I finally broke down and went all junior-high with my research — different colored pens for the different accounts of Cyrus’ taking Babylon. The most ancient records are notoriously problematic. Each one has a either a bone to pick or a bridge to sell, and they simply don’t agree on the facts. Did or did …
The small clay cylinder, 2500 years old and a bit beat up has quietly moved people all over the world since its very beginnings. Cyrus II, founder of the Persian Empire produced this declaration of intent for liberty and peace. The National Museum of Iran recently reported that besides Iranian schoolchildren, elites, and not-so, officials …
To hear in a cryptic message whatever our innermost self is inclined to hear, right or wrong is timelessly human, or so it would seem. The “Croesus syndrome, ” is how the Asheville Jung Center refers to it. Croesus was a super wealthy and powerful ancient Greek ruler who consulted an oracle (prophet, of a sort) …
Sept. 10-12, and now Norouz. Is it just coincidence that the Cyrus Cylinder, a 2500 year old document sometimes described as the first declaration of human rights and attributed to the founder of the Persian Empire, traveled from its museum home in the West (UK) to the Middle East (Iran) on September 10 (2010) for an exhibit that began …
I just finished Anne Rice’s Servant of the Bones. From the original queen of vampire writing, who’d have thought? A book that includes not just the gothic but profound questions of purpose and identity and (here’s what’s especially intriguing to me right now) reflects some good research into ancient Near Eastern religion and history. Marduk, …
As writers, do we ever get off the first page? Not just the physical first to which most of us return again and again (before discarding) but the writing itself. It’s always empty, always new. These days, I’m reading all sorts of things about the transition from Babylonian to Persian rule in the ancient Near …
A small clay object with scratches decipherable by only a few people in the world can nevertheless still move nations. Sometimes called “the first charter of human rights,” this text inscribed on a cylinder of clay comes from Cyrus II, founder of the Persian Empire and called “messiah” by the biblical prophet Isaiah. It dates back to the …
Contemplating the beginnings of the Persian empire, I’m intrigued by Cassandane and Atossa, who seem to be respectively the wife and daughter of Cyrus II. Were they the means by which these first Persian emperors were identified as Achaemenid?, an i.d. of some pride that is still to describe those kings. It appears to be a family line that …
