Cyrus the Great

Cyrus II was born around 600 BC into the small kingdom of Anshan in southwestern Iran. His father Cambyses I was a vassal of Median king Astyages; his mother Mandane was Astyages' daughter. King of Anshan from 559 BC, he ruled a Persian polity still subordinate to Media. In 550 BC he revolted against his maternal grandfather, winning partly through the defection of Median general Harpagus.

Around 547 BC he marched into Anatolia and defeated the wealthy Croesus of Lydia; the fall of Sardis brought the Greek cities of the Aegean coast under Persian rule. In 539 BC his army entered Babylon with strikingly little bloodshed. The priesthood resented king Nabonidus, so Cyrus arrived as 'the chosen of Marduk'. The Cyrus Cylinder, excavated in 1879 and now in the British Museum, is the official policy statement: gods returned to their cities, deportees sent home. As part of the same programme he freed the Babylonian Jewish exiles and authorised rebuilding the Jerusalem Temple; Isaiah 45 calls him 'the Lord's anointed', the only non-Jew so named in Jewish tradition.

The principle of his rule was 'do not destroy what you conquer'. He preserved local elites, respected indigenous cults, and developed the early satrapy system pairing Persian governors with native administration. This two-layer structure was the institutional innovation Darius I would perfect into the 200-year frame of the Achaemenid Empire. Herodotus has him killed campaigning in Central Asia against the Massagetae queen Tomyris, who plunged his severed head into a sack of blood - legend in its details, but death on campaign is plausible. His tomb still stands at Pasargadae.

Xenophon's Cyropaedia turned him into the model king of antiquity. Modern Iran reveres him as a national hero, and the Cylinder is sometimes hailed as 'the first human rights declaration' - an anachronism: his tolerance was pragmatic, not philosophical. Yet a sixth-century BC monarch put on record a policy of respecting the conquered.