[MUSIC PLAYING]
NEIL MACGREGOR: One of the great things
about the objects we make is that they
live longer than we do.
So they can have many different lives.
In every one of their lives in every different generation,
they can acquire different meanings.
So their meaning can become richer as time goes on.
One of the most extraordinary objects in that regard
is the so-called Cyrus Cylinder.
It's about 2,500 years old.
It's a small, barrel-shaped piece
of clay covered with cuneiform inscriptions, discovered
in 1879 by a British Museum expedition to Babylon,
now in modern Iraq.
But to understand the Cyrus Cylinder,
we need to start with the world from which it came,
a world in which Iran--
Persia-- reigned supreme.
NARRATOR: Our story begins 550 years before Christ,
with Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire.
After uniting the Persian and Median tribes,
Cyrus came into conflict with King Croesus of Lydia,
in what's now modern-day Turkey.
He defeated Croesus in battle.
Cyrus then clashed with the powerful Babylonian Empire
to the west.
In 539 BC, he besieged their capital, Babylon.
It fell with barely a fight.
Persia under Cyrus became a superpower
of the ancient world.
Cyrus' conquest of Babylon had been predicted
and was described in the Old Testament
by the Jewish prophet Daniel.
That very night, the Babylonian region, Belshazzar,
had held a feast.
DR. JULIAN RABY: He feasted using the sacred gold vessels
from the temple in Jerusalem.
And then suddenly, miraculously, there
was a hand writing on the wall.
And the writing said, you have been weighed in the balance.
You've been found wanting.
And your kingdom will be given to the Medes and the Persians.
So from this we have the expression,
the writing is on the wall.
And we have Rembrandt's great painting, Belshazzar's Feast.
NARRATOR: Within hours, the great empire of Babylon
was no more.
Cyrus justified his invasion to the Babylonian people
in a proclamation written on clay tablets
such as this one, which are likely to have
been widely distributed.
Surviving fragments, along with the Cyrus Cylinder,
carry identical wording.
IRVING FINKEL: Because the Cyrus Cylinder
was meant for a Babylonian audience,
it was written in the Babylonian language, which
is a Semitic tongue related to the modern languages of Hebrew
and Arabic and Aramaic.
The writing system, which Cyrus' officials used,
was the traditional cuneiform script,
which had been invented in ancient Iraq
well before 3,000 BC.
It is written by pressing a stylus, something a bit
like a chopstick, into the surface of the clay, which
is nearly dry.
And the signs, which convey the sound of the language,
consist of different arrangements of these strokes.
They're written one by one.
And the reader has to join them up.
And the sound emerges from the clay.
This is the line that says, [Speaking Babylonian language],
King of the World, the Great King, King of Babylon,
and so it goes on.
So I begin to write [Ku-ra-ash] So the first
sign, Ku, has the big vertical.
Two small horizontals, one bigger horizontal,
a little vertical, and another horizontal like a box.
This is Ku, then Ra.
We have three strong horizontals to begin.
And big one next to it.
Then one little vertical wedge and one bigger vertical wedge--
ku, ra Now we do ash, which is three long horizontals,
comme ca. And then a vertical in the middle.
So we can read this [Ku-ra-ash] The name
of Cyrus.
NARRATOR: The early lines on the cylinder extol Cyrus' virtues
and his reasons for invading Babylon.
But it's lines 30 to 35 that set Cyrus up
as a great leader in the modern liberal sense.
DR. JULIAN RABY: One of Cyrus' first acts
after his conquest was to release those who'd been made
captive by the Babylonians.
This was a mark of his style of rule.
And it's this very event that's recorded on the cylinder.
So this was a key moment in the history of the Jewish people.
They'd spent many years weeping by the rivers of Babylon.
And now finally, they were allowed to return to Jerusalem,
and then to rebuild the temple.
The return to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon--
the permission from Cyrus to rebuild the second temple--
reshaped Judaism.
And the notion of return is central to Jewish life
and mythology.
No less a person than David Ben-Gurion
wrote, "Cyrus displayed a spirit of charity
towards his adversaries.
A unique tolerance towards all religions.
He, Cyrus, played a decisive role in the first return
to Zion."
NEIL MACGREGOR: Well, then Cyrus' empire was eventually
broken up.
The idea of Cyrus himself remained.
Cyrus as the model ruler.
The principal source for that view of Cyrus
came from the Greek historian Xenophon.
His book, Cyropaedia, was really about how
to run an empire with Cyrus as the model.
It was very popular all through the Renaissance,
and particularly with the founding fathers of America.
And we know that Jefferson had two, possibly three
copies of Xenophon's Life of Cyrus,
and referred to it regularly.
So there is a very direct link between the Cyrus Cylinder
and the making of the United States.
NARRATOR: The Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great,
reached its peak under the later King Darius,
extending from Libya in the central Mediterranean
to the Indus Valley in modern day Pakistan.
NEIL MACGREGOR: It is the beginning
of the idea of the Middle East, an idea that we still
live with today.
And when we use the word the Near East, the Middle East,
we're talking about exactly the area
that was the Persian Empire.
The frieze behind me is the cast of the frieze
in the royal palace at Persepolis,
the Persian capital.
And it shows the different peoples
of the empire bringing their different tributes.
It's a perfect emblem of the variety of the Empire.
Every people brings their own kind of tribute.
And the Persian Empire, unlike others,
didn't try to crush people into one way of being or doing.
