Cyrus the Great - Rise of the Achaemenid Empire DOCUMENTARY

When looking at monarchs who have been nicknamed "the

great

s," it is easy to become numb to its overuse, but one of the few ancient "

great

s" who truly deserved this noble title was the founder and first "King of Kings" of the powerful Persian Achaemenid Empire - Cyrus II - also known as Cyrus the Great. Welcome to our video covering Cyrus'

rise

to power and his actions that shaped the world we live in. The sponsor of this video Raid: Shadow Legends allows you to master hundreds of champions, millions of skill combinations, and countless tactics to take on raid bosses, dungeons, campaign battles, and PvP arena matches.

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One of its provinces was Persis, mountainous home of the subordinate Kingdom of Anshan. Its rulers were the Achaemenid clan, which was said to have descended from an eponymous founder: Achaemenes. In myth, the Median prince Astyages1 had a prophetic dream in which his pregnant daughter Mandana exuded water that would soon flood all of Asia, so he married her to one of these kings of Anshan, knowing that no son of a simple Persian would ever rule. the big ones. Middle Empire. But soon after he had another dream, in which vines grew from Mandana's womb to engulf the entire world.

Terrified and paranoid, Astyages decided to kill her son when she was born. This child, known as Kourosh in the ancient Persian pronunciation, but to us as Cyrus, came into the world in the royal palace of Ecbatana in the year 600 BC. Astyages immediately ordered one of his older men, Harpagus, to take the baby, kill it, and dispose of the body far away. Harpagus said he would do as he was told and took the boy home. Unwilling to kill the child, but fearing the wrath of Astyages, Harpagus ordered a shepherd Mithridates to do the deed for him. However, instead of killing young Cyrus, Mithridates and his wife secretly raised him as their own son.

Harpago had no idea and neither did Astyages. One day Cyrus, then known in his secret existence as Agradates, was playing “king and court” with some other children, one of whom was the son of a Median magnate. As part of the game, "King" Cyrus ended up whipping the young nobleman, who subsequently complained to his father about the incident. The perpetrator was summoned to answer before Astyages, who quickly discerned that he was the boy Harpagus had been ordered to kill. Astyages feigned calm and explained to Harpagus that he had often felt remorse for the order and that his actions should actually be celebrated with a banquet.

By order of Astyages, Harpagus sent his thirteen-year-old son to the palace and then himself arrived as a guest. During the feast, Astyages made Harpagus eat his own son, and although the courtier claimed, "Everything you do pleases me," he would always hold a grudge. Meanwhile, Cyrus was saved and even became royal cupbearer, a position of considerable prestige. The young Persian also served as a royal envoy and advisor, becoming indispensable to Astyages. Cyrus also married Cassandana, a fellow Achaemenid and the love of his life. At the same time, Harpagus had been rallying the anti-Astyages nobles and befriending Cyrus.

In the year 552 B.C. They decided to act. The prince, who was already forty years old, returned to his homeland and rebelled. After winning an initial battle there and another on the border between Persia and Media, Cyrus and his allies crushed Astyages' army outside Pasargadae after Harpagus betrayed Astyages, and soon afterward took Ecbatana. Almost immediately, the Median governors of Hyrcania, Parthia, and Bactria also submitted. The Achaemenid Empire was born, which in its beginnings was a collaboration between Persia and Media. Afterwards, Cyrus diligently administered this newly won domain. Their territories were divided into semi-autonomous provinces known as satrapies and were governed by satraps, initially drawn from both Persians and Medes.

Overseers were sent to supervise these lesser rulers, and 10,000 of Cyrus' greatest warriors were instituted as the famous Spear-bearing Immortals, whose ranks never fell below that number. The "King of Kings" did all this under the protection of treaties of friendship promulgated with his powerful neighbors Babylon and Lydia. However, encouraged by a famously misleading response from the Delphic oracle, the Lydian king Croesus began to mobilize forces to attack this leapt-up Persian usurper. Around the year 548 BC. C., probably informed by expert spies about the military concentration at the Halys River, Cyrus sent envoys to the Ionian Greeks, asking them to stay out of the coming war;

However, the cities loyal to Lydia flatly refused, with the exception of Miletus. This decision among the Aegean Greeks would eventually, more than half a century later, trigger the legendary Greco-Persian wars of Salamis and Thermopylae. Crossing the Halys and thus the Achaemenian border by a bridge in 547, Croesus and his great army approached Pteria and laid siege to it. Hearing of the invasion of his capital, Ecbatana, Cyrus marched west to confront the Lydians, who were joined at multiple stages by loyal armies from the satrapies. The core of his force was Persians and Medes, but there were also Hyrcanians, Sakae, and many others.

Pteria had already fallen and its people had been sent to Lydia as slaves when the Achaemenid army, probably smaller in size than Lydia's, arrived. Confident of his ability to defeat Cyrus, the Lydian king prepared for battle, but in the day-long clash, the Persian center pierced and severely bloodied his army, leading Croesus to retreat to Sardis. The king of Lydia hoped that winter would stop hostilities, so he sent emissaries to allies Babylon, Egypt, and Sparta, asking them to send armies within five months to help him. Crucially, he also dismissed all of his mercenaries with similar orders. However, contrary to the warlike trend of this period, Cyrus entered Lydia and camped within sight of Sardis.

