Three Significant Events Including
Cyrus the Great
Fall of Babylon
to Persians
On Cyrus's journey to Babylon he encountered the
Gyndes River which flowed into the Tigris. The river could only be
passed by boat and when a white horse tried to walk over it, the river's
current swept him away to death. So Cyrus decided that he would reap
vengeance on the river and he delayed the attack on Babylon to dig hundreds
of trenches around the river and turned it into three hundred and sixty
channels. Then Cyrus marched on to battle the against the Babylonians
as they waited without their walls. The Persians won a battle outside
the city so the Babylonians retreated to within their walls. The Babylonians
had been awaiting the attack of the Persians for many years so they stacked
up many provisions and waited inside their walls. So Cyrus came up
with a plan to wait for the river to become shallow enough and then march
through the city at the two points where the river entered and exited the
city. He then took a separate army to turn the Euphrates into a basin
by building a canal. The Persians then launched a surprise attack
on the city of Babylon and easily took over the city in 539 B.C.E.
Cyrus vs. Croesus
Croesus wanted to engage in war with Persia.
He asked an oracle if he would win the war, and the oracle told him that
he would bring down the empire. He then took down the Syrians and their
capital. At the same time, Cyrus and the Persians fought the Lydians in
Cappadocia, and the winner of the battle is not known. After this incident,
Croesus fled to Sardis in Lydia, and Cyrus followed him there, took down
his army, and took him to Ecbatana. Here, he took over the Median Kingdom
between 559 and 549 B.C.E. In 546 B.C.E., he defeated Croesus and
put Lydia under his rule.
Cyrus's Cylinder
One of the
important source for the history of Cyrus is the cuneiform writing on the
Cylinder of Cyrus (above) discovered during excavations at Babylon which
Cyrus entered in 539 B.C. In this written message to the Babylonians, dated
538-529 B.C., Cyrus declared: "I (am) Cyrus, the king of the world, the king
of Babylon, the king of Sumer and Akkad, the king of the four regions .
. . When I entered Tintar (ancient name of Babylon) peacefully . . . I established
my sovereignty in the palace of the princes, Marduk (the Babylonian national
god) inclined the noble hearts of the people of Babylon towards me, for
I was daily attentive to his worship . . ." Cyrus respected the
Babylonian religions and repaired the temples .
A French mission was excavating the foundations of the palace walls,
a preliminary to their partial restoration, when they came across two stone
tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters. As they soon realized, they
had discovered the stones inscribed with the charter of the foundation of
the palace of Darlus, placed beneath the walls at the end of the 6th century
B.C. The tablets were preserved very well and were engraved on their six
sides. The one placed under the east wall of a corridor bore a text in Akkadian
an ancient language of Mesopotamia. used in cuneiform writing from about
the 28th to the 1st century B.C. (photo right). The second, recovered from
beneath the west wall, was inscribed in Elamite (the language of Elam, an
ancient country to the east of Babylon). It is probable that a third tablet,
Cyrus's Cylinder, with an inscription in ancient Persian - the third official
language of the Empire- was also placed in the foundations. This is
a huge factor to our knowledge of Cyrus the Great.
