Why Machiavelli and Jefferson studied this Persian king — Cyrus the Great | THE FIRST SHAH Part 4

History Onion · Part 4 The Open Hand · 2:59

Armies can take an empire. They cannot run one. Part 4: how Cyrus actually ran the largest empire the world had seen — and why, for 2,500 years, everyone from the prophets to Thomas Jefferson has reached for him. In Persian, Cyrus is Kourosh — کوروش. Why we use the Greek forms 👇 in the pinned comment. The old playbook was Assyria's: deport the peoples, burn the temples, carry the gods away. Cyrus ran it backwards — gods sent home, temples ordered rebuilt, local leaders kept. The empire's paperwork ran in Aramaic, and it worked: twenty years later, when officials challenged the Jews' right to rebuild their Temple, the clerks found Cyrus's decree still filed at Ecbatana (it's in the Book of Ezra). It stood 220 years. At its height under his grandson Xerxes, one famous estimate says it governed two of every five people alive. Even Alexander kept the system — after burning Persepolis.