Croesus sent a formidable army of cavalry to confront the Persians. Harpagus advised that his own cavalry mount camels and form the vanguard to scare off the Lydian horses. When the battle began, this maneuver was successful and Croesus, despite his heavy losses, was able to retreat to the fortress of Sardis. Before the Persians surrounded the city, Croesus managed to send a message for help. However, after only fourteen days of siege, one of the largest capitals in the Near East fell. After that lightning campaign, Sardis and all of Asia Minor were now Achaemenid territory. Croesus himself was eventually saved and brought to advise Cyrus.

The oracle was right, but he had destroyed his own powerful

empire

, and not that of the Persians. Although expansion through conquest does not appear to have been a priority for the Persian king prior to the Lydian invasion of his territory, it is almost certain that he would have set out to dominate the region at some point. After the annexation of the kingdom of Croesus, Cyrus and his generals set out to create a new great capital in Pasargadae, in addition to subduing the resistance in peripheral territories such as Bactria and Urartu. Around the year 542 BC. C., Cyrus' attention was focused on another great power ready for conquest: the so-called Neo-Babylonian Empire.

Far from the “good old days” of Nebuchadnezzar II, the current Babylonian king Nabonidus was not a good ruler. He diverted favor and funding from the Babylonian priests, neglected the common people, stopped city renovation works, and even canceled the new year festival of the great god Marduk. Discontent was widespread and loyalty to the king, and to his son Belshazzar, was at its lowest ebb, and Cyrus was well aware of this state of affairs. Persian infiltrators began to spread throughout the Nabonidus Empire that Cyrus intended to restore Marduk's supremacy in Babylon. In 540, sensing the time was right, Cyrus sent his army to seize Babylonian-held Elam with the help of a native revolt.

This blow caused Nabonidus to return from his retirement3 and return to Babylon, where he took control of the army. It is notorious that he seized the sacred statues of his numerous domains to ensure his obedience. The following year, Cyrus and his increasingly powerful army marched south to invade the Babylonian Empire, but he would do so as a liberator. However, his advance was blocked for weeks by a swollen tributary of the Tigris River just north of Opis. Although the obstacle was overcome by Persian troops who dug many canals around the river to divert its course, this delay allowed Nabonidus to gather a large army and advance north.

The king himself, however, remained installed in Sippar, while General Gubara directed the war. The battle took place at the end of September near Opis. What we do know is that Cyrus's forces, fighting under the gold and red banner of Shahbaz, won another overwhelming victory. Opis was sacked, while Gubara surrendered, earning himself a place in the Persian hierarchy. Nabonidus headed south along the river. Instead of facing another hostile army in the field, Cyrus arrived with his vast army on the outskirts of the huge, sprawling city of Babylon and found Nabonidus's armies camped inside, prepared for an extensive siege.

Even for the indomitable Cyrus, it would have been a truly daunting sight. Its defenses included multiple layers of moats, the great Euphrates River itself, and two colossal walls, inner and outer, eighty feet high or more, stretching for fifteen miles around the city's nearly triangular circumference. . The orderly, gridded districts were crisscrossed by streets and occupied by large-scale residences, temples, palaces, and, most robust of all, the great citadel of the royal guard beside the Ishtar Gate. As he usually did, King Cyrus summoned his advisors to a council of war immediately upon his arrival and debated the best way to seize the city.

They decided that a full-scale assault would result in massive casualties, so they opted for a complex strategy based on subtlety, intelligence, and timing. First, to maintain the illusion of a conventional siege, the Achaemenid king divided his army in two, stationing one on the east bank of the Euphrates, where the river entered Babylon in the north, and the other downstream, where the river abandoned her. Cyrus himself led all non-combatants, including servants, slaves, and attendants north, and soon after arrived at a basin that had been dug years before to temporarily redirect the river. Putting his men to work toward a similar end, Cyrus had a wide canal dug from the disused basin to the river and cut down giant palm trees to act as levies to redirect the water.

When the earth was moved, a large portion of the Euphrates flow was diverted into the basin instead of flowing toward Babylon. While Xenophon reports that the water level before this ingenious work was more than two men deep, Herodotus claims that afterwards the Euphrates was only waist-deep. The "impassable" river was now a viable entry route into the city. That same night, carefully timed because it marked the advent of a great festival of music, drinking, and revelry in Babylon, Cyrus had Gubara infiltrate the city across the diminished river, which the celebrating citizens or guards of the capital of Nabonido doesn't seem to do.

Have noticed. The defenders, lulled into a false sense of security by their great defensive force and weakened by drink, were unable to resist the Persian infiltration. By dawn, Prince Belshazzar had died, the gates were opened and the city was under Achaemenid control. Nabonidus, who had actually been at nearby Borsippa, was handed over to the Persian monarch and then allowed to undertake a comfortable and happy exile in Carmania. Two weeks after capturing the city and taking care of all the necessary formalities, on October 26, 539, Cyrus entered Babylon and received an enthusiasticwelcome, restoring the priesthood of Marduk to its elevated position and meeting the needs of the people.

