Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, is the earliest influential military commander for whom at least some reli¬able records survive. In the sixth century B.C. he defeated the Medes, Lydians, and Babylonians and united them into a single empire that reached from India to the Mediterranean Sea. Cyrus, as efficient in administrating his domain as he was in conquering it, established a lasting kingdom that survived and prospered for two centuries as the world’s leading power.
It is difficult to separate fact from myth about the early years of Cyrus, believed to have been born between 600 and 585 B.C. His father, Cambyses I, was a member of the Achaemenid dynasty. Mythology, particularly the writing of Herodotus, says that as a child Cyrus was banished to the mountains, suckled by a wolf, and later raised by a shepherd. Some of these accounts go as far as to claim that Cyrus’s Persian name translates as “young dog.”
The first reliable information about Cyrus comes from 558 B.C., when he became the ruler of the Persian district of Anshan, apparently succeeding his father. A few years later, Cyrus initiated a rebellion against the ruling Median Empire. In a three-year war, Cyrus defeated the Medians, treating them mercifully and incor¬porating them into his empire. Cyrus adopted many Median laws and administrative procedures as his own.
Cyrus’s next challenge came from King Croesus of Lydia, in Asia Minor, who invaded Persia in 546 B.C. After repelling the invaders, Cyrus pursued them back into Lydia and engaged them in a decisive battle on the Thymbra plain. Cyrus formed his outnumbered army into a square, with his archers preventing Lydian penetration. As the Lydians spread out to surround the square, Cyrus countered with his cavalry to cut off and destroy the isolated enemy groups. When Croesus ceased fighting and withdrew to his capital of Sardis (near modern Izmir, Turkey), Cyrus again pursued and completed his conquest. Cyrus spared Croesus, and his kind treatment of the vanquished Lydians ended their hostility and eventually added their support to his army.
In 539 B.C., Cyrus turned his army to the rich kingdom of Babylon, to his east. The Babylonians, unhappy with their own leadership and impressed with Cyrus’s treatment of previously conquered territories, surrendered without a fight. Included in the bloodless conquest of Babylonia were Palestine and Syria. Cyrus’s humane leadership continued. Along with a lack of brutality against the citizens of the newly acquired territories, Cyrus righted several previous wrongs. Of significance was his return of the Jews to their homeland, from which the Babylonians had deported them fifty years before.
The Persian Empire now reached from the eastern Indus River border with India north to the Aral, Caspian, and Black Seas and west to the Mediterranean. It was the center of politics and culture of the civilized world. Cyrus, now known as “the Great,” assumed the title he preferred: “king of Babel, Sumer, Accad, and the four corners of the world.”
Although his empire was vast, rich, peaceful, and threatened by no outside force, Cyrus apparendy desired more conquest. In 530 B.C. he set out to conquer the Massagetae, a group of nomadic tribes living east of the Caspian Sea, in Central Asia. The Persians won the early fights in the war that followed, but within a year Cyrus, at only thirty-nine years of age, was killed in battle, and his soldiers were unable to recover his body. The queen of the Mas¬sagetae supposedly removed his head and placed it in a blood- filled animal skin, with the comment that now the Persian leader could have all the blood he wanted.
Neither the loss of Cyrus nor the battle threatened the Per¬sian Empire. Cyrus left behind a well-disciplined army with a specific chain of command that allowed for the succession of his son. Cambyses II led the Persians to victory over the Massagetaes, recovered the body of his father, and returned it for burial in the empire’s capital of Pasargadae. Later conquering Egypt as well, Cambyses II continued to maintain the respect from Greece and other neighbors that Cyrus had secured to ensure the peace.
Cyrus gained his empire through military strength and his ability to unite those he defeated. According to surviving records, he was a remarkable leader who knew how to develop an enthusiastic army capable of defeating larger forces.
Cyrus also exhibited truly remarkable talent in governing his own and conquered people. His policies of moderation in the treatment of conquered peoples and his toleration of their local religions and customs gained him allies of former enemies. As a result, the Persian Empire survived in prosperity and peace for more than two centuries after the death of its founder. Not until Alexander the Great did portions of the empire fall to an outside force. Even then, remnants of Cyrus’s vast domain remained under Persian control for another twelve centuries.
Although other great empires to come, such as the Roman, British, and Chinese, would exert stronger influences on world development, the Persian Empire was the first, and it would not have existed in its massive form—from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River on the border with India—or perhaps at all, had it not been for the leadership of Cyrus. Cyrus remains today a Persian hero and an important leader in military history.