Cyrus the Great: founder of the Persian Empire

Cyrus led the wars that built his empire in person. He beat Astyages in a war fought partly in Persia itself, near Pasargadae, between 553 and 550 BC; he fought Croesus at Pteria and then took Sardis; and his victory at Opis in 539 BC opened the way to Babylon. In two decades his armies took three kingdoms and reached Central Asia.¹

Who were Cyrus the Great's parents?

Cyrus was the son of Cambyses, king of Anshan, the Persian kingdom in today's Fars, Iran. On the Cyrus Cylinder he calls himself “the son of Cambyses, great king, king of Anšan, grandson of Cyrus, great king, king of Anšan, descendant of Teispes.” Herodotus and Xenophon name his mother as Mandane, daughter of Astyages, king of the Medes.²

Cyrus succeeded his father as king of Anshan in 559 BC, as a vassal of the Medes. Olmstead accepted the Median descent; Pierre Briant notes that the ancient writers disagree about it and suspects that the marriage was invented after the conquest to justify Cyrus's rule over Media.³

Around his birth grew a legend. Herodotus, who says he could tell the story in three other ways, writes that Astyages dreamed his grandson would take his place and ordered the baby killed. His kinsman Harpagus passed the task to a herdsman, whose wife raised the child in place of her own stillborn son, and at ten the boy was recognized. Briant compares its folk motifs with the legend of Sargon of Akkad.⁴

How did Cyrus overthrow the Medes?

Through war and the defection of the Median army. A cylinder of the Babylonian king Nabonidus says that in his third year, 553 BC, the god Marduk raised up Cyrus, who “with his small army” scattered the Medes and took Astyages captive. The Nabonidus Chronicle adds that when Astyages marched against Cyrus, his own army rebelled and handed him over.⁵

The chronicle puts the fall of Astyages in Nabonidus's sixth year, 550/549 BC, and records that Cyrus carried the silver and gold of Ecbatana, the Median capital, back to Anshan. Herodotus tells the same story through Harpagus, whom Astyages had punished for sparing the infant Cyrus: put in command of the Median army, he went over to Cyrus, and most of the troops deserted or fled. Briant reads the Babylonian texts as showing at least three years of open war, from 553 to 550 BC, with fighting in Persia near Pasargadae.⁶

The Medes kept a privileged place under the new king. Ecbatana remained a royal residence, Medes held high office and led Persian armies, and Greeks went on calling the Persians “Medes.” Peoples of Central Asia who had owed allegiance to Astyages submitted to Cyrus, but only formally: Herodotus lists the Bactrians and the Sacae among the enemies he still had to fight.⁷

Cyrus the Great's greatest victories

Each of his three great wars ended a kingdom. He took the Median empire by 550 BC; he defeated Croesus of Lydia and captured Sardis after a fourteen-day siege, around 547 or 546 BC; and in 539 BC he beat the Babylonian army at Opis and entered Babylon. Between the last two wars he campaigned far into Central Asia.⁸

Croesus started the Lydian war. Taking advantage of the fall of Astyages, his brother-in-law, he crossed the river Halys into Cappadocia. At Pteria the two armies fought until night with no victory on either side, and Croesus went home to Sardis and dismissed his army for the winter. Cyrus marched straight after him. On the plain before Sardis, Herodotus says, Cyrus set his baggage camels against the Lydian cavalry, and the horses turned away at their sight and smell.⁹

The year is disputed. Olmstead read a damaged line of the Nabonidus Chronicle for 547 BC as naming Lydia; Grayson's translation leaves the country's name unread, and Briant, who doubts that the line refers to Lydia, gives 546 BC or 542 to 541 BC for the fall of Sardis.¹⁰

The fate of Croesus is disputed too. Herodotus has Cyrus put him on a pyre and then spare him, and Croesus becomes the king's adviser; Briant accepts that he lived on at Cyrus's court with the revenues of a town in Media, while Olmstead thought he burned himself to death and that the rescue was a story spread by Delphi. The Greek cities of Ionia, which had refused Cyrus's terms, were then conquered by his Median generals Mazares and Harpagus.¹¹

After Sardis, Herodotus says, Cyrus left the Greeks to his generals because Babylon, the Bactrians, the Sacae and Egypt stood in his way. Little is known of his eastern wars. He founded garrison towns on the northern frontier, the best known being Cyropolis, which Alexander later destroyed, and he probably won most of the eastern lands that Darius later listed as his, among them Bactria, Sogdiana, Gandhara and Arachosia.¹³

How did Cyrus take Babylon?

