So this got posted to the podcast Facebook page last week, and as much as I like ancient Persia getting some attention, I'd love if that was A) without modern politics, or at least B) accurate. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to get either. So here's: "What Trump and His Religious Supporters Can Learn From Cyrus The Great." I messaged the mods when I decided to do this write up, and I'll be keeping presidential references to a minimum, but for those of you who can't be arsed to click the link the premise is this: Supporters of the current POTUS have taken to comparing him to Cyrus the Great because of his stance on Israel. Cyrus the Great is credited by the Bible with ending the Jewish exile in Babylon, Donald Trump is credited with also being pro-Israel. Setting aside the modern political issue of equating Israel with ancient Judah aside, and that Cyrus being an Iranian king makes the whole situation bizarre, that's how we got to this article in the first place. Both are worth talking about, just not on this sub.

Because this sub welcomes pedantry, I'll start with the second sentence:

>"And a few of his titles include 'shepherd,' 'anointed,' and 'smoothing the way,' which meant the Jews trouble free return from captivity."

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So to start, those aren't titles. They are descriptions of Cyrus's actions and role in Judaism. "Anointed" actually is a title, but only really makes sense when you leave it in the more recognizable Hebrew as "messiah." They're all used to describe Cyrus, because the ancient Jews did venerate the first Persian king as their rescuer. What Bible the author is reading that implies a "trouble free return," must be bizarre though. The Bible describes three waves of returnees, how getting the second two to come at all required a lot of persuading, and how once the first two groups arrived back in Judah, they didn't have the resources to rebuild Jerusalem, encountered hostile locals, and the religious leaders being frustrated by mass apostasy. According to the book of Ezra, these problems lasted for over 20 years before the order to rebuild the province was rediscovered in an archive. Historians cast some doubt on that, and suspect that it was Darius, not Cyrus who ordered the rebuilding, meaning that the Jews were left in the lurch for two decades, essentially foreigners in a destitute province with no resources or meaningful royal support.

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Next we get "Cyrus was a Zoroastrian but he did not Parade his faith like Darius and especially Xerxes after him." I'm mostly willing to forgive this one. It is an Iranian source and Iranian author, where it's usually held that Cyrus must have been Zoroastrian too. There is a lot of scholarly debate about this, but is definitely still possible. It's also possible that Cyrus was generally polytheistic and honored a variety of Iranian and Mesopotamian gods. I'm not actually sure why the author thinks Xerxes was more directly religious. Maybe the "Daiva Inscription," but Darius proclaimed the support of Ahura Mazda all over his inscriptions too, so I don't necessarily think that one was more open than the other.

Then comes a quote from 12 Major World Religions by Jason Boyett, which I have not read, but seems to have a very "cherry picked JStor" understanding of Zoroastrianism. It starts by calling Zoroastrianism monotheistic. This is true now, and was mostly true during the Zoroastrian golden age under the Sassanid Persian Empire, but in the time of Cyrus and the Achaemenids, does not seem to have been the case. At best, it might have been henotheim, but monalatrism seems more accurate. Ahura Mazda was clearly the supreme being, and the rest of the Iranian pantheon didn't see to much attention, but the god Mithra and goddess Anahita appear to have been pretty widely venerated during the Achaemenid period.

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Boyett goes on to promote the regular lines about Zoroastrianism's influence on Judaism: it was the source of dualism between good/evil or God/Satan, the immortal soul, eschatology, resurrection, or a coming savior messiah. That Zoroastrianism influenced Judaism cannot be debated. They existed side by side for centuries during the second temple period, and while Zoroastrian ideas may have influenced some of this, they probably weren't the sole source. Ha-satan, the adversary, was already a concept in Judaism as an oppositional force directed by God. Disassociating Satan from God seems to be much more of a Christian development than a Jewish one too, so probably not a direct result of Persian influence. Apocalyptic prophecies almost always reflected contemporary politics, rather than some unified belief in the end of days. Jewish ideas of resurrection in the Bible seem to be linked more with earlier scripture talking about "resurrecting" that kingdom of Israel/Judah more than anything Zoroastrian, and evidence for Zoroastrian belief in a future Messiah (saoshyant) before the Sassanid period is scarce and might be a Judeo-Christian influence of Zoroastrians, not the other way around.

>Cyrus' ethical behaviour was far ahead of his time. He lifted the standards of all the rulers of his time not excluding the kings of the Old Testament. Cyrus tried to win over his enemies with diplomacy first. He showed compassion and forgiveness toward his enemies in a world when only revenge and killing of your defeated foes was the norm.

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> Cyrus the Great never compromised his morals or ethics.

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Gotta pick one. His ethics weren't ahead of his time. He didn't brag about massacring whole cities and sending populations into exile, but that doesn't mean he didn't. Like the Babylonian and Assyrian kings before him, he took kings who surrendered hostage, like Astyages of Media and Croesus of Lydia. The population of Priene in Ionia was taken captive, and the Babylonian city of Opis was slaughtered. Trying to win over his enemies with diplomacy wasn't unique, even within the context of the Bible, Assyria and Babylon tried to work with the Hebrew kingdoms before conquering them. According to Herodotus, he almost executed Croesus before changing his mind, Belshazzar, crown prince of Babylon, was almost certainly killed when the Persians took that city, and his father Nabonidus may have been as well.

>King Cyrus free the Jews from slavery in Babylon that's why he was hailed as the liberator. He was equally welcomed by other nations who were being oppressed by their rulers.

