Cyrus the Great

Cyrus the Great

Author: BBC Radio 4 April 10, 2025 Duration: 50:59

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore the history and reputation of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great. Cyrus the Second of Persia as he was known then was born in the sixth century BCE in Persis which is now in Iran. He was the founder of the first Persian Empire, the largest empire at that point in history, spanning more than two million square miles.

His story was told by the Greek historians Herodotus and Xenophon, and in the Hebrew bible he is praised for freeing the Jewish captives in Babylon.

But the historical facts are intertwined with fiction.

Cyrus proclaimed himself ‘king of the four corners of the world’ in the famous Cyrus Cylinder, one of the most admired objects in the British Museum. It’s been called by some the first bill of human rights, but that’s a label which has been disputed by most scholars today.

With

Mateen Arghandehpour, a researcher for the Invisible East Project at Oxford University,

Lindsay Allen, Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek and Near Eastern History at King’s College London,

And

Lynette Mitchell, Professor Emerita in Classics and Ancient History at Exeter University.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Pierre Briant (trans. Peter T. Daniels), From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Eisenbrauns, 2002)

John Curtis and Nigel Tallis (eds.), Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (The British Museum Press, 2005)

Irving Finkel (ed.), The Cyrus Cylinder: The King of Persia’s Proclamation from Ancient Babylon (I.B.Tauris, 2013)

Lisbeth Fried, ‘Cyrus the Messiah? The Historical Background to Isaiah 45:1’ (Harvard Theological Review 95, 2002)

M. Kozuh, W.F. Henkelman, C.E. Jones and C. Woods (eds.), Extraction and Control: Studies in Honour of Matthew W. Stolper (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2014), especially the chapter ‘Cyrus the Great, exiles and foreign gods: A comparison of Assyrian and Persian policies in subject nations’ by R. J. van der Spek

Lynette Mitchell, Cyrus the Great: A Biography of Kingship (Routledge, 2023)

Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (Facts On File, 1990)

Vesta Sarkosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart (eds.), Birth of the Persian Empire (I.B.Tauris, 2005), especially the chapter ‘Cyrus the Great and the kingdom of Anshan’ by D.T. Potts

Matt Waters, King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great (Oxford University Press, 2022)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production


For anyone with a restless mind, the weekly In Our Time podcast from BBC Radio 4 offers a deep and engaging conversation across the vast terrain of human thought and experience. Host Misha Glenny guides a panel of distinguished academics, not in lecture format, but through a lively, accessible discussion where ideas genuinely collide and unfold. You might find yourself immersed in the complex legacy of a figure like Napoleon one week, and the next be untangling the scientific principles of photosynthesis or the philosophical arguments of the Enlightenment. The scope is deliberately broad, covering history, religion, culture, science, and philosophy, because understanding one often requires context from another. What you hear is the genuine process of exploration-the questions, the debates, and the connections made in real time by leading experts. It’s the kind of podcast that doesn’t just recount the Sack of Rome or the intricacies of Russian court politics, but examines why these moments mattered and how their echoes are still felt. The result is a consistently stimulating hour that treats listeners as curious equals, offering the intellectual satisfaction of following a great conversation to its illuminating conclusion.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

In Our Time
Podcast Episodes
The Antikythera Mechanism [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:35
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 2000-year-old device which transformed our understanding of astronomy in ancient Greece. In 1900 a group of sponge divers found the wreck of a ship off the coast of the Greek island of…
George Herbert [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:27
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poet George Herbert (1593-1633) who, according to the French philosopher Simone Weil, wrote ‘the most beautiful poem in the world’. Herbert gave his poems on his relationship with God…
The Venetian Empire [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:24
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable rise of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike other Italian cities of the early medieval period, Venice had not been settled during the Roman Empire. Rather, it was a…
Little Women [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:16
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel, credited with starting the new genre of young adult fiction. When Alcott (1832-88) wrote Little Women, she only did so as her publisher refused to publish h…
Hayek's The Road to Serfdom [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:16
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) in which Hayek (1899-1992) warned that the way Britain was running its wartime economy would not work in peaceti…
Robert Graves [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:53
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of 'I, Claudius' who was also one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Robert Graves (1895 -1985) placed his poetry far above his prose. He once declared that from the…
The Haymarket Affair [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:39
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the notorious attack of 4th of May 1886 at a workers rally in Chicago when somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman, Mathias J. Degan. The chaotic shooting that followed left more peo…
Wormholes [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:56
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the tantalising idea that there are shortcuts between distant galaxies, somewhere out there in the universe. The idea emerged in the context of Einstein's theories and the challenge has be…
Benjamin Disraeli [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:21
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the major figures in Victorian British politics. Disraeli (1804 -1881) served both as Prime Minister twice and, for long periods, as leader of the opposition. Born a Jew, he was onl…
Bacteriophages [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:43
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most abundant lifeform on Earth: the viruses that 'eat' bacteria. Early in the 20th century, scientists noticed that something in their Petri dishes was making bacteria disappear and t…