinking? And what are we missing?
A lot, evidently. But it’s up to us to search for the missing fragments ourselves.
