Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [13]
The plan failed, as these types of plans always do. Harpagos, whom Astyages had ordered to kill Cyrus, gave the baby instead to a shepherd, who raised Cyrus as his own. Astyages eventually discovered that Harpagos had deceived him and that Cyrus was alive, but his magi advisors reinterpreted his dream so that Astyages feared Cyrus no longer. Cyrus was sent to Persia, where he rejoined his Achaemenid family. Harpagos, however, did not fare as well: Astyages invited him to a banquet, where he served him the flesh of his own son mixed with lamb.10
A different version of the Cyrus legend has him abandoned by the shepherd but saved and suckled in the wild by a female dog. Yet another says that his mother was a goatherd and his father a Persian bandit. However he got there, Cyrus had by 559 BC become a vassal king under Astyages in Persia. A few years later, Cyrus led a rebellion against Astyages. Assisting him were a number of Persian tribes and clans, most prominently the Achaeme-nids, as well as the same Harpagos who had been served the unappetizing dinner.
In 550 BC, Cyrus defeated Astyages and took over the Median kingdom and its claims to Assyria, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, and Cappadocia. By 539, Cyrus had conquered both the Lydian kingdom (located in modern-day Turkey) and the formidable neo-Babylonian kingdom. He was now ruler of the largest empire that had ever existed.”
The strategy Cyrus employed was essentially “decapitation”— but of leadership, not of the leader's head. After conquering each new kingdom, Cyrus simply removed the local ruler, typically sparing his life and allowing him to live in luxury, and replaced him with a satrap who governed the territory, or satrapy. The satrap was almost always a member of the Persian aristocracy. Beneath the satrap, however, Cyrus interfered very little with the daily lives of his subject peoples, leaving them their gods and their disparate cultures. He embraced linguistic diversity, including as languages used for official administrative purposes in the empire Aramaic, Elamite, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Lydian, and Lycian. He codified and enforced local laws, keeping in place local authority structures. It was not unusual for high-ranking officials in conquered territories to retain their official positions under Achaeme-nid rule. Babylonian records also show that the same families often dominated business before and after Cyrus's conquest.12
Perhaps most striking was Cyrus's religious tolerance—his legendary willingness to honor the temples, cults, and local gods of the peoples he conquered. In a sense, it was easier in the ancient world for rulers to allow the worship of multiple deities. Unlike Judaism or Christianity, the religions of the ancient Near East were syncretic. They assumed the existence of many gods, each guarding its own city, people, or aspects of life. But this syncretic world-view did not necessarily imply that one people had to respect or tolerate the religious beliefs of others. On the contrary, many conquering kings of antiquity liked to demonstrate the superiority of their own gods—and assert their own power—precisely by suppressing and destroying rival cults.
For example, not long before the fall of the Assyrian Empire, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal conquered the country of Elam. He ravaged the entire kingdom, leveling major cities, desecrating temples, and dragging off sacred cult objects. He also ordered his troops to destroy the royal tombs of the Elamite kings because they, in Ashurbanipal's own words, “had not revered the deities Ashur and Ishtar,” his “lords.” Assyrian kings similarly razed the cities of Jerusalem and Thebes and left many other districts a wilderness stripped of human and animal population.13
Nabunidus, the king of Babylonia when it fell to Cyrus, is also famous for his religious intolerance. He suppressed popular worship of the god Marduk, forcing adherence instead