The Cyrus Cylinder

In room 52 on the Upper Floor of the British Museum, past relics of Roman Britain, Europe and the Middle East, there is a certain fired clay cylinder, smaller than an A4 sheet of paper. This small object testifies to a pivotal point in the Old Testament story, when power switched hands from one formerly mighty empire to another, thus initiating Judah’s return from exile.

This artefact is known as the Cyrus Cylinder and is a declaration written in Akkadian cuneiform script. It records the words of King Cyrus, a Persian ruler who reigned during the 6th century BC. Cyrus the Great (as he is known to history) founded the Achaemenid empire and changed the course of ancient Near Eastern history by defeating the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, and bringing about the fall of his kingdom.

The cylinder was excavated in 1879 in Amran, an archaeological site in modern Iraq, and acquired by the British Museum in 1880. For scholars it is a small but important source of information about ancient Near Eastern political history. While it doesn’t name Jewish places or individuals directly, it does give us intriguing details that are consistent with the biblical narrative.

What is Akkadian cuneiform?

Akkadian is a language from the Semitic family (the same group as Hebrew and Arabic). We have examples of it in written form from the third millennium BC up until the latter part of the first millennium BC. The language was spoken in Mesopotamia, an ancient region that today makes up modern-day Iraq, Kuwait and parts of Syria and Turkey.

The Akkadian cuneiform script emerged around the mid third millennium BC. Cuneiform is an ancient system of writing that consists of wedge shapes pressed into soft clay with the edge of a stylus (the name is derived from the Latin word for wedge, cuneus). Akkadian cuneiform is partly a syllabic script, meaning that many of the written symbols correspond to syllables which make up the words represented. For example, King Cyrus is spelled with three signs in the cylinder: ku-ra-aš (individual signs are separated by hyphens in transcription). Naturally, this system requires several hundred distinct signs (combinations of wedges).

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The Cyrus Cylinder offers other details that are consistent with Old Testament accounts. In particular, the cylinder claims that when Cyrus conquered the Babylonian empire he came as a “harbinger of peace” and subsequently “collected together all of their people and returned them to their settlements”. This matches up with the accounts we read in the biblical book of Ezra (1:2-3) about a Jewish return to Jerusalem during this period: “Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel — he is the God who is in Jerusalem.” The restoration of displaced people to their homes would have been unusual at the time. Cyrus’s policy of returning people to their settlements differed significantly from the earlier deportations undertaken by the Babylonian and Assyrian empires.

For modern-day readers the survival of this small cylinder provides an extraordinary glimpse into the political context of some of the most significant events in the Old Testament. You can read more about the Cyrus Cylinder, along with a translation of the cuneiform text, on the British Museum website. You can also visit Room 52 at the British Museum virtually on Google Street View.