# The Cyrus Cylinder > Unknown Babylonian scribal workshop, working for the court of Cyrus II of Persia - c. 539-530 BC > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/achaemenid-neo-babylonian-scribal-workshop/cyrus-cylinder-british-museum/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-19 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown Babylonian scribal workshop, working for the court of Cyrus II of Persia - **Date:** c. 539-530 BC - **Medium:** Fired clay (barrel-shaped foundation cylinder), inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform - **Dimensions:** 21.9-22.8 cm long; diameter 7.8-8.2 cm at one end, 7.9 cm at the other, up to 10 cm at the maximum girth - **Object type:** Antiquity - **Period:** Achaemenid Persian, immediately following the Neo-Babylonian period - **Current location:** British Museum, London, Room 52 (Ancient Iran gallery) - **Attribution:** unknown ## Summary A barrel of fired clay barely 23 centimetres long, buried in the foundations of Babylon's wall around 539 BC and dug up by workmen under the British Museum excavator Hormuzd Rassam in March 1879. In Babylonian cuneiform it records, in the conventional language of a much older Mesopotamian genre, how the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon without a battle, restored the city's neglected cults, and released deported peoples to return home - a genre he shared, almost word for word, with the very predecessor his text condemns.Two separate scholarly recoveries completed the object long after Rassam's spade left the ground: a fragment quietly sitting unrecognised in Yale's Babylonian Collection since 1920, identified as the cylinder's missing final lines by Paul-Richard Berger in 1970-71, and two further tablet fragments found inside the British Museum's own uncatalogued backlog in December 2009 and January 2010, proving the same proclamation had also circulated as an ordinary copied document, not only as a single buried deposit addressed to a god.From 1971 the object also carries a second, entirely modern history: promoted by the Pahlavi state as the first charter of human rights, gifted in facsimile to the United Nations, and pressed into service as the emblem of a lavish state celebration staged by a government Amnesty International would soon name among the world's worst human-rights violators. Irving Finkel and other Assyriologists working on the actual cuneiform have said plainly that the reading does not survive contact with the text. Both histories belong on the same record, kept visibly apart. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 539-530 BC-1879** Buried as a foundation deposit, Amran ibn Ali mound (Esagila), Babylon `[documented]` (origin and burial) Commissioned in the name of Cyrus the Great following his capture of Babylon in October 539 BC and buried, by genre convention, within the fabric of the city's rebuilt fortification wall or an associated temple structure. No documentary record survives between burial and its rediscovery in 1879; the intervening roughly 2,400 years are a gap, not a documented custody chain. - **March 1879-1879** Excavated by workmen under Hormuzd Rassam's overseer Daud Toma, for the British Museum `[documented]` (excavation) Recovered at the Amran mound, Babylon, between approximately 17 and 23 March 1879, under a firman granted by Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Rassam himself had already left Baghdad (2 April 1879) and did not personally lift the object from the ground; it was found and reported by his site staff. Objects including the cylinder were shipped to London via the Baghdad merchant Baltazar and are reported to have arrived already broken. - **1879-17 June 1880** British Museum (received, then formally registered) `[documented]` (acquisition) Received and examined by the Museum's cuneiform curator Theophilus Pinches later in 1879; formally registered into the collection on 17 June 1880, the date reflected in registration number 1880,0617.1941. The gap between arrival and formal registration is ordinary Museum administrative practice for the period, not evidence of a separate transaction or owner. - **1880-September 2010** British Museum, London `[documented]` (ownership) Continuous Museum ownership and, for most of this period, display. A first short loan to Iran took place around the October 1971 Persepolis anniversary celebrations, per Iranian and UN sources describing that event, though the exact duration of that 1971 loan is not detailed in the sources consulted for this record. - **12 September 2010-April 2011** On loan to the National Museum of Iran, Tehran; British Museum retained ownership throughout `[documented]` (loan) Unveiled in Tehran on 12 September 2010 after a loan process delayed since a promised 2005 date and further postponed from a planned 16 January 2010 unveiling, a delay the British Museum attributed to examining the newly identified duplicate tablet fragments BM 47134/47179 and which Iran's cultural heritage organisation, through Hamid Baqaei, treated as evasive, briefly cutting cooperative ties with the Museum on 8 February 2010. The loan, agreed for four months, was extended to roughly seven months amid strong attendance (reported approaching half a million visitors) before the cylinder returned to London. - **April 2011-spring 2024** British Museum, London `[documented]` (ownership) On permanent display in Room 52, the Ancient Iran gallery, with further short-term study or exhibition loans (including US venues from 2013) not exhaustively itemised in the sources consulted for this record. - **spring 2024-30 June 2024** On loan to the Yale Peabody Museum, New Haven; British Museum retained ownership `[documented]` (loan) The first loan of the cylinder from the British Museum to Yale, the institution that had unknowingly held the missing end of its text (the Nies fragment, NBC 2504) for roughly fifty years before Berger's 1970-71 identification. Negotiated over a reported four years. - **2024-present** British Museum, London `[documented]` (ownership) Returned to the Museum after the Yale loan. A further loan to the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, was approved in principle by the Museum's trustees in March 2022 for prospective autumn 2024 dates and drew a formal protest from Iran's Directorate General of Museums in January 2024; the sources consulted for this record do not show this loan as confirmed, scheduled, or having taken place. ## Open questions - Where exactly does composition sit within 539-530 BC? No source consulted gives a narrower date range than 'within about a year of the conquest' for when the text was drafted and the cylinder buried. - Was the cylinder's scribe the same person, or workshop, that produced the duplicate tablets BM 47134/47179, or an entirely separate copying event? The colophon naming Qishti-Marduk belongs to the tablet, not the cylinder, and no source links the two directly. - How many further copies of this text existed and were distributed through Cyrus's newly absorbed territories? The 2009-2010 discovery proved at least one tablet copy existed beyond the buried cylinder; Finkel has suggested more copies likely remain undiscovered in Iraq, but none has been reported found since. - Has the clay body ever been subjected to a published petrographic or compositional sourcing study to confirm a Babylon-local origin? No such study appears in the sources consulted for this record. - What was the exact original burial location and orientation of the cylinder within the Amran/Esagila foundations, beyond the general mound identification? The excavation predates modern stratigraphic recording and the sources consulted do not give a precise findspot within the mound. - Has Iraq, as the modern state occupying the findspot, ever formally requested repatriation or made a public claim on the cylinder? No such claim appears in the sources consulted for this record, and its absence is recorded here as a finding rather than assumed. ## Sources - [1] British Museum, collection online catalogue entry for the cylinder (museum number 90920, registration 1880,0617.1941). - [2] Yale Peabody Museum, press coverage of Irving Finkel's lecture dispelling myths about the Cyrus Cylinder. - [3] Encyclopaedia Iranica, 'CYRUS iv. The Cyrus cylinder'. Bibliography only was retrievable in this research pass; flagged for replacement with the full article text (Kuhrt, Harmatta, Oppenheim references indicated). - [4] Livius.org, 'Cyrus Cylinder', including translation notes based on the Cogan translation adapted to Schaudig's edition. - [5] Zoroastrian Heritage (blog), 'The Cyrus Cylinder', drawing on Irving Finkel's 2013 book 'The Cyrus Cylinder: The King of Persia's Proclamation from Ancient Babylon'. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Finkel's book directly. - [6] Zoroastrian Heritage (blog), 'The Remarkable Discovery of the Cyrus Cylinder', on Rassam's 1879 excavation, again drawing on Finkel's 2013 book. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Finkel's book directly. - [7] World History Encyclopedia, 'The Cyrus Cylinder'. Tertiary encyclopedia entry; flagged for replacement with primary Assyriological publication. - [8] World History Encyclopedia, image caption 'Additional Fragments of the Cyrus Cylinder Text'. - [9] Yale Herald, 'Piecing Together the Cyrus Cylinder' (2024), on the Yale fragment history and the 2024 Yale Peabody loan. - [10] Aggregated web search synthesis on genre parallels between the Cyrus Cylinder and the royal inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, Esarhaddon, Sargon II, Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar II, including the cylinder's own reference to finding an Ashurbanipal building inscription during wall reconstruction. - [11] The Art Newspaper, 'Discovery of fragment belonging to British Museum's Cyrus cylinder further defers loan to Iran' (2010), on the BM 47134/BM 47179 discovery by Wilfred Lambert and Irving Finkel and the scribe Qishti-Marduk. - [12] Wikipedia, 'Cylinders of Nabonidus', on the Sippar and Ur cylinders and their shared rhetorical structure with the Cyrus Cylinder. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a primary Assyriological edition. - [13] Aggregated web search synthesis on Neo-Assyrian/Neo-Babylonian royal inscription genre and the theme of divine abandonment and selection in the inscriptions of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, compared to the Cyrus Cylinder. - [15] United Nations Gifts collection, entry on the 1971 ceramic replica of the Cyrus Cylinder ('Edict of Cyrus', gift ID UNNY068G) presented by Princess Ashraf Pahlavi. - [16] Al Jazeera, 'Iran cuts ties with British Museum' (8 February 2010). - [17] Aggregated web search synthesis of contemporaneous 2010 reporting (The History Blog, Elginism, BiblePlaces, NBC News, BBC News) on the Cyrus Cylinder's 12 September 2010 arrival in Tehran, the extended roughly seven-month loan, and its return to the British Museum in spring 2011. - [18] Elginism, 'Cyrus Cylinder loan to Iran by British Museum finally goes ahead' (2010). - [19] BiblePlaces.com, 'Cyrus Cylinder Loaned to Iran' (September 2010). - [20] Aggregated web search synthesis on the Yale Peabody Museum 2024 loan terms and negotiation timeline. - [21] The Art Newspaper, 'British Museum's planned Cyrus Cylinder loan to Jerusalem sparks protests from Iran' (26 January 2024). - [22] Ajam Media Collective, 'Reconstructing a Persian Past: Contemporary Uses and Misuses of the Cyrus Cylinder in Iranian Nationalist Discourse' (2013), on the 1968 origin of the Shah's human-rights framing, the 1971 Persepolis celebrations and UN gift, and named scholarly critiques (Wiesehofer, Walker, Llewellyn-Jones). - [23] Wikipedia, '2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire', on the cylinder's use as the event emblem and on coins, banknotes and stamps, and on contemporary criticism of the celebration. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a scholarly account of the celebrations. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.