The Jews were not slaves. They were exiles and political prisoners, but they owned land and slaves of their own, and when they returned to Judah, they had personal belongings including gold, silver, and fine fabrics. I have absolutely no idea what other nations the author is talking about. If there are other exiled populations that were freed, we never hear about them, and the only province that seems to have willingly capitulated to the Persians was Cilicia, where the sitting kings stayed in power. It's possible that this is a reference to Babylonia, where at least one city surrendered, and Babylon itself had a large enough pro-persian camp that the gates opened without too much fighting, but that's hardly "welcomed."

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> Another comparison is that both Cyrus and Trump were underdogs and came from nowhere to become influential leaders. This comparison is wrong again. Everyone in America was familiar with the face of Donald Trump from his television show, The Apprentice, and his business empire... Cyrus, however, was virtually unknown in the ancient world. Equally his race, which was the vassal of the Medes. Unlike Alexandra the Great who inherited a powerful military machine in tiptop shape from his father Phillip, Cyrus created the biggest empire the world had ever seen virtually from nothing in mere 11 years.

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Ha, some of you might actually have forgotten that this is a political article. I see the point they want to make, but Cyrus was king of Anshan, one of cities claimed in the official titles of earlier, Elamite, kings (the kings of Susa and Anshan). Cyrus deliberately tied himself and his ancestry to that city in his official proclamations to the Babylonians, like the Cyrus Cylinder. On top of this, Cyrus's initial revolt against Astyages and Media was significant enough when it started in 553 BCE to be recorded in a Babylonian temple inscription. Cyrus was a minor political figure in the grand scheme of things when he started conquering, but he was not unknown. He also conquered and absorbed Media wholesale, essentially inheriting one of the major power players in Near Eastern politics at the time. It's not inheritance, but it's also not really a slow grind. In that perspective, I'd say that in this one instance the two leaders being discussed actually might be comparable, accounting for huge differences in context.

> The Greek writers by mistake referred to the Persians as Medes because they couldn’t believe the small obscure Persian tribe could achieve such amazing feats.

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No, they got them confused because they were two Iranian ethnic groups that probably shared a lot, if not all, customs, clothing, language, heritage, and general culture.

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> Trump and his supporters should be reminded that Persepolis, which was the ancient city of the Achaemenids, did not have any walls around it.

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Stearing away from the politics here, Persepolis is entirely irrelevant to the discussion of Cyrus the Great, as construction wasn't even started until a decade after his death, under Darius I (the Great). Cyrus built Pasargadae, a giant complex of palaces and gardens, each set off within in their own walls, with a citadel structure at one end, which sort of undermines the whole argument here. Regardless of that, Persepolis wasn't walled because it was a ceremonial capital meant for showing off, never intended for defense. That's what the Achaemenid kings had other capitals at Susa, Ecbatana, and Babylon for.

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> Persepolis was also designed to be the world’s first capital city where everybody was welcomed.

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Babylon, Memphis, Ecbatana, Susa, Sardis, etc. would all like a word. Persepolis was far from the first cosmopolitan city in the world. All of these cities, and more, had significant foreign populations there to trade and do business. Hell, Babylon had many more than Persepolis under Persian rule. The only reason that you see an increase in foreigners traveling during Persian times is because it was all one empire with semi-consistent administration and infrastructure over those vast distances for the first time.

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> The historical Cyrus is a multifaceted character who still demands our attention.

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Yes, and you didn't acknowledge most of those facets.

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>He is a universal king who sets the moral standard and inspires world leaders to follow. Mercy, forgiveness, and respect for others were only some of the virtues that King Cyrus demonstrated.

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> Tom Holland writes: “Cyrus had presented himself as a model of righteousness, and his rule a payback from the gods. People from across the vast span of his empire had duly scrabbled to hail him as their own.

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I already refuted this stuff above, but just want to reiterate. Cyrus was not a loving pacificst conqueror. He played the political and military games of his time. If that didn't require brutality or bragging on the scale of the Assyrians, so be it, but it is clear that he wasn't opposed to it when necessary to achieve his goals. More Tom Holland:

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> ‘He eclipsed all other monarchs, either before him, or since’. This verdict, not of a fellow countryman, but of Xenophon- an Athenian.”

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This actually is a fair assessment of Cyrus's reception beyond Persia, but I just have to point out that despite being Athenian, Xenophon was a Sparta-phile and monarchist sympathizer. He propogated the Spartan myth harder than almost anyone else with the Constitution of the Spartans and used Cyrus as the stock character for his perfect king in Cyropaedia, which frankly could be a bad history post of its own.

> To superimpose the American contemporary politics onto ancient history (or vice versa) is almost pathological.

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And like a pathogen, probably not something you should try to work with if you haven't done the proper preparation.

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> We can only learn from the past, especially from those leaders or episodes that challenge and sharpen our moral standards and expand our code of ethics and give us the necessary courage to do better, be fairer and integrate higher principles in our thinking.

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I whole heartedly agree. However, I'm not sure a conquering autocrat from the 6th century BCE is your best role model, all things considered.

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Edit: I just clicked on a link below the article after finishing this post, and stumbled into an opinion piece. The Iranian might provide enough fodder to keep me busy on this sub for a while.

E2, for Rule 3: The Jewish Study Bible, The Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation | Encyclopaedia Iranica | Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire, 550-330 BCE, by Matt Waters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) | Cyrus the Great: Life and Lore, edited by M. Rahim Shayegan, (Boston: Ilex Foundation 2018)