In a short campaign in the autumn of 539 BC. The Nabonidus Chronicle records that Cyrus defeated the Babylonian army at Opis on the Tigris and slaughtered the people; Sippar fell without a battle, and two days later Ugbaru, governor of Gutium, and the army of Cyrus entered Babylon “without battle.” Cyrus himself entered the city on 29 October.¹⁴

Babylon fell on 12 October. Nabonidus, who had fled, was captured in Babylon and left alive. Herodotus and Xenophon tell instead of a siege ended when the Euphrates was diverted, so that the Persians walked in along the riverbed while the Babylonians were holding a festival.¹⁵

Briant warns that the chronicle's brevity misleads: Opis was a real battle followed by a massacre, and the hostilities had probably begun before 540 BC. In Babylon Cyrus took the titles “king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters,” and from mid-October 539 BC scribes dated documents by his reign.¹⁶

What was Cyrus the Great famous for?

For his conquests and for the way he treated the conquered. In the Cyrus Cylinder he says that he entered Babylon in peace, returned the statues of gods to their sanctuaries and gathered their displaced inhabitants and returned them to their homes. Jewish tradition credits him with letting the exiles in Babylon go home and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.¹⁷

The Book of Ezra opens with a proclamation of Cyrus ordering the house of the Lord at Jerusalem to be rebuilt, and the Book of Isaiah calls him the Lord's “anointed.” Herodotus reports that the Persians called Cyrus a father, Cambyses a master and Darius a shopkeeper, and Xenophon made him the ideal ruler of his Cyropaedia.¹⁸

Historians read these texts as propaganda as well as policy. Briant notes that the Cylinder was composed on the model of inscriptions of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, that Nabonidus had already restored many of the buildings Cyrus claimed, and that sending deported gods and peoples home was a familiar practice of Near Eastern kings. Olmstead called the Cylinder “a model of persuasive propaganda.”¹⁹

How did Cyrus the Great die?

He died in 530 BC on a campaign against the Massagetae, nomads beyond his northeastern frontier. Herodotus says that Queen Tomyris, whose captured son had killed himself in Persian hands, defeated Cyrus in the fiercest battle between barbarians he knew of, and that Cyrus fell there; but he admits that many tales of Cyrus's end were told.²⁰

Herodotus gives Cyrus a reign of 29 years and says that before the campaign he sent his son Cambyses back to Persia as his heir. Xenophon gives a different ending, in which the old king dies peacefully in Persia after a last speech to his sons, and Briant notes how quickly the death was wrapped in legend.²¹

Where is Cyrus the Great buried?

At Pasargadae, the capital he built in his Persian homeland, where Cambyses brought his body. His tomb still stands: a gabled stone chamber on a podium of six steps. Aristobulus, an officer of Alexander the Great who entered it, saw a golden coffin, a couch with golden feet, garments and jewels, and on a later visit found it robbed.²²

Briant links the choice of the site to the Pasargadae, the noblest of the Persian tribes and the tribe of the Achaemenid clan. Arrian adds that Magi guarded the tomb from the time of Cambyses, receiving a sheep every day and a horse every month for a sacrifice to Cyrus.²³

Cambyses went on to conquer Egypt in 525 BC, and the empire Cyrus founded lasted until Alexander's conquest two centuries later. Alexander visited the tomb twice, in 330 BC and on his return from India, and Arrian says he was grieved to find it plundered.²⁴ › Cambyses II

Compare his empire with Alexander's in Cyrus vs Alexander, meet his successor Darius the Great, or explore the greatest battles of the Persian Empire and its greatest commanders.