7 - CYRUS THE GREAT (558–529 b.c.)

Summary

THE FOUR-WINGED GUARDIAN FIGURE

From a lonely pillar at Pasargadae the phantom of Cyrus, clad in an Elamite robe, flits across the ruins of the long-deserted city and beckons us to consider the remains of one of the world's greatest imperial dynasties: by a strange freak of archaeology we have a fleeting glimpse of a royal image arrested for eternity in stone. Many will be familiar with this great winged figure (pl. 6a) naming the king, the sole survivor of four which once stood on opposite sides of two doorways in the hypostyle building known as Portal R at Pasargadae. The top of this monument, now vanished, was once inscribed in three languages, Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, and posterity must be grateful to Ker Porter who, just before 1820, copied the inscription, and likewise to Flandin and Coste who left another record of it twenty years later.

The inscription itself makes a simple statement: “I (am) Cyrus the king an Achaemenian”, an authentic and contemporary record of the style used by the early forerunners of the dynasty, before the reign of Darius, when titles became pompous and elaborate.

The crown worn by the king is in remarkable contrast to the simplicity of the inscription, and was perhaps intended to signify imperial majesty: a strange Persian version of a concept of the divine Pharaoh. The splendid splayed horns are those of the Ovis longipes palaeoaegyptiacus, a variety of ram apparently common during the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, but rare thereafter. It is clear that this unique crown must have come to Pasargadae from some unknown source on the coast of Phoenicia, and that it carried with it the prestige and authority of some quasi-Egyptian god which had thus travelled far beyond the Nile, in a form appropriate to Ba'al. A convincing explanation of this strange transference has recently been made by Dr R. D. Barnett: he sees in it an expression of the oecumenical attitude of the Achaemenian kings who, from the time of Cyrus onwards, adopted a liberal policy of tolerance and conciliation towards the various religions embraced within their empire. I find this interpretation of the winged Cyrus the more attractive because in the nearby “Palace of Audience” to which Portal R gave access there were the remains of other carvings, including a god or priest clad in a fish cloak, clearly Assyrian in origin, and derived from the protective magical figures which had once adorned the portals of Nimrud and Nineveh (pl. 6b). On another portal the foot of a raptorial bird reminds us not only of the legs of a divine guardian on a doorway of Sennacherib's Palace at Nineveh, but also of the claws of the dragons on the Ishtar gate at Babylon. Here indeed at Pasargadae, in these quasi-Phoenician, Assyrian and Babylonian images, we have a forerunner of the Gate of All Nations which later on Xerxes was to erect at Persepolis.