Cyrus Cylinder
23 June 2010
A workshop jointly organised by the British Museum and the Iran
Heritage Foundation is to be held at the British Museum on 23–24
June 2010 to discuss the significance of two newly identified
fragments of cuneiform tablet in the context of the Cyrus Cylinder.
Experts from around the world, including from Iran, have been
invited to participate and there will be a public presentation of
the findings at 18.00 on 24 June in the BP Lecture Theatre.
Following the postponement of the proposed loan of the Cyrus
Cylinder to Iran in January, discussions are now ongoing with the
Iranian Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization about lending
the Cylinder for a special exhibition in the National Museum in
Iran starting at the end of July.
The British Museum has a long standing policy of lending its
unparalleled collection as widely as possible across the world to
benefit the greatest number of world publics. This cultural
exchange is a vital part of the Museum's commitment to being a
Museum for the world. The Trustees reaffirmed their view that
exchanges of this sort were an essential part of the Museum's
international role, allowing valuable dialogues to develop
independently of political considerations.
7 February 2010
At a special meeting on Tuesday 2 February 2010 the Trustees of
the British Museum confirmed their intention to lend the Cyrus
Cylinder plus recently-discovered associated fragments of clay
tablet to the National Museum in Tehran in the second half of July
2010. This decision was conveyed in a telephone conversation to the
Iranian Cultural Heritage Organisation on the same day, and was
confirmed in a letter, sent by fax and email, to Mr Hamid Baghaei,
the Vice President of Iran, on Friday 5 February 2010. The new
announcement from Mr Baghaei therefore comes as a great surprise.
The British Museum has acted throughout in good faith, and values
highly its hitherto good relations with Iran. It is to be hoped
that this matter can be resolved as soon as possible.
The British Museum has a long standing policy of lending its
unparalleled collection as widely as possible across the world to
benefit the greatest number of world publics. This cultural
exchange is a vital part of the Museum's commitment to being a
Museum for the world. The Trustees reaffirmed their view that
exchanges of this sort were an essential part of the Museum's
international role, allowing valuable dialogues to develop
independently of political considerations.
20 January 2010
An important discovery has very recently been
made at the British Museum in the form of two pieces of cuneiform
tablet that cast light on the famous Cyrus Cylinder that is
sometimes described as the first Declaration of Human Rights.
The Cylinder was discovered in an 1879
excavation at Babylon (now in Iraq, then in the Ottoman Empire),
directed by Hormuzd Rassam on behalf of the British Museum. It was
written in Babylonian cuneiform on the orders of the Persian king
Cyrus the Great after his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC. It has
acquired iconic status because it authorises the return of deported
peoples to their homelands and implies that there will be freedom
of religious expression throughout the Persian Empire. This is
consistent with the Biblical tradition which portrays Cyrus as a
tolerant and enlightened ruler.
The two new pieces of cuneiform tablet come
from the small site of Dailem near Babylon and also in Iraq. They
have been in the British Museum since 1881, but their significance
has not previously been recognized. It has now been discovered, by
Professor Wilfred Lambert formerly of the University of Birmingham
and by Dr Irving Finkel of the Department of Middle East in the
British Museum, that the pieces come from a cuneiform tablet that
was inscribed with the same text as the Cyrus Cylinder.
The British Museum has a vast collection
of 130,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments from Mesopotamia that
were acquired in the 19th century. This collection is an
incomparable resource for researchers from around the world, and
the ongoing process of scholarship and study results in a steady
stream of new and important discoveries. Recent finds have included
a tablet giving new information about Nebuchadnezzar’s sack of
Jerusalem and an addition to the Babylonian Map of the World. Many
of the pieces are small, barely more than an inch across as in the
present case, and it is an extraordinary achievement to recognise
that these small pieces belong to the same text as on the Cyrus
Cylinder. Remarkably, the new pieces assist with the reading of
passages in the Cylinder that are either missing or are obscure,
and therefore help to improve our understanding of this iconic
document. In addition, they show that the ‘declaration’ on the
Cylinder is much more than a standard Babylonian building
inscription. It was probably an imperial decree that was
distributed around the Persian Empire, and it may have been
pronouncements of this sort that the author of the Biblical book of
Ezra was able to draw upon when writing about Cyrus.
The proposed exhibition of the Cyrus Cylinder
in the National Museum in Tehran seems the ideal place to present
the new fragments with the Cylinder itself. Although written in
Babylonian and made in Iraq, the Cylinder has great significance
for modern Iranians, as a document of Iran’s long history. First,
though, the new texts must be properly studied, and it is proposed
that there should be an international workshop at the British
Museum in June, to study and assess the new pieces. Scholars from
Iran will also be involved in the study and evaluation of the new
pieces. In the meantime, there will be an exhaustive search in the
British Museum collection for more pieces of this new
tablet.