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Cyrus Cyrus and the establishment of the Persian Empire The Rise of Persia Under Cyrus Darius Xerxes
Cylinder seal and inscription of Cyrus the Great from Babylon I am Cyrus, king of the world,
great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of the land of Sumer and
Akkad, king of the four quarters, son of Cambyses, great king, king of
Anshan, grandson of Cyrus, great king, king of Anshan, descendant of
Teispes, great king, king of Anshan, progeny of an unending royal line,
whose rule Bel and Nabu cherish, whose kingship they desire for their
hearts' pleasures.
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Persia The Rise of Persia Under Cyrus II Author: Grote, George The ruling dynasty of the Persians settled in Fars in
southwestern Iran (possibly the Parsumash of the later Assyrian records)
traced its ancestry back to an eponymous ancestor, Haxamanish, or
Achaemenes. There is no historical evidence of such a king's existence.
Traditionally, three rulers fall between Achaemenes and Cyrus II: Teispes,
Cyrus I, and Cambyses I. Teispes, freed of Median domination during the
so-called Scythian interregnum, is thought to have expanded his kingdom
and to have divided it on his death between his two sons, Cyrus I and
Ariaramnes. Cyrus I may have been the king of Persia who appears in the
records of Ashurbanipal swearing allegiance to Assyria after the
devastation of Elam in the campaigns of 642-639 BC, though there are
chronological problems involved with this equation. When Median control
over the Persians was supposedly reasserted under Cyaxares, Cambyses I is
thought to have been given a reunited Persia to administer as a Median
vassal. His son, Cyrus II, married the daughter of Astyages and in 559 BC
inherited his father's position within the Median confederation. Cyrus II
certainly warranted his later title, Cyrus the Great. He must have been a
remarkable personality, and certainly he was a remarkable king. He united
under his authority several Persian and Iranian groups who apparently had
not been under his father's control. He then initiated diplomatic
exchanges with Nabonidus of Babylon (556-539 BC), which justifiably
worried Astyages. Eventually, he openly rebelled against the Medes, who
were beaten in battle when considerable numbers of Median troops deserted
to the Persian standard. Thus, in 550 BC, the Median Empire became the
first Persian Empire, and the Achaemenid kings appeared on the
international scene with a suddenness that must have frightened many. Cyrus immediately set out to expand his conquests.
After apparently convincing the Babylonians that they had nothing to fear
from Persia, he turned against the Lydians under the rule of the
fabulously wealthy Croesus. Lydian appeals to Babylon were to no avail. He
then took Cilicia, thus cutting the routes over which any help might have
reached the Lydians. Croesus attacked and an indecisive battle was fought
in 547 BC on the Halys River. Since it was late in the campaigning season,
the Lydians thought the war was over for that year, returned to their
capital at Sardis, and dispersed the national levy. Cyrus, however, kept
coming. He caught and besieged the Lydians in the citadel at Sardis and
captured Croesus in 546 BC. Of the Greek city-states along the western
coast of Asia Minor, heretofore under Lydian control, only Miletus
surrendered without a fight. The others were systematically reduced by the
Persian armies led by subordinate generals. Cyrus himself was apparently
busy elsewhere, possibly in the east, for little is known of his
activities between the capture of Sardis and the beginning of the
Babylonian campaign in 540 BC. Nowhere did Cyrus display his political and military
genius better than in the conquest of Babylon. The campaign actually began
when he lulled the Babylonians into inactivity during his war with Lydia,
which, since it was carried to a successful conclusion, deprived the
Babylonians of a potential ally when their turn came. Then he took maximum
advantage of internal disaffection and discontent within Babylon.
Nabonidus was not a popular king. He had paid too little attention to home
affairs and had alienated the native Babylonian priesthood. Second Isaiah,
speaking for many of the captive Jews in Babylon, was undoubtedly not the
only one of Nabonidus' subjects who looked to Cyrus as a potential
deliverer. With the stage thus set, the military campaign against Babylon
came almost as an anticlimax. The fall of the greatest city in the Middle
East was swift; Cyrus marched into town in the late summer of 539 BC,
seized the hands of the statue of the city god Marduk as a signal of his
willingness to rule as a Babylonian and not as a foreign conquerer, and
was hailed by many as the legitimate successor to the throne. In one
stride Cyrus carried Persian power to the borders of Egypt, for with
Babylon came all that it had seized from the Assyrians and had gained in
the sequel. Little is known of the remainder of Cyrus' reign. The rapidity with which his son and successor, Cambyses II, initiated a successful campaign against Egypt suggests that preparations for such an attack were well advanced under Cyrus. But the founder of Persian power was forced to turn east late in his reign to protect that frontier against warlike tribes who were themselves in part Iranians and who threatened the plateau in the same manner as had the Medes and the Persians more than a millennium earlier. One of the recurrent themes of Iranian history is the threat of peoples from the east. How much Cyrus conquered in the east is uncertain. What is clear is that he lost his life in 529 BC, fighting somewhere in the region of the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers.
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