December 13-2013
The Cyrus Cylinder, a potent symbol of Iranian national identity, has completed its national tour of the United States and is now off to India to be displayed at a Zoroastrian congress.
The cylinder has been displayed at five museums across the United States over the last nine months. It wrapped up its US appearance at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles Sunday night.
Before Los Angeles, it was displayed in Washington, Houston, New York City and San Francisco to considerable attention from art lovers, human rights advocates and history buffs, not to mention Iranian-Americans. The unusually small exhibit—centered on just a solitary object—got remarkable media attention everywhere it went.
The barrel-shaped artifact is 2,500 years old and only nine inches long, but is celebrated around the world as the first known state document that lays out a policy of civil rights for citizens.
“The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia” exhibit “is about understanding the way Iranians see themselves in the world, and that’s obviously important at the moment,” said Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, where the cylinder has been housed for more than a century.
The artifact bears inscriptions proclaiming the victory of Persia’s King Cyrus over Babylon in the sixth century BCE. It records the Persian emperor’s restoration of shrines dedicated to different gods and his intention to allow freedom of worship to people displaced by the defeated ruler, Nabonidus.
Archaeologists now say that such declarations of religious tolerance were actually quite common at the time. But that hasn’t diminished the attention given the small artifact.
“The cylinder has acquired a special resonance, and is valued by people all around the world as a symbol of tolerance and respect for different peoples and different faiths,” the British Museum says on its website.
More than a million people are said to have flocked to see the cylinder when the museum lent it to Iran in 2010, although doubts have been raised about the Islamic Republic’s count.
Cyrus’ proclamation was written in spiky Babylonian cuneiform on the soft clay cylinder, which was buried in Babylon, now in modern-day Iraq. It was dug up in 1879 and has since been in the British Museum.
Cyrus owes much of his historical standing to an excellent Greek propagandist. In the fourth century BCE, the Greek historian and soldier Xenophon wrote “Cyropedia,” a text that portrays Cyrus as the ideal ruler. It is said to have greatly influenced Alexander the Great.
Xenophon’s portrayal also carried weight with Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers. Thomas Jefferson is said to have been influenced by Cyrus in his writing of the US Declaration of Independence.
The United Nations building in New York has a copy on display.
“This is a great statement about how a society thought about running itself. And to that extent, it’s like the Magna Carta,” MacGregor told Reuters.
The exhibit included lectures, a small number of other artifacts, a workshop on how to tweet in cuneiform, concerts and a showing of the 1916 silent film “Intolerance,” directed by D.W. Griffith.
One gallery focused on how the proclamation of Cyrus accreted meaning over the centuries and influenced politics and policy. It included quotations from Machiavelli, Aeschylus and Shirin Ebadi.