To further show his benevolence, the new ruler kept taxes to a minimum, completed several public works, and returned the idols confiscated by Nabonidus. Nabonidus's verse account summarizes what the people, or at least the favored priests, may have felt: “They are like prisoners when the prisons are opened. Freedom is returned to those who were surrounded by oppression. Everyone rejoices to see him as king.' In a famous act that would earn him unabashed applause in the pages of the Hebrew Bible, Cyrus the Great returned thousands of Jews, who had previously been deported as part of Nebuchadnezzar's so-called Babylonian exile. , to Jerusalem.

Not only did he restore the Jews to his homeland, but Cyrus is also said to have ordered the construction and state funding of what eventually became the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Because of this generosity, he was the only foreigner to be named Messiah in the Jewish religion. Without this, Judaism may have become extinct, while Christianity and Islam may never have existed. Following the Persian annexation of Babylon and its rich

empire

, Cyrus's only possible rival was Egypt, but that particular question of imperial expansion would wait until after the founder's death. There is a gap in the ancient sources after about 539, during which the Great King probably administered his provinces, stabilized the empire, and laid the foundations that would provide a solid foundation for centuries of prosperous rule.

Xenophon tells us that when the king was not on campaign with the army, he resided seven months a year in Babylon, where there was a warm and sunny climate. When spring came, Cyrus moved to Susa for three months and in summer he went up to Ecbatana, in the Median highlands, where the cooler climate was more tolerable. He would only visit Pasargadae seven times during his reign, while Persepolis was a later construction. The famine in our sources ends the multifaceted and intensely debated issue of the death of Cyrus the Great. The soldier-historian Xenophon, writing more than a century later, believed that the first Persian king died in his bed, while the Greek physician Ctesias claimed that Cyrus' death was due to wounds received in battle.

Herodotus, however, undoubtedly tells us the most fantastic and epic story of how the first King of Kings came to his end. In the late autumn of 530 BC. C., with his new hegemonic empire organized and in order, Cyrus led his army to face a new mortal enemy. After a long march through Iran, the Persian force reached the empire's northeastern steppe border, in present-day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. There, a fierce Scythian tribe known as the Massagetae were gathering a huge army of infantry and the famous nomadic cavalry. Upon reaching the vicinity of the River Oxus, where the Massagetae were at that time, Cyrus, who seems to have become arrogant because of all his successes, was informed that the previous leader of this troublesome people had died.

In her place ruled the intimidating Amazonian Scythian queen, known to us as Tomyris. Cyrus prepared his forces, but also sent an offer of marriage to the queen in the hope of a diplomatic conquest. This was quickly rejected. The clever queen knew that Cyrus only had an eye for her dominion, rather than her. While the Persians were in the process of building a pontoon over the Oxus, messengers from Tomyris arrived with an offer of their own. “Cease, king of the Medes, from what you propose; because you cannot know whether the carrying out of this work will benefit you.

Cease and be king of your own land; and be patient to see us govern those we govern.” Having made this brazen decree, Tomyris decreed that the bridge was unnecessary. Either he would withdraw from the river for three days and voluntarily fight the Persians there, in the open field, or the Persians could let the Massagetae cross, whichever seemed more convenient to them. Gathering his advisors, all but one recommended that Cyrus retreat and then smash Tomyris against the river. The only dissenter was Croesus, deposed king of the Lydians, who advised the Achaemenid ruler to cross to the other side.

Cyrus took his advice and did just that. Then, after setting up a luxurious camp and feigning retreat, the Persians attracted a third of the Massagetae army, who feasted and drank the "spoils." Then this force, led by the son of Tomyris, was attacked by the entire Persian army and destroyed. Tomyris's son committed suicide and her mother swore to avenge him by giving Cyrus the blood she clearly desired. On December 4, 530 BC, the armies of Cyrus and Tomyris clashed. At long range, the nomads and their Persian enemies were evenly matched, both people being brilliant archers. However, as the Massagetae approached, their heavy bronze armor and brutal battle axes tore the Achaemenid army to pieces.

Almost everything was annihilated and Cyrus died, either in the field or from his wounds a few days later. Tomyris fulfilled his promise by finding the Persian king's head and soaking it in animal skin blood. Somehow, through a negotiation or a bold act that we know nothing about, Cyrus' remains came to rest in the Tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae, a remnant of the ancient world that still exists more or less intact to this day. At the time of Alexander's conquest, 200 years later, there was an inscription on the tomb that read: “I am Cyrus, son of Cambyses, who founded the empire of Persia and ruled Asia.

Don't hold a grudge against me because of my monument.” There are more videos on the history of Iran on the way, so make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button to watch the next video in the series. Please consider liking, commenting and sharing; It's a great help. Our videos would be impossible without our kind sponsors and YouTube channel members, whose ranks you can join via the links in the description to find out our schedule, get early access to our videos, access our discord, and much more. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will see you in the next one.