It allowed a great diversity of habits and patterns, language
and faith, to live together.
It became the great model of how to run an empire
of dizzying diversity.
DR. JOHN CURTIS: Because it was such a vast area,
new practices and techniques had to be introduced
to administer this vast space.
The exhibition has tried to highlight some of these, all
as the introduction of old Persian cuneiform.
There are technological introductions--
wonderful new forms of jewelry and gold and silver bowls.
We find Aramaic becoming widely used at this time.
And we've got the introduction on a large scale of coinage.
DR. VESTA CURTIS: The King of Lydia
is Croesus, who rules a very prosperous nation.
And the Cyrus sees Lydian coinage in silver and gold.
And he adopts that coinage and produces croesus,
as we call these coins.
These coins show a lion attacking a bull.
And it is until the time of Darius
in 522 that this coinage is continued.
Darius introduces a completely new monetary coinage.
The gold daric, named after him.
And the silver siglos, which derives from the Hebrew
word for silver shekel.
He describes himself as a competent archer,
as a competent horseman, as a competent spearman.
So this imagery of the archer on his coins,
it's something definitely that the Persians
would like to be portrayed as.
DR. JOHN CURTIS: This armlet is actually one of a pair.
It's from the Oxus treasure.
The griffin terminals possibly show the Zoroastrian varegna
bird.
The surface is covered with lots of little cavities
for inlaying with semiprecious stone, glass, or colored post,
characteristic of the Achaemenid period.
Armlets were particularly precious diplomatic gifts
at this time.
They're shown being brought by four
of the different delegations on the Apadana reliefs
at Persepolis.
DR. VESTA CURTIS: Amongst the objects of the Oxus treasure,
there are some fascinating votive objects
in the form of gold plaques.
These figures wear a soft cap, perhaps made
of felt. They had a chin guard.
This could be pulled up to cover the mouth.
When they were engaged in a religious act or ritual
act in front of the fire, they had
to protect the fire, which is a holy element,
and must not be polluted.
They hold consecrated wooden sticks--
the balsam.
We think the Achaemenids were Zoroastrians.
It's an ancient religion, which gets its name from the prophet
Zarathustra, or Zoroaster in Greek.
At a time when a number of gods were worshipped,
Zarathustra came and said, no.
The creator of all is Ahura Mazda.
NARRATOR: This is the official seal of the later King
Darius, who put the empire on a secure administrative and
financial footing.
King Darius hunts a lion.
Above him is a winged figure with the head of a human being,
thought to be the Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda.
The wording declares, I am Darius, the great King.
It's in three languages--
old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian.
These monumental official languages,
which sometimes also include Egyptian hieroglyphs,
are another sign of the multicultural nature
of the empire.
NEIL MACGREGOR: Almost everything
that we know about the Persian Empire actually
comes from Greek sources.
So it was written by their enemies.
So it's a bit like knowing the story of 20th century America
entirely through Soviet sources.
And that's why this cylinder is so important.
This is the Persian speaking as the Persians addressing
the world.
It's a message direct from Cyrus.
When the Cyrus Cylinder was excavated in 1879,
it brings Cyrus, and indeed, the cylinder,
into a totally different kind of debate.
Not about government, but about the reliability of scripture.
The middle of the 19th century was, of course, a moment
when the authenticity and the authority of scripture
was being challenged.
Darwin is writing about evolution.
The discoveries of geology are making
people wonder whether you can rely on scripture.
The cylinder tells us that Cyrus is governed--
led-- by the god of Babylon, Marduk.
The Hebrew Bible tells us that it was the Lord god of Israel
who governed Cyrus, who conducts him
through the whole military campaign.
And so what we have in the Cyrus Cylinder
put beside the Hebrew Bible--
the Book of Chronicles, the Book of Ezra--
are two different priestly interpretations
of the same military campaign.
It suggested that the Hebrew scriptures
must be part of a much bigger Middle Eastern
religious tradition.
NARRATOR: The life the Cyrus Cylinder
could breathe into contemporary affairs
was only just beginning.
In 1971, for the 2,500 anniversary of the Persian
Monarchy, the Shah of Iran held lavish celebrations
in the ancient capital, Persepolis,
and in Pasargadae, the site of Cyrus' mausoleum.
The Cyrus Cylinder was the official symbol
of the celebrations.
Once again, it took on a new story.
The invention by the Shah of a return to Iranian history
to put him at the center of a great tradition.
Coins were minted portraying the Shah and the Cylinder.
The Cyrus Cylinder as guarantor of the Shah.
But soon, the Shah was gone.
And revolutionary Iranians wanted an Islamic history.
Since the Iran-Iraq war, it's become
a symbol of unity for all Iranians--
to remember when 2,500 years ago, they fought Iraq, and won.
DR. JULIAN RABY: It's worth reflecting on a moment
when a Persian released the Jews, enabling
them to go back to Jerusalem.
NEIL MACGREGOR: When the Cyrus Cylinder went to Tehran
for exhibition in 2010, it was seen by about half a
million people--
Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, everybody.
And it became the focus of a very particular debate
about what Iran is today.
What are the histories that will shape Iran
now and in the future?
And how will those affect therefore,
the future of the whole of the region,
and indeed, of the world.
In that intense debate, I think it's possible
that one of the most persuasive and most powerful voices
may well be the voice of this mute, broken, clay cylinder.
[MUSIC PLAYING]