Jacob Wright: The Cyrus Cylinder

A nice piece by Jacob in the HuffPo (one of the very few times an actual scholar has appeared in the HuffPo- usually they just get celebrities to pontificate on subjects they don’t know anything about).

In a recent TED lecture that is well on its way to becoming one of the most popular in a distinguished series, the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, narrated the fascinating history of a 2,600-year-old clay object known as the Cyrus Cylinder. The ancient artifact is unremarkable in appearance. It resembles thousands of cuneiform-inscribed tablets and objects from Mesopotamia housed in museums all over the world.

So why is a replica of this object displayed prominently at the U.N. Headquarters in New York? Why did more than a million people come out to catch a glimpse of the Cylinder when the British Museum loaned it for a three-month exhibit last year in Tehran? And why does the Cylinder continue to arouse so much excitement in the media?

The Cyrus Cylinder (Photo credit: Averain)

MacGregor’s captivating TED lecture seeks to identify the reason. The Cylinder bears one of the “great declarations of a human aspiration,” comparable to the American Constitution and Magna Carta. Cyrus the Great and the Persian Empire he established (ca. 550-330 B.C.E.) bequeathed to history “a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.”

Enjoy the rest.