Director of British Museum, Neil MacGregor
Ted Talks, July 2011
The things we make have one supreme quality, they live longer than us. We perish, they survive. We have one life, they have many lives. And in each life, they can mean different things. Which means that while we all have one autobiography, they have many.
I want this morning to talk about the story, the biography, or rhather the biographies of one particular object. One remarkable thing. It doesn't, I agree, look very much. It's about the size of a rugby ball. It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with cuneiform writing, and then baked dry in the sun. And, as you can see, it's been knocked about of it. Which is not surprising, because it was made two and a half thousand years ago, and it was dug up in 1879.
But today, this thing is, I believe, a major player in the politics of the Middle East. And it's an object with fascinating stories, and the stories that are by no means over yet. The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war, and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler, and instant regime change. And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you will be very familiar with: Belshazzar's feast. Because we're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 B.C. And there are parallels between the events of 539 B.C. and 2003, and in between, on, stauntly.
What you are looking at is Rembrandt's painting, down at the national gallery in London, illustrating the text of the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. And you all know roughly the story. Belshazzar, the son of Nabonidus. Nabonidus who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem, and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon. Not only the Jews, he had taken the temple vessels. He had ransacked, desecrated the temple of the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem, had been taken to Babylon. Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast. And in order to make it even more exciting, he adds a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun and he brings out the temple vessels. He was already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia, and that night, Daniel tells us, at the height of the festivities, a hand appeared that wrote on the wall: 'you are weighed in the balance and found wanting and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and Persians.' At that very night, Cyrus, King of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell.
It is of course a great moment in the history of the Jewish people. It's a great story, it's a story we all know, the writing on the wall is part of our everyday language. What happened next was remarkable. It is where our cylinder enters the story. Cyrus, King of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight. The great empire of Babylon, which ran from central/southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus. And Cyrus makes a declaration, and that is what this cylinder is. The declaration made by the ruler, guided by God, who had toppled the Iraqi despot, and was going to bring freedom to the people.
In ringing Babylonian, it was written in Babylonian, it says: 'I am Cyrus, king of all the universe. The great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four corners of the world."
They're not shy of hyperboles you can see. This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we've got. And is written, as you'll see in due course, by very skilled PR consultants. So the hyperbole is not actually surprising.
And what is the great king, the powerful king, the king of the four corners of the world going to do. He goes on to say that having conquered Babylon, he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians, Nabonidus, Belshazzar have captured and enslaved, go free. He'll let them return to their countries, and more important, he will let them all recover the gods, the statues, the temple vessels that had been confiscated. All the peoples that the Babylonians had depressed, and removed, will go home. And they'll take with them their gods, and they'll be able to restore their alters and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place.
This is the decree. This object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews, after the exile in Babylon, the years they had spent sitting by the waters in Babylon, weeping when they remembered Jerusalem; those Jews were allowed to go home. They were allowed to return to Jerusalem, and to rebuild the temple.
It's a central document in Jewish history. And the Book of Chronicles, the Book of Ezra, in the Hebrew scriptures, reported in ringing terms. This is the Jewish version of the same story: 'Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, all the kingdoms of the earth that Lord God of Heaven have given me, that He has charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem. Who is there among you of His people? The Lord God be with him, and let him go up.'
Go up. 'Alyah'. The central element, still of the notion of return. A central part of the life of Judaism.
As you all know, that return from exile, the second temple, reshaped Judaism. And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia. Reported for us in Hebrew in scripture, and in Babylonian in clay.
Two great texts, what about the politics? What was going on was the fundamental shift in middle eastern history. The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire. Cyrus begins in the 530s B.C., and by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control. This empire is, in fact, the middle east as we now know it. This is what shapes the middle east, as we now know it. It was the largest empire the world had known until then.
Much more importantly, it was the first multicultural multifaith state on a huge scale. It had to be run in a quite new way. It had to be run in different languages, the fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing, and it has to recognize there are different habits, different peoples, different religions, different faiths. All of those are respected by Cyrus.
Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational multifaith multicultural society. And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen, and which survived for two hundred years of stability, until it was shattered by Alexander**. It left a dream of the middle east as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together. The Greek invasions ended that. And of course, Alexander couldn't sustain the government, and it fragmented.
But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central. The Greek historian, Xenophon, wrote his book Cyropedia promoting Cyrus as the great ruler. And throughout European culture afterwards, Cyrus remained the model. This is a 16th century image, just to show you how widespread his venerations said he was, and Xenophon's book on Cyrus, and how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the founding fathers of the American Revolution.
Jefferson was a great admirer. The ideals of Cyrus, obviously speaking for those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state.
Meanwhile, back in Babylon, things had not been going well. After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost. Until 1879, when the cylinder is discovered. The British Museum expedition digging in Babylon. And it enters now another story. It enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century: are the scriptures reliable? Can we trust them?
We only knew about the return of the Jews, and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures. No other evidence. Suddenly, this appeared and great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures who had their faith of creation shaken by evolution, by geology. Here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true. It's a great 19th century moment.
But, this, of course, is where it becomes complicated. The facts were true, hoora for archeology. But the interpretation was rhather more complicated. Because the cylinder account, and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect. The Babylonian cylinder is written by the priest of the great god of Bablyon, Marduk. And, not surprisingly, it tells that all this was done by Marduk. Marduk, we hold, calls Cyrus by his name. Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, of course to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon. Marduk tells Cyrus that he would do these great generous things of setting the people free. And this why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk.
The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised that they take a rather different view of this. For them, of course, it cannot possibly be Marduk that made all this happen. It could only be Jehova. And so in Isiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this not to Marduk, but to the Lord God of Israel.
The Lord God of Israel, who also calls Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand, and talks of him shepherding his people. It's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event. Two different religious takeovers of the same political fact. God, we know, is usually on the side of the big battalions. The question is which god was it. And the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century, to realize that the Hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion.
And it is quite clear that the cylinder is older than the text of Isiah, and yet Jehova is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk. And there's a slight sense that Isiah knows this. Because he says: 'I have called', this is God speaking, of course: 'I have called thee by thy name, though thou hast not known me.' I think it is recognized that Cyrus doesn't realize that he's acting under orders from Jehova.
I think he was even surprised he was acting out of orders from Marduk, because his interests, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian, was a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts.
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