History cannot tell you how this king died — Cyrus the Great | THE FIRST SHAH Part 5

History Onion · Part 5 The Four Deaths of the King · 2:59

In 530 BC, Cyrus the Great rode out one last time and never came back. Twenty-five centuries later, history still cannot tell you how he died. It kept four stories. In Persian, Cyrus is Kourosh (کوروش). Why we use the Greek forms 👇 in the pinned comment. Herodotus has him fall to Tomyris, widowed queen of the Massagetae, in the fiercest battle he knew, after a wine-trap devised by Croesus (the spared king of Part 2) caught her son. Ctesias, a Greek doctor at the Persian court, gives him a javelin wound in a different war, and adds that the body was carried home to Persia. Berossus the Babylonian blames the Dahae. Xenophon lets him die in his own bed, an old man among his sons. No Persian account survives to judge between them: the empire's records ran on leather and papyrus, and between rot and conquest almost nothing made it through. Even the date comes from other people's paperwork: Babylonian business tablets quietly switch kings from Cyrus to Cambyses in 530 BC. The clay kept the when. Nobody kept the how. What is certain is the tomb at Pasargadae. Alexander, who had burned Persepolis, found it broken open and ordered it restored. Then the empire fell, the faith changed, and somewhere in those centuries Persia lost the story of its first king: locals forgot whose tomb this even was and took it for the resting place of the mother of Solomon, Madar-e Soleyman. As the story goes, the holy mistake kept it safe for centuries. And the name never died: Iranians still give it to their sons.