Following her previous books and articles on ancient Kingship, Lynette Mitchell has written an impressive and thorough book on one of the absolute “celebrities” of the ancient world, Cyrus the Great. Cyrus’ life and destiny has been told, retold or repurposed and interpreted from the sixth century BCE in the ancient Near East, in ancient Greece, in Rome, in mediaeval Europe and beyond. Mitchell reviews the different versions beginning with the very first mentioning of Cyrus in the Ehulhul Cylinder and ending in the fifteenth century CE where the reintroduction of Greek texts in the Latin West led to new trajectories. The review documents that there is not one, but many Cyruses, and the book is therefore not really a biography of a man, but a biography of the stories that surround his kingship. According to Mitchell, it would not be methodologically sound to prefer one story to another. Likewise, it would be wrong to try to rationalize the different stories to form coherent narratives, because they are not coherent, but reflections of different aspects of kingship or leadership embedded in different cultural contexts. Instead, Mitchell proposes to present each stage or each version in the creation of Cyrus as a legend contextualizing it in its own literary and theological setting. Throughout the book, Mitchell engages energetically and impressively in the main text as well as in the notes with earlier and still ongoing research.
The book consists of seven chapters. In the Introduction, Mitchell lays the foundation in terms of a description of the ancient background reasonably giving most attention to the geographical, sociological and cultural background in the Near East. In the Introduction, she also evolves the methodology reaching the conclusions referred to above. Chapter 2. unfolds further Cyrus’ place in Near Eastern Kingship, his ethnic identity not least in relation to the ideology presented in the Cyrus Cylinder and in the program for and the idea of the Garden Palace at Pasargadae. Chapters 3-6 follow the traditional stages of a life story under the headline: Cyrus’ Birth Stories, Cyrus and the Medes, Cyrus as a cosmic warrior and Cyrus: an exemplary death. The Conclusion is short but draws together the results and concludes (p. 155) that there is no canonical account but rather shifts and adaptations as different authors in diverse periods change the stories according to their needs and the concerns of their own time. The book also includes Irving Finkel’s translation of The Cyrus Cylinder in an appendix. In addition to the appendix, the book is well equipped with maps and figures, useful surveys of relative chronologies, key dates, an index and a comprehensive bibliography.
Very few points or dates in Cyrus’ life are fixed. According to the Babylonian Chronicles, he defeated Astyages in 550 BCE, became king in Babylon in 539 and died in 530. Moreover, his identity or his self-identity is not easy to pin down, Persian or Elamite, Assyrian or Babylonian, because literary documents regarding his career and rise to power are few except the so-called Cyrus Cylinder, which in itself also mixes different cultural traditions both Babylonian and Assyrian and has a clear ideological purpose. Nevertheless, Mitchell succeeds in creating a picture of the region and culture Cyrus came from and in placing him within a broader Near Eastern culture. She points to pastoral nomadism as an important condition for the first and to ideas on the metahuman and in some cases divine conception of Kingship for the second. Throughout the book, Mitchell uses all kinds of material, be it archaeological, sociological and theological and she supports her views carefully with parallels.
The oral nature of the Near Eastern storytelling has long been known, but Mitchell argues convincingly for the view that this is not a one-way journey. Oral stories become written stories and are then adapted as oral versions again. An important factor in this transmission is the so-called Scribal Matrix, i.e., the education and training of youths for ritual and administrative purposes. Memorization appears to have played an important part and maybe public declaiming.
Given the vastness and spread of the material, it is understandable that some stages and stories receive more attention than others do. It is only natural, in contrast to earlier Hellenocentric views, that the embeddedness in the Near East carries more weight than the one in ancient Greece, which is well known and treated in many other works. Herodotus too, must receive more attention than later authors, seeing that he probably was their source and that his version in the end was most influential. His dramatic description of Cyrus’ death and mutilation in the hands of a woman, the queen of the Massagetae, Tomyris, was retold and reinterpreted again and again in Rome and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries because of the interest in famous men and women. Interestingly, Herodotus’ Tomyris becomes a mythical figure transformed into the queen not of the Massagetae, but of the Amazons. Whether the amount of attention given to Ctesias is fair, is open for question in view of the fact that we only have his text in fragments and preserved in much later authors. The author, though, is aware of this, as it appears p. 3. Maybe more could have been done with Xenophon. Although his Cyropaedia is mostly fiction, the deathbed scene may contain reminiscences of Near Eastern material.
A central merit of the book is the demonstration of the rich pool of storytelling that existed in the Near East. Its different patterns of narrative, which emerge in stories of the King as warrior, or as gardener, or as stranger king, destroyer of cities as well as builder, as elected and protected by the gods and maybe in Cyrus’ case their equal. The many different Cyruses incorporate almost all of these patterns, but differently in different works and authors. He is the destroyer of Babylon, but in the Hebrew Bible also the restorer of Jerusalem. He is the conqueror of the Medes but saves Croesus from the pyre. Out of it all Lynette Mitchell draws a fascinating story of a historical figure who became a legend.
The result is an interesting, well-researched and inspiring book.