What ancient sources do we have on Cyrus the great?

by [deleted]

The sources can be written such as the cyropaedia or archeological.

rosemary85

For textual sources, Amelie Kuhrt's The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (Routledge, 2007) pp. 47-103 gives the following (not in this order):

  • An inscribed clay prism, an inscribed cylinder seal, and a 6th-century tablet of transactions (on Persia before Cyrus)
  • Herodotus book 1 (on Cyrus' whole life, but largely focusing on the Lydian conquest)
  • Xenophon, Cyropaedia (entire life)
  • Ctesias (entire life)
  • Another clay cylinder (defeat of Astyages)
  • Justin 1.6.16 (defeat of Astyages)
  • The Nabonidus chronicle (Babylonian conquest; regarded as the most reliable source)
  • The Cyrus cylinder (Babylonian conquest)
  • Isaiah 41-2, 44-5 (Babylonian conquest)
  • Arrian Anabasis 6.29 (Cyrus' tomb at Pasargadae)

Kuhrt's book would be the best place to go for a one-stop shop of these texts and discussion of them.

farquier

The obvious non-textual source that comes to mind is the archaeological remains of Pasargadae; a good starting point on that is the Encyclopedia Iranica article online as well as the excavation reports by Ernest Herzfeld and David Stronach